• wonder who watches all of the 700+ channels that you get from your cable provider?
• wonder why you are paying more than $50/month for all those channels, when you only watch a handful?
• find yourself channel surfing, just because you can, not because you know what you want to watch?
• feel like you are not getting the most out of your TV?
• feel like you can’t wait for Google TV or the Boxee box to improve your television experience?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, I have a few tips for you. There have been times when I spent an hour flipping through channels, not really watching anything in particular, and later feeling like an idiot for having wasted my time. All this while I just accepted that cable TV as a given, an inevitable companion of our internet service provider… until I met a few friends who were perfectly happy without any cable service.

With that inspiration, I started looking around for a better TV experience. There is so much content available online (and good content!) that I wasn’t really worried about lack of material to watch. Both Google TV and the Boxee box seemed very promising (not to mention, the new Apple TV). There were two little problems:

1. Neither Boxee box nor Google TV are here yet, and
2. All of these devices have very very limited functionality. They address the problem of Internet TV, but I don’t want to use my TV to just watch TV. I want it to become a hub for all my media. I want to access my local music, photos, videos and more.

So I did what any self-respecting geek would do — I built my own media center PC. It runs Ubuntu; it hosts all my media in a single location; it serves as media server and storage server; and it serves as a compute server when I have to transcode media. You can find all the gory details in this guide: HOWTO Build an Ubuntu based media center.

Think about it for a second. Television is, for the most part, a broadcast medium. That is, our television sets mostly just receive data and hardly ever send anything back. You could say that this communication channel is mostly one way.

The Wikipedia page on Nielson ratings sheds some light on the matter:

One involves the use of viewer “diaries,” in which a target audience self-records its viewing (or listening) habits.

I’m not sure how much trust I can put in this methodology. But there is hope:

A more technologically sophisticated system has used Set Meters, which are small devices connected to every television in selected homes. These devices gather the viewing habits of the home and transmit the information nightly to Nielsen through a “Home Unit” connected to a phone line.

But this still doesn’t sound like a good solution. I also read somewhere that another popular methodology involves calling up randomly selected people and questioning them about their viewing habits!!

These days the situation is still a little bit better. Set-top boxes and  DVRs are becoming increasingly prevalent. These devices are significant more powerful and smarter than their ancestors, in the sense that they already do a fair bit of communication with your cable company, and hence it is conceivable that they enable collection of more accurate usage statistics.

Overall, it seems like a hard problem to me, since television has traditionally not been a connection oriented medium. This might change moving forward as IPTV and on-demand videos become more common. If you have some more information on the nitty-gritties of how this all works, please do share!