I, Cringely: NerdTV

Robert X. Cringely has been talking up his online TV series for months. I haven't seen it yet, but they're not using BitTorrent and I'm still getting a ridiculously good transfer speed.

NerdTV

I'm enjoying this new spate of online TV: the shows of Kevin Rose's Revision3, Patrick Norton's Digital Life TV, and From the Shadows. And those are just the ones that involve Screen Savers refugees. There are plenty more of significantly lower quality out there that still aren't too shabby.

Remember. TechTV was basically "Hey, why don't we buy some cameras and make TV shows about tech we like?" Now, former TechTV employees are still asking that same question, but they no longer have to worry about the inherent problems and restrictions of cable broadcasting. The Internet is their distributor.

I know that plenty of places have tried to do Internet TV before, back when a 15MB video file was considered huge and Iomega actually had a useful business model in selling you a 100MB disk that only worked in their special drives. That was then. Now, we have BitTorrent instead of your cable box, RSS instead of a TV Guide, and gigantic hard drives instead of a pile of blank VHS tapes. We now have a ubiquitous presence of journaling filesystems, DivX, H.264, and whatever the hell .WMVs are made of. Online TV is viable now, and I hope that NerdTV is everything Cringely wants it to be.