Alex Pareene Cable Quotations

Ideally, in the future, you'll just pay your cable company for the stream, which you'll be able to watch and manipulate through whatever means on whatever devices you like.

It's been possible for years to use a PC to watch and record over-the-air television broadcasts, and unencrypted cable television tuners have been available almost as long. But for a long time, you could only watch copyright-protected channels with a cable company-leased box.

Cable boxes are, almost without exception, awful. They're under-powered computers running very badly designed software. Their channel guides are slow, poorly laid out, and usually riddled with ads.

For the cable news guest, nothing happens for a while until suddenly everything happens very quickly. After you receive your television face, you stand around for a while, ignored, until you're sat down at a desk and asked to argue with strangers.