The Periphery of the Mind

When I was a kid I remember watching a show called CBS Storybreak. The idea was that they'd take obscure children's novels from the time and condense them into a thirty minute (minus 7 minutes of commercials, and 3 minutes for credits and intro) cartoon. You know, teach kids how fun reading is by giving them even less reason to read.

Anyway, one of the stories they did was C.L.U.T.Z. The story of a obsolete robot with a heart of gold, and the boy who ends up loving him despite the robot being a suicidally co-dependant spastic. Ok, I'm a cynic. Big surprise.

The reason why any of this is relevant though, is that in the story was a much more fascinating idea that had nothing to do with robots. There's a scene where the boy protagonist is surfing through hundreds of channels, looking for the one show he wanted from a central database. Today we'd be tempted to call such a thing TiVo or DVR, but in the Eighties the idea was like magic! But DVRs and TiVos require are still just glorified VCRs, recording our shows for us. They don't really let us "watch on demand", since we still have to place our demands before a show has been aired.

Which brings me to Hulu. It's still very small, and it requires you to have a pretty good machine and connection, but you can watch it whenever you want, for free. The catch? Commercials. But when the commercial break consists of 30 seconds, it's a bit more tolerable. Right now I'm watching the remake of Planet of the Apes. Stuff like this has been talked about for years (remember my spiel on C.L.U.T.Z.?), but the technology may be getting in place to finally do away with satellite and cable TV.