Lot of people have cable these days. Many moons ago, nearly every home in any neighborhood had a TV antenna on it.  Not so much any longer. The only antennas that you might see are those small satellite dish antennas.  Certainly not as impressive as the old TV antennas, they really made a statement.

So, progress has helped us to relieve our roofs of the unsightly antenna, and cable has provided us with hundreds of channels of low quality (content not signal) shows.  And my favorite, the ability to watch a movie on demand. Kind of like having a DVD player right? Or a VCR.

All of that is good and fine, but I would like to see cable companies take their massive networks to the next level…  I want to have more of the cable bandwidth available for my computer to use. How do we do that? Simple, make EVERYTHING on-demand.

It’s the next logical step. Right now the cable company is pumping basic broadcast channels (2-99) plus all the extended channels (everything above 99) into my home all the time. That is a totally in-efficient way of doing things.

Most people, not all, get a cable box, so they can access all the extended channels, including music. Take a quick look at how it works now here.

Why not just have a cable box that gives you a list of things you could watch, and give you a little sample of it to watch if you want?  But it only gets the samples you want to see, not pumping all of it into your home all the time.

I was inspired by seeing a simple $100 box for sale at Costco, it’s from western digital and it allows you to watch movies that you have stored on your home network.  Check it out here.  Bravo to Western Digital!  You watch what you want, when you want, nothing more… no wasted bandwidth there… the cable companies could do something like this too.

Let’s break this down a little more. If the cable companies didn’t send all the channels into your house (extended channels) all at once, you would have more bandwidth. They could make their cable boxes such that what you want to watch is only sent to your box when you want to watch it. Want to watch Syfy channel? How about AMC? Fine, the cable box would request and connect directly to that digital feed.  How about recording something on your DVR?  The DVR could connect to the cable company and request that feed.  Easy peasy…

And it would open up the cable bandwidth so we could have much faster connections!  That rocks!

If the cable company does move forward and change the way they deliver content over cable to your home, it opens up many more possibilities. The cable company could store say a weeks worth of programs, the news, movies and such from regular broadcast networks or cable networks, and you could view them when you want.  They would have the big bad DVR there in their data center…. sweet.

Then, they could also offer computing services. This is something I would love to see. Instead of you purchasing a computer; rent it from the cable company, you get something like a Sun-Ray device from Oracle. It’s a thin computer.. it doesn’t have a hard drive, not a lot of memory, it’s really just a screen/keyboard/mouse. But it does everything that your regular home PC does and more.  The Sun-Ray just displays your PC session that is running at the cable company. Need Microsoft Office on your computer? Great, just add it for $5 per month instead of $400.00 and the time you spend on installing it. Need to have space to save your documents, that would be done on your PC instance at the cable company. AND they back everything up for you, don’t have to worry about that.  Fewer crashes, regular backups, security and the ability to add software immediately if you need it… the possibilities are endless.

For printing, you can connect a printer to the Sun-Ray or whatever thin client device.  The cable company would have all the print drivers so you don’t have to worry about installing that. For regular computing it would be a dream!

And the brilliant thing is that if your thin client dies at home, all you need to do is pick up another one from the cable company, plug it in and you have EVERYTHING back, because it never was lost.  It’s all saved at the cable company.

Another great feature of the thin clients is that the cable company could set up your account so you can get to your computing environment from anywhere. Imagine, going across town to see your sister, mother, brother, or cousin…. for some reason you need to show them some pictures say, and you left them on your computer at home and hadn’t emailed them or uploaded them to the social networks. Well, you just hop on your family’s cable supplied thin client computer, log in and BAM, you have access to all your files and programs right there. And as far as security is concerned, not to worry (unless you give out your credentials of course) because none of your data ever stays on the thin-client. Smoooooth….

Yeah sure, you could have a laptop, and store everything there, but how about a thin client laptop… like a netbook, but all it ever does is connect to the network to display your PC session… Then who cares about the power, speed and so on… it just needs to be in network range… it would be more energy efficient (both the desktop version as well as laptop version), and they would have all the same benefits of the desktop version.

I know it’s putting all your eggs in someone elses hands, not even a basket, but it’s a pretty good idea!

So, in conclusion, the cable companies need to move forward, get more efficient, offer more products and open up the bandwidth… PLEASE.