I must admit that I am prejudiced when it comes to cable companies and the television service they provide. My experience in having used cable at three different home locations, from three different companies, have left me with a sour taste for cable. I have never experienced such poor picture quality nor poor customer service as I have experienced from the cable companies I have used. But I know I am not alone in my experiences and have once again reaffirmed, from someone else, how poor cable service is.

Last week when I was visiting our kids in Texas, I spent an entire day with my son-in-law who was installing a DirecTV satellite service and two new LED televisions at a residence in Shreveport, LA. The home owner had no trouble describing their bad experience with their cable provider, including no reception on the morning we arrived. They stated they had called the company so much and with poor results concerning reception that they finally just gave up. I am sure some of you who read this may have had similar experiences.

So when I read about companies like Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Apple, and Amazon going on the attack against cable companies, I must admit that it brought a smile to my face. In a recent article it states that:

Just take a look at the big picture. Everyday there is a new story about how one of the aforementioned tech giants is on the verge of something new meant to control our time spent watching content — and much of it from the living room. Today’s story is about Google’s big pay-per-view movie plan for YouTube, a new service they’re hoping to debut later this year with full Hollywood studio support. If they land it, it could be huge. But that’s just today’s example.

On Wednesday, at an event in San Francisco, Apple is widely expected to debut their next iteration of the Apple TV — which will likely now be called the “iTV”. Alongside it, they’re expected to unveil a new layer of iTunes that will allow people to rent television shows for $0.99 a pop. Again, that too could be huge.

But it doesn’t really matter if one of these individual things doesn’t hit it big (and certainly the current Apple TV hasn’t). It’s the fact that all of these giant companies are clearly focused on this one thing: invading the living room and changing the way we consume video entertainment.

And they absolutely should be focused on that space. It’s a multi-billion dollar goldmine of potential that is sitting around begging to be disrupted. Consumers want this — even if many don’t realize it yet.

You see, there are plenty of us more tech-savvy consumers who have long thought about severing our ties with cable television — and some of us already have to varying degrees. Most average consumers simply don’t realize there are better alternatives out there yet, because the truth is that there is no singular better alternative right now. But these services from the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, etc. keep moving forward. And as more enter the game, they keep pushing each other to improve at a more rapid pace.

The sentence that stood out to me was this one:

Most average consumers simply don’t realize there are better alternatives out there yet, because the truth is that there is no singular better alternative right now.

Like the folks I met in Shreveport, LA, they were not aware that a better alternative was available until it was presented to them. Once they viewed DirecTV on their new LED HDTVs, their jaws dropped open. They could not believe how great the picture was and mentioned how pleased they were with the new systems.

Comments welcome.

Source – TechCrunch