A couple of good bits about TV

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My hat’s off to Gary Merson, the man behind hdguru.com, for a nifty bit of investigation. He published a piece over the weekend detailing how expensive it is to fix a (comparatively) cheap digital TV set. The fees demanded by the manufacturers for shipping and repairs for out-of-warranty sets (and even in some cases in-warranty sets) are stunning. If you’ve always dreamed of opening your own flat-screen TV repair shop, now might be a good time.

Also, props to Troy Wolverton at the San Jose Mercury News for this piece about Bit Torrent Inc. -- the company, not the file-sharing protocol -- readying a service that will stream free, advertiser-supported TV shows and movies through the Internet. As the story notes, one huge hurdle facing the service is most viewers’ inability to watch Internet-delivered video on their TV sets. Another question in my mind: how much of the content will have to be delivered by Bit Torrent’s servers at the company’s expense, rather than from peers? The higher the percentage, the tougher it will be for the company to make the service pencil out.