Why the cable company sells televisions

This article is part of the On Tech Newsletter. Here is a collection Past columns.

Walmart starts selling TVs Comcast’s software dare, Cable TV provider and owner of Universal Movie Studios and TV networks, including NBC.

These Comcast TVs will never be the best sellers. But they are interesting because of what they stand for: corporate land grabbing as the starting point for everything that happens in American homes.

Companies like Comcast, Amazon, Rogue and many more imagine that we can watch Netflix’s latest costume play on “Monday Night Football” and watch a YouTube science video through one of their TVs or gadgets.

Selling equipment is not the goal, but a way to the end. Their goal is to make money by selling ads or getting people to watch “Halloween” on a streaming service that pays for advertising. Comcast wants to showcase its peacock streaming service using its TVs.

This is now one of the highest role wars in American trade. Companies need to be empowered and paid to trust us to use their hardware as a starting point for our virtual entertainment.

There is nothing strange or wrong with that. The struggle to be Americans ’favorite prey for all entertainment has been raging in the media and technology for decades.

Since the 1990s, Bill Gates People need to use Microsoft technology To watch TV shows and run their personal computers. Since the 20th century, video boxes from Comcast or other cable providers have been the gateway to television and other home entertainment. Broadcast in the 21st Century Has a similar idea. This is the old TV in a new look.

If you want to watch the “squid game” on Netflix, I do not blame you if you do not think too much about the luxury of costumes trying to win the battle on stage on your TV screen. But it is worth considering what we gain and lose from this streaming crash.

Amazon Fire TV makes people buy movies online from Amazon, and has great ads right in front of your eyes from other streaming apps that pay for Amazon. Sometimes Roku streaming devices do not include some entertainment applications YouTube TV And HBO Max Due to financial conflicts between companies.

Entertainment programmers like Netflix and Disney want to develop themselves to gain more power than distributors like Amazon, Rogue and Comcast.

This new world of streaming is popular (so much to see!), But it’s more boring than that, because more money is at risk and companies want to control it. It also highlights an Internet age peculiarity: it neutralized old world gatekeepers such as old cable TV providers, big box stores and newspapers and created new ones. New powerful ones.

Amazon has given us a selection of products that are not in the physics stores, but the company also has a huge influence on the products being noticed. Almost anyone can build a smartphone processor, but for Apple, Google and other App Store owners we can download any processor and control it under any conditions. Anyone can post their videos or dance ideas online, but Facebook or Dictoc computer systems determine how many people watch them.

This is what drives me crazy about the new digital worlds. We have many choices at our fingertips, but in reality some power brokers still have great influence in guiding what we see, do or buy.

Week Tip

My favorite time savers

Oh, you’re going to explode. Brian X Sen., The Consumer Technology columnist for The New York Times brings us some technical tips to save valuable time and intellectual resources:

1) “Sir, add a crowd to my calendar. “ Virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa are addicted to many jokes because they misunderstand what we are saying. But after a decade of using Sri on the iPhone, this is the best way to add new events to my digital calendar. Saying “Hey Siri, add the doctor’s appointment to the calendar Thursday evening at 3:00” is only a matter of seconds.