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Out of the box: The future of TV

His prime time is all the time

Nick Starr has a tech habit. If there is a TV-related gadget, he owns it. It puts the tube on his terms. Welcome to your future.

By CHASE SQUIRES
Published April 3, 2006

	[Times photos: Bob Croslin]
	Nick Starr, 25, stands in front of his house in Pinellas Park. He's sending a text message with his phone, which also plays streaming video.
	Starr follows the coverage of an Apple event while writing about it on his blog NickStarr.com while on his lunch break at work.
	Nick Starr passes time in his doctor's parking lot on a Tuesday morning by watching the CBS show How I Met Your Mother on his Sony PSP.

ST. PETERSBURG - Nick Starr watched one of his favorite sitcoms shortly after 7 a.m.

In his car. In a parking lot. Waiting for his doctor's office to open.

Lots of people use portable DVD players to watch shows from years past. But Starr was using a digital device to watch an episode of CBS' How I Met Your Mother that had aired just the night before, in a period still quaintly referred to as "prime time."

For Starr - whose way of watching TV foretells the future for all of us - it is becoming irrelevant when and where a TV show airs. The new digital buzzwords are "time-shifting" and "place-shifting."

"The network schedule means nothing to me," he said. "Why should I watch it when they say I should watch it? It's my time."

Starr used a digital file sharing network to download the episode to his computer while he slept. In the morning he loaded it into his Sony PSP handheld device, then plugged the gadget into his car stereo (for surround sound) and watched on the palm-sized screen.

Halfway through the episode, the doctor's office opened. Starr carried his PSP inside and watched the rest of the show in the waiting room. Without commercials, it ran about 22 minutes. He finished watching about the same time his name was called.

The new digital mantra: Wherever. Whenever.

Prognosticators have long said that TV and computers would become one. The concept became reality when TiVo popularized digital video recording, followed by cable and satellite companies.

Then in October, TV networks began licensing popular shows such as Desperate Housewives to downloading service iTunes.

Suddenly, ordinary people could buy current shows and watch them at a kids' soccer game, in the break room at work - or in the doctor's waiting room.

Starr, 25, represents the leading edge of the trend. His apartment is his digital command center, crowded with computers and other gadgets that feed his desire for entertainment on his terms.

For a glimpse of how we will watch TV in the future, watch Nick Starr.

Starr's real last name is Schuler, but he has taken to using his middle name (his mother's maiden name) for everything but government documents. On his blog, Nickstarr.com, he chronicles developments in the world of techie gear and reviews every new piece he buys.

The newest, the latest, the fastest - he has to have it, all in pursuit of better television viewing. He buys all the gadgets, uses them for a while, then sells them on eBay to fund upgrades. He calls eBay "my technology leasing program."

He supports his technology habit by working as an analyst for a Pinellas County commercial bakery, but sometimes things get tight. When his beat-up van (with the driver's side door duct-taped shut) finally died in February, Starr had to sell off some devices to raise cash for a new car.

Starr's St. Petersburg apartment is almost completely bare - no posters, no paintings. Gadgets are his decor. He has two TiVo recorders on the bedroom floor, amid foam packing bits left over from some new purchase. Another is in storage.

He bought his first TiVo after seeing an infomercial, way before it became popular.

"It was a thousand bucks," he said. "But I said, "I've got to have that.' "

Now, he doesn't even use them. Like videotape and rabbit ears, TiVo is already out of date for Starr.

A Microsoft computer loaded with Media Center software connects to a 51-inch projection television. Unlike TiVo's service, the computer finds and records programs for free, using schedules scavenged from the Internet. Plus, it can download shows in high definition. Cables connect three video monitors and the TV to two computers, a Mac and a Windows-based PC. Bright House cable delivers both television and Internet, and the two media become one, filtering through the same computer network. Live television feeds mingle with downloaded digital programming. It doesn't matter where a show comes from - a hard drive, network satellite, a local broadcaster, an Internet-only broadcaster. They all look the same when they come out on a computer screen or a TV screen.

Old Saturday Night Live skits, Internet-only cartoons, movie trailers and prime time network fare pour out of Starr's computers at his command.

Inside the smooth, white computers in Starr's bedroom, digital words and pictures can be shuffled from device to device: television, monitor, PSP or iPod. The ancient Zenith TV in the downstairs living room never gets used.

Nor does the living room, Starr said.

On a recent evening, one of his two roommates came home, ducked into a bedroom down the hall and stayed there. Never said a word.

"We all have TVs in our own rooms," Starr said. "We just go in our own rooms and close the door."

At night, Starr's room glows digital blue.

Tuesday nights, Starr gets away from his gadgets to have dinner with his parents. It's tradition.

In the living room of the house he grew up in between Pinellas Park and Largo - furniture arranged facing the 35-inch Sony TV - his mom revealed his namesake, a character from the 1970s family TV drama Eight Is Enough. "Nicholas" was the mop-haired youngest - Nicholas Bradford.

"I've never seen that show," Starr said.

His mother, Holly Schuler, said the family didn't watch much TV when Nick was growing up.

Still, they paid for premium channel HBO, to watch Fraggle Rock. They also found a way to rig an early video camera to a portable color TV for long car rides. Pretty state of the art for the early 1980s.

Starr's early fascination with video games gave way to an interest in computers at the Center for Advanced Technology magnet program hosted at Lakewood High School, his mother said. The array of computers and monitors filling his bedroom as a teen drove up the household electric bill, his dad Paul Schuler said.

"The temperature in that room was eight degrees higher than the rest of the house," he said. "You just watched that meter go kachuk, kachuk, kachuk."

Most Tuesday nights, the family talks about their lives over pizza while watching TV - one of the rare times Starr watches on somebody else's schedule. Lately they're into M*A*S*H reruns.

Leaving his parents' home, Starr stopped at a video store and picked up a DVD of an episode of Nip/Tuck he missed last year. He planned to load it onto his computer and return the DVD.

Industry groups such as the Motion Picture Association and the TV networks say copying DVDs is stealing. The difference in price between renting a movie and owning it should tell you that, MPAA spokeswoman Gayle Osterberg said.

But what if there's no money at stake?

"How would this be different from watching a TV show or even pay-per-view program and videotaping it for personal use later?" said New York University professor Adam Penenberg, who has written about the Internet's impact on television.

"Who owns the user's viewing experience? The user or the company distributing the content?"

Nick Starr would say Nick Starr owns it.

Starr has at least one other controversial way to get his TV fix. If his computer can't pull a show from cable and he can't buy it at iTunes.com, he downloads it from a free file-sharing network called BitTorrent.

Starr says using BitTorrent is like having a friend tape The Sopranos, then hand him the tape.

But it's not exactly like that. Strangers record it, then hand it off digitally to anyone.

The entertainment industry has tried to tame BitTorrent the way the music business did Napster. But unlike Napster, which routed files through central switching centers, BitTorrent has no center to shut down. Members simply swap among themselves in an electronic web. Trying to fight BitTorrent the old way is like trying to eliminate an ant hill one ant at a time.

Starr said he's not worried about getting in trouble. He doesn't profit from using BitTorrent. He just wants to watch TV without commercials, without a cable tether, and whenever he wants. Recently he caught a few minutes of The Apprentice, the British version, uploaded by someone in England.

He prefers the jumbo screen in his bedroom, but he has myriad other ways to watch. In a satchel he calls his "gadget bag," Starr carries a Sony PSP and a video iPod.

His T-Mobile cell phone combines a keyboard and screen for text messaging, Internet access and streaming video. He's planning to buy a device called a Slingbox that will provide mobile access to anything in his home computer library, at any time. That includes live television from cable, movies, pictures, downloads, and Internet-only programs, like an online cartoon he watches called Strong Bad. It's pretty funny.

Starr watches TV at lunch, waiting for classes to start, at a coffee shop, and even when he's stuck in really slow, bumper-to-bumper traffic. He stays up on his favorite shows when others might be just sitting somewhere, unentertained.

You might think he has no life. He says the opposite is true. With friends, work, nighttime college courses and family time, he packs a lot into a day. Watching TV on his terms gives him the time he needs.

One of Starr's favorite shows, Boston Legal, comes on at 10 p.m.

Starr didn't give it a thought on a Tuesday night heading out to a friend's Brandon townhouse. Tuesday is podcasting day, when Starr and comedy duo "Patrick and Hollywood Adam" do the NobodyLikesOnions.com show. A podcast is like a radio show, but listeners download it at their convenience.

The show is unscripted, unstructured and uncensored. Starr's pals rib him endlessly as he talks about tech innovations and a trip to San Francisco. Callers listening to an Internet live feed join in. It's merciless, loud and silly. Just guys cutting up.

But it's social, and it's during prime time, when millions are in their homes watching television on the network schedule.

The fun ends after midnight. Starr, who started his day shortly after 6 a.m., heads back over the Howard Frankland Bridge.

Home, he checks his e-mail, watches 24 and then Monday's episode of Donald Trump's Apprentice before falling asleep around 2 a.m.

Boston Legal will have to wait. He'll be up again in less than five hours. "I try to take naps on the weekend," he said. "To catch up."

Chase Squires can be reached at squires@sptimes.com or 727 893-8739. His blog is www.sptimes.com/blogs/tv

[Last modified April 3, 2006, 06:08:05]