WWE Network is the future of TV

Yes! Yes! Yes! WWE announced its upcoming WWE Network last night and I think this is exactly the way to go for television content producers. The deal is that we get all present and historical WWE content, in HD quality, live and on demand, for only $10 per month. Damn! It’s like Spotify for wrestling fans (okay okay of course it has no TNA and indies but who cares). And that’s what TV should be.

Last summer we cancelled our television cable subscription and decided to only watch those shows we really really liked. And only on demand. This meant no more useless zapping around and wasting time watching crap and commercials. I got Hulu Plus to watch the big shows on-demand and also have a subscription to Fox Sports GO to watch the away matches of my football club. We use the Apple TV to stream this to the big screen TV. Also, most television channels in Holland have an app on which you can watch their shows on demand and sometimes even live, so why pay at all for this?

Back to the WWE Network. For the past two or three years WWE has been trying to start a ‘real’ television network, but that didn’t work out with the cable companies. Now they are bypassing the cable guys and creating their own direct platform. Great! That is exactly what  the Internet is all about. Just do it yourself.

With a monthly price of $10 for everything WWE this is just a no-brainer for fans. And yes, WrestleMania is included. Just as with the Spotify deal, who is going to pirate anymore? There are only two problems with the network at this moment:

1. There is no channel on Apple TV available yet, but that should be a matter of time since we also have channels for the NBA, MLS and so on. For the mean time we can use the iPad app to stream it or use Playstation.

2. WWE Network only launches in US for now. But, just as with Hulu there will be ‘solutions’ for that.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Mountain Lion Audio-only Airplay to Apple TV

One of the great new features of Mountain Lion (Mac OSX 10.8) is Airplay mirroring.With this option you can stream your Mac screen to your Apple TV. Unfortunately this only works on recent Macs (since 2011) so I have to lend my girlfriends MacBook Air to use it. My ancient iMac (’09) and MacBook Pro (’10) are too slow. Ouch.

A feature that does work on all Macs is Audio-only Airplay, which is way more useful since I listen a lot more to music (Spotify FTW!) than that I watch video or need to mirror things.

So if you check System Preferences in the Apple menu and go to the Sound option, in the Output tab you can now select your Apple TV!

But I found a faster way to switch between audio on your Mac and Apple TV. Hold the Option (ALT) key and select the Volume option in the menu bar. Here you can quickly select Apple TV or Internal Speakers.