It's 8:30 in the evening. You sit on your couch, grab the remote control and click through your 42 cable TV channels. Same old stuff. So you suffer through the slowly scrolling program guide. Finally, you find a good movie-but it doesn't start till 10:00 p.m. Darn.

It's then that you realize you could be watching that big soccer match in Rio de Janeiro, but your cable company isn't carrying it. A Richard Pryor movie would brighten your outlook, but you'd have to rent a video. One of those amateur Internet movies might be interesting, but that means sitting in your stiff desk chair staring at a small screenand, oh yeah, the movie will take an hour to download. You smirk. After a half-century of television, you're still hostage to a few tired broadcasters.