I just got digital cable a few months ago, and it is cool in ways that regular cable isn’t, but I also think they’re missing some easy opportunities to provide great services to their subscribers while making a lot of money at the same time.

What prompted my upgrade to digital cable was our temporary move into a rental house in March. We’re doing a major house remodel that required moving out, as we really didn’t want to live without the luxuries of walls and a roof. As luck would have it, two weeks before our baby was born (the reason for the remodel), we snagged the usually rented house across the street that had just been vacated. Of course with a move, comes the dreaded transfer of all utilities to the new location – one of those being cable.

I wouldn’t say I’m a huge TV fan, but I figured cable would be an entertainment necessity to maintain while I’d be home on maternity leave. Otherwise I’d have been happy to do without it for awhile. In fact, what I really wanted to do was cancel my existing service, get the minimum, basic, 10 channels only option for dirt cheap at the rental, and leave it at that till we moved back home. But - believe it or not - it was actually cheaper to leave the cable ON at my house, and get Bronze Digital Cable in the rental. Sounds crazy, but with the cancellation and activation fees I’d have to pay for twice, it was a better deal.

So here I am with digital cable. Once I figured out the menu system and how to use the remote, I soon started listening to DMX. Super cool. Commercial free, damn good music that doesn’t repeat the same songs all day long like most of the radio stations in town. And it sounds great through the stereo. Some of my favorite channels are Album Rock, Acid Jazz, Retro Dance and 70’s Hits.

After a little while I started noticing that I kept hearing great songs and thinking, "I loved that Ratt album in high school – I gotta get it on CD" (as opposed to the old cassette tapes in the basement), or "I wish I could put together a compilation CD of all those kickass Journey songs I still know the words to, but I don’t want to buy all their CDs to do it, even from Djangos."

Wouldn’t it be bitchin’ if I could just click a BUY button on the remote, have a CD shipped to me, and the cost automatically added to my bill? Even better, wouldn’t it be awesome to store playlists of my favorite tunes and then custom order mixed CDs or downloadable compilations? I would have purchased so much music through AT&T by now if I had these options.

If they’d take it a step further, I could also listen to those playlists at any time with a push of a button, or download them to my laptop, an MP3 player, an internet enabled car stereo, my cell phone or a PDA, and listen to them there. OK, maybe that’s a little bit further down the road, but are they at least working on it?

While we’re on this topic, here are some other options I’d love to have through cable:

Of course there’s always Napster and whoever may follow, but so far I’ve found it to be somewhat of a pain in the ass to record music through my computer, free or not. I really want to buy or make recordings of music, movies and videos as I’m thinking about it, and usually that’s when I’m actually listening or watching.

And there’s TiVO, Replay TV, and now the "live TV" options offered through the Dish Network (satellite TV) that allow so many hours of digitally recorded programming, automatic recording of all episodes of a TV show, and more. I imagine you could record it through a VCR, and once DVD-RWs become somewhat affordable, that would be a nice option as well.

But STILL – if these big media companies already have this stuff stored digitally, they already have my address and billing information, and they have an easy opportunity to sell me stuff, make money, and add even more of my personal information to their marketing databases, why don’t they??

They could even do things like:

...and much more. The possibilities seem endless, I’m sure the demand is there, and it seems like it would be so easy for them to implement, while the benefits would be huge. Maybe then, with all those sales and advertising dollars they’d rake in, they could even lower (gasp!) the absurd rates we pay every month to watch TV.