Benjamin Mayo would like to see a single unified interface for all of his television shows — like the list of recorded episodes on a DVR. I couldn’t agree more and have actually thought quite a bit about this ever since I cut the cord nearly a decade ago.

In my younger, and much more naive years I thought that video podcasts were going to be the future of television. You simply subscribe to all of the shows you like, they download automatically when new episodes are released, and you can watch them at your convenience in the client of your choosing. I realize now that this would never happen. There’s no way for content creators to completely control the experience, prevent piracy, or  ensure that viewers are actually watching the ads.

The only hope we have now for a unified interface, like Mayo describes, is if a service like Netflix or Hulu ended up lincensing the lion’s share of available content. But that, of course, comes with its own set of problems.