Thursday, April 4, 2013

Video On Demand, Any Show That Has Aired, For Only Fifty Cent!

As I laid down to take a short five minute nap a thought occurred to me. Having had the opportunity and the time to record my favorite shows on an old Tivo Series II recorder some years ago and then archving them to tape, had me thinking. Recently I purchased the newest Tivo Series III HD 300 hour recorder for the wife to use in the master bedroom. She has a lot of shows she likes to watch and likes to watch them in bed after a long day of work. I still have my old Tivo Series II running after ten years of great uninterrupted service. I don't use it to record anymore as it is only standard definition. My recorder is a Verizon DVR in the main living room and I hooked up an external one terrabyte hard drive to it which gave me over a hundred hours of high definition recording. But, here is the problem. The thought of having to hook up and connect my old Hi-8 recoder deck to transfer anything from the Verizon DVR and then transferring from tape to the pc for use later just makes me tired thinking about it. With all the current hoopla about Netflix partnering up with Verizon and who knows what other service provider, who cares at this point. Somehow I foresee in the future where these big networks will get a clue and begin to build their own huge data centers to archive and store all their video and then connect the internet pipes and allow anyone to download a copy for fifty cents. I liken this to Apples iTunes service. Their ninety nine cent model for a tune I still cannot see subscribing to. If music and video were made more affordable and more convienant I would imagine the whole country and possibly the world might want to add it to their subscriptions. For now, we are just stumbling along and leaving the consumers with not much to digest for mobile entertainment and enjoyment. I for one would like to be able to download my favorite weekly show, CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood, transfer it to my Android smartphone for playback when it's more convienant for me to watch. For now though I just have to hope that the show doesn't get interrupted by the servive provider and the dvr gets to record the full hour and a half show. Lately thought I cannot even find the time to watch the daily evening news that I have been recording let alone my favorite show.

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