The future of TV has arrived to Denmark some two weeks ago. I entered it in the weekend: I surfed to the website of the Danish Public service TV station DR, clicked the “watch live TV” button, and watched live streams of their two channels. After having done that for a while, I clicked a few more buttons, and surfed through the programs of the last week. I watched a few more chunks of moving pictures. Promises of the on-demand life comes true. Cool. But then the future stopped.
Or at least I hope the future is rather much more elegant, functional and convienient than what happened next. Which was: I ran to my local supermarket, and bought myself two cables for my standard DELL laptop. I plugged them into the computer. One for sound, the other another for video. The other end of the caples I first plugged into one end of a scart cable, and the other into my old TV at home. Have a look at what I did:
Though I sound rather enthusiastic in the video clip, really you don’t want to carry two cables and a scart-plug around with you in order to watch TV! However, after having pushed a few more buttons I actally did watch TV on my TV-set via good old world wide web.
But the malfunctioning of my digital home doesn’t stop here. Not only is the two-cables-one-scart-plug solution not really elegant. It really didn’t work to well on my TV-set either: The picture quality was TV-like – but definively not optimal: colours all very dim. When the TV was on, my laptop screen went black, meaning I had to use the TV screen as computer-monitor as well. Not a good experience. And when I tried to adjust the volume on my TV-remote control, signals to the TV died out, forcing me to go to the laptop clicking buttons to have the TV up running again.
I’m sure TV transmitted through the web has a lot of things going for it. And I’m very much certain my digital home needs a serious upgrade, to make it work in my living room.
Point taken Jon, but the streaming of video is optimal on a digital screen, rather than the good old tube. I gather that is what you are trying to do from that opaque picture. You are right the picture quality on a good old tube TV is poor, so you will have to get yourself a big flat HD ready screen which can be connected to your PC. As you know currently 37% of broadband users are interested in having TV programming delivered to their PC. It is a safe bet that many of the 360.000 digital TVs sold last year are going to them.
Right, Edward: I did my experiment on my “good old tube”. And yes: I DO want a big flat HD ready screen!
🙂 Jon