If you’re like me, with a PC full of music and pictures and more, and have some electronics around the house, then you need to try Tversity. It makes your PC into an all-powerful media center like hub. It’s free and open source and as easy as pie to install and configure.
A nice guy went door-to-door a week or so, from Qwest, trumpeting their new fiber-to-the-node service, which offered up to 20MBps speeds - wow! So I signed up for a 30-day free trial, just paid a few bucks for them to ship me the modem.. worth a try!
It didn’t work. Well, of course, I go the modem working and all, but wow, the speeds sucked.
DirecTV SuperFan has always been great, and with HD the past few years, it’s the finest time of year, just now in 1080i! Now they have a super cool AIR (adobe flash for your desktop) application.. this is heaven..
I love to get new electronics and toys, and usually turn around and either give the old stuff to Mack/Miles or eBay/Craigslist it.. but perhaps Gazelle is a new option.. I’m looking forward to trying it!
Once in a while I’m reminded that despite all the attempts, money spent, and savvvy marketing that big companies can muster, consumers will often do the right thing and not just follow the herd. I contemplate 3 current examples that are striking.
Blu-ray vs HD-DVD: I thought I was in the minority, in that I wasn’t going to budge and buy one of these two competing formats until they sorted it out and didn’t force me to buy both! Some movies I love are on HD-DVD, while others are on Blu-Ray, well, sorry gang, I’m not buying 2 different players and I won’t start digging in deep with one, to find out that I picked the wrong horse. Now, don’t get me wrong, the technology is great and I am picking a horse - Blu-Ray all the way. But until Blu-ray becomes truly dominant will I make the investment. I feared consumers would just pick one that was lower priced or had the better incentives to buy one, but to my pleasant surprise, most consumers have wielded the same middle finger I have. Now, they have sold almost a million combined players, but that really means squat here. They are looking to move the mass population to these new formats, to save their revenue streams. There’s a slow down now, consumers are buying less DVDs, and this is the next great hope, but they aren’t getting it done.
Vista - Man, Vista stinks for the most part. And Microsoft should have learned, people will not just automatically upgrade! And people aren’t! Vista just doesn’t offer that much and pretty much demands a new souped-up PC, PASS! XP works just great, on 3-4 year old hardware.. we’ll all sit this one out.
CD’s/DRM - Man, the music industry is as dense as a diamond. Consumers are done buying CD’s - their sales just dropped another 10% in 2007. They tried to cozy up to Steve Jobs & Apple and now found out they have been marginalized by the fruit bearing friendly cultish company. As a result, consumers still hate DRM, are buying less music and Apple now holds all the cards, with the iPod and iTunes. So, can they the genie back in the bottle? Not sure.
I was browsing on DirecTV the other day and saw a banner to test out their “VOD” solution. I wasn’t even aware of such, but after some tinkering and playing I was able to determine what is going on.
They DO have a VOD solution. You can Google for it and find all sorts of information, but never a release note or email or letter or anything! It just showed up. So I downloaded some content and realized, they use broadband for the VOD part - NOT satellite. Interesting and shrewd, stick it to the cable companies and suck up all their bandwidth to deliver the feature they don’t have. However, I’m sure comcast will be sniffing for this and cutting that traffic down to a trickle before too long - something comcast has been getting a black eye for lots lately.
Also, DirecTV partnered with Slingmedia (this deal was pre Sling being bought by Echostar and may come to an end) - but you can watch ANY NFL game using, basically, their giant slingbox. i got a screen grab, it’s quite cool!
walt mossberg doesn’t just hit the nail on the head today, he frickin clobbers it with a jackhammer. when you buy a PC these days, it’s so overloaded with c-r-a-p, it’s an insult. and what gives pc manufacturers the right to pollute computers with all this crap? most of which kicks back to them in the form of rev shares and subsidies.
If you’re like me, with a PC full of music and pictures and more, and have some electronics around the house, then you need to try Tversity. It makes your PC into an all-powerful media center like hub. It’s free and open source and as easy as pie to install and configure.
I have lots of TVs and lots of antenna’s - this is the mess on the side of my house where it all converges — ever seen such spaghetti!?
