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    « Get well Doc | Main | Most companies who try to do Enterprise 2.0 will fail. »
    Sunday
    Jun152008

    Times they are a changing

    DateSunday, June 15, 2008 at 12:10AM

    In the last three hours none of my family have watched a television and yet:

    The kids watched video of themselves when they were younger using Front Row streamed off my media server to their iBook.

    We all watched an EyeTV recording of Dr Who on the big iMac

    My wife then watched Casualty on the iMac using the BBC's iPlayer

    I watched leo Laporte's twitlive.tv streamed via Stickam from his personal studio in California

    And all of this was what is now typical behaviour on a typical day.

    | Comment6 Comments |

    Reader Comments (6)

    Sky TV woudl be good enough for the Who of course but we're almost in the same position in this house in terms of mac -> TV and 360 to another TV
    June 15, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterIan
    Even my 20 month old wants to interact with the TV instead of watching it and imitates his brothers on the Wii. Even this morning we watched a family video clip together on Animoto. Yep, times are a changin'.
    June 15, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterJasmin Tragas
    The problem is Euan, everything you watched was recorded (except perhaps EyeTV) or played back at well below broadcast quality. Thus your experience, however flexible was actually being significantly impeded (even if you didn't notice). I don't own a TV and the experience of the current offering of download content is really quite poor in video quality. Time is changing and I am at the cutting edge of spec'ing this work, however currently it just don't work well.

    Image quality has a direct effect on your perceived enjoyment and the quality of the experience.
    June 15, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterBob H
    In a word Bob "bollocks".

    You are right the EyeTV experience on the iMac's great screen with my good speaker system was the best but in each case I stopped noticing any "quality" issues once I got into the story.

    Many moons ago with DigiLab we showed an early example of hi def costume drama followed by badly shot hand held reality stuff and people stopped noticing video quality within minutes.

    There are obviously extremes at which the annoyance of poor quality begins to intrude on our ability to experience the story but none of my devices, especially not video on my Phone, are anywhere near that lower end tolerance
    June 15, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterEuan Semple
    Can I come and live in your house?



    And the quality issue is meaningless unless you happen to live in an area where digital broadcast TV is actually getting good coverage - the stations I can get varies day by day.

    And I love the idea someone can be impeded without noticing... I'd more than happy to have less than the alleged high quality of broadcast TV (with a permanent blizzard obscuring Five), to be able to watch what I want, when I want...
    June 16, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterDan Thornton
    I think Bob was having a "Moon Landing" moment!

    "The story of the engineer who tried to stop the first live pictures from the moon being shown because they were not of broadcast quality is probably entirely apocryphal, but it illustrates one of the ways in which video quality can be unimportant. Our audience will tolerate, and even value, poor quality video where the images are unique and of great interest to them."

    From a BBC R&D White paper by Mike Armstrong - who comments here occasionally.
    June 16, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterMichael Walsh

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