I have a little time this morning to putter while Jamie sleeps after a late night with supper club last night. I am sitting in the study continuing to be amazed at the things that technology will do, and am taking notes on posts I want to do over the next few days about the the new programs and devices I am using. This morning I thought I'd mention some of the recent things we're using primarily for entertainment, which are changes from what we've had since moving into the new house.
This is what Jamie and I have been waiting for ever since we moved into the new house six and a half years ago and got our first DVR - a way to watch recorded programs anywhere in the house. DirecTV called this multi-room viewing when they upgraded our circa 2004 receivers, but in short, we went from one HD receiver/recorder (which we got about a year ago primarily so I could watch Giada de Laurentis in HD on Food Network) and three standard receivers, to the same receiver/recorder with three HD receivers which were able to access and play the content on the DVR from anywhere in the house. What this meant was that we now had the ability watch HD in the study and in our bedroom (and in Grayson's room once he got a hand-me down HD TV). The became a more pressing need recently because the boys started spending a lot of time playing Wii on the TV in the living room/den so we couldn't watch our programs - plus it's getting harder to watch anything in there because the boys tend to play in there and they make it impossible to hear the TV. It also meant it was time to get a larger TV for the study (which got Grayson my old one) and a big TV for our bedroom, but now we can watch Castle or Hawaii Five-O upstairs late at night when we want, or in the study in the evenings while the boys are playing on the Wii.
This one was a fluke. I was in Walmart last weekend and decided that with prices so low it was time to upgrade the DVD player in the den to a Bluray player. But when I started looking, I saw that the Sony BDP-S570 had Internet access via Ethernet or wi-fi, so I decided to get this one for the study and move the older player to the den. Boy was that a good decision!
I have not been impressed with "Internet TV" since my experience with it has been limited to what the Ethernet-connected Samsung Internet@TV monitors in the conference rooms at the Hub do. They're difficult to program, and the services are slow (hard to believe when I have a fiber optic connection) and hard to access. By contrast, the Sony Blu-ray set itself up, found the house's wi-fi no problem and immediately (it starts up far faster than any other Blu-ray player I have ever used) presented me with a variety of video and audio options. I couldn't get Hulu to work and wasn't interest in renting movies (via Netflix or otherwise) at the time, but I was interested in TV - I have been wanting to watch the first two seasons of Castle, but why buy the seasons on DVD since they surely ought to be available somehow in HD? Well sure enough, Amazon Video On Demand came to my rescue. All I had to do was set a code and it allowed me to order shows or movies on my account. And there it was ... Castle seasons 1-3 in HD, at 99 cents a pop. I skimmed the listings in movies under sci-fi - and there were over three hundred, including movies I've been wanting to see for thirty years and haven't had time for. I can rent in SD, sometimes in HD, and best of all, I can often buy at half of what buying a DVD would cost. (I still haven't rented anything because I can rarely tell whether I can get a movie watched in the next 24 or 48 hours, so I suspect I'll be using it primarily to buy movies - not rent).
So I buy the first episode on Castle in glorious HD, and it's now in the cloud, ready to download and play whenever I want, and wherever I want. For kicks I watched part of one episode at the office the other night, and it downloads and plays just fine on the computer monitor as well. Same with the iPad except that Apple doesn't permit the Flash software to work, so while the browser comes up, the episodes can't download and play. I am getting the episodes I want in HD at about half the price of buying them on DVD - in standard definition, and then being restricted to playing them only on something with a DVD drive if I have them with me.
There are a lot of other web TV channels, some of which deal with technology or gaming or sports and Parker especially liked looking at the ones about video games, but nothing I got too enthused about.
The other service I've started using on the TV is another cloud-based one, and that's Pandora, which is a Internet radio application. It lets you set your own stations based on artists you like (I started with Jude Cole, Pat Metheny and Sting) and then plays music by those artists and others like it. The Jude Cole channel has been great - the first four songs it played I really liked three (the fourth I already knew) and they were by artists I'd never listened to or even thought about. So I started scrambling to take notes on these artists and I may download an album or two in the near future from these guys - who's I'd never even thought about before. And if I don't like the song, I just hit forward and it goes to a new one. What a concept!
But this has changed what I do in my leisure time ever since - even though I can now watch TV in HD in the study, and even watch what's recorded on the DVR, I find myself going to the study and sitting down and either going to Amazon to download episodes I like or to Pandora to browse through some interesting music. These sorts of services are starting to be built into TVs, but even if the TV doesn't have it, they can be accessed by web-enabled DVD players like this, by computers, and by TVs with HD streaming players (so I might buy one of the latter for the bedroom TV).
Anyway, I highly recommend the whole concept of whole-house DVR access, and - especially - Internet TV. Finally.