Had a nice chat today with a helpful customer service rep at Verizon. Seems that being such an early adopter of FiOS, I was missing out, not only on some HD channels, but some bandwidth, and I was paying $14/month more than I should be. Here’s how it looks now.
Looks good, except that “about 50 miles” is almost twice the distance from here to Boston.
If not for modern medical science, I would be blind. Ten years ago today, the retina in my left eye detached. A piece of plastic was sewn onto the top of that eye, and the vitreous was removed.
Within a few months, both of my eyes developed cataracts, and I now wear the ultimate contact lenses — internal ones. They’re fixed focus, with one eye better for close-up sight and the other optimized for long distance vision.
But now there’s a promising new cataract replacement technology under development. It’s coming too late for me, but for those of you who have yet to experience the world in amber, you’re in luck.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/DEC/HDvision.flv 512 288]
Anybody in the U.S. who uses Netflix but doesn’t have a Netflix player for connection to a TV is really missing out. There are now a lot of Netflix-compatible devices. The one that I use, and love, is the Roku player.
Netflix seems to be on top of the movie game, and I think the industry has no choice but to deal with Reed Hastings and his vision of the future, the way Steve Jobs forced the music industry out of digital indecision. But I’m not on iTunes, in part because there are so many other options for music, especially for casual listening.
Roku offers services besides Netflix, and last night I took an update that enabled a bunch of additional channels. The one that caught my eye — actually, my ear — is the Pandora music service. A year ago I started using TheRadio.com, and it’s good, but I have to give the nod to Pandora, now that it’s on the Roku player. I want to hear everything that Elvis Costello has done that I don’t own, and Pandora makes that possible. I assume Costello gets money in the process, so everybody wins.
Another new Roku option is Revision3, with videos about tech topics. Looks promising. One of Revision3’s channels is Film Riot, where a guy named Ryan, who has some of Leonard Maltin’s mannerisms, teaches videography. Ryan’s latest entry features Popeye, which I liked, and I was impressed that he got into some history by talking about a technical innovation invented by Max Fleischer nearly a century ago.
Mediafly, sort of a news aggregator, is the only other Roku channel I wanted to try. Mediafly is rather rough around the edges, and not only is it slow to come up, there seems to be a bug that causes occasional lockups. Sometimes these are local to Mediafly, but sometimes they affect everything else on the player, and a restart is needed.
Whether it’s called Video on Demand, IPTV, streaming video, or whatever, once you’ve seen it you know it’s eventually going to take over television. At our house we take Netflix Watch Instantly for granted, on Eric’s Xbox 360 that’s hooked up to the video projector via component video, and on the Roku HD player that’s in regular composite SD video on my beloved Sony 32XBR100.
Last summer I wrote about a Doctor Who episode called “Love and Monsters” (the YouTube video I’d embedded was pulled). Another memorable installment, one of the most enjoyable hours of TV I have ever watched, is called “Blink”.
Recently, the whole family watched “Blink” on the Xbox 360. It wasn’t in HD, but it wasn’t supposed to be. The quality of the highly compressed widescreen picture was, to borrow a line from The Doctor, a bit “wibbly wobbly,” but it was serviceable.
Funny thing, though, because last night, on a lark I put the Roku player on the projector with an HDMI cable. “Blink” was in HD! There was no doubt about it.
This left me wondering if there’s a setting that needs changing on the Xbox 360’s Netflix software, or if Netflix upgraded the Doctor Who files without adding an HD logo. I’ll see tonight, when I have Eric play a bit of “Blink” on the Xbox again.
This video clip has a few minutes of “Blink” in HD on the Roku player and taken with the Canon digital camera sitting on top of the projector. I add to the suspense of the scene by sticking my fingers into the left of the picture at 1:45, so you can get an idea of the image size.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/OCT/WhoBlink.flv 512 384]
It was 40 years ago today, the ARPAnet was taught to play. It was 80 years ago today that the Great Depression began.
If you haven’t played with the Beatles Widget yet, give it a try. They could have called it the Ono Sideboard.
