Sunday 11 January 2009

A new way of watching telly . . . STREAMING VIDEO


We're old-fashioned at our house. If there's a programme we want to watch on the goggle-box, we turn on the telly at the prescribed time, watch the show, then switch off.
An exception has always been made for EastEnders, a pretty popular soap, on in the early evenings; that gets video-recorded each time, and then deleted shortly afterwards.

We weren't able to watch a programme about Rick Stein (see photo) who's a popular West Country restauranteur, so we video'd it. The recording was AWFUL (full of 'snow' garbled sound, too too bad). I KNEW that I couldn't download BBC i-player to my MacBook, but I went to

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00gmr6r/Rick_Steins_Memoirs_of_a_Seafood_Chef/

to find the show archived online. You are supposed to download the i-Player software to your PC, then download the programme you want, and watch it on you computer.

Clicking on the picture got me 'streaming video'. Yes, it took me a minute to realise what had happened. but the BBC has set up their webpage so that when you click on a show you want to look at, it checks what type of ADSL (Broadband) connection you are using (speed, contention ratio, technical stuff) and then STARTS TO SEND THE SHOW TO YOUR COMPUTER FRAME-BY-FRAME in real-time. How cool is that !

I had to add the auxillary CRT 550 mm. monitor, to make the film viewable by both of us, over an hour and a half. It worked REALLY WELL.; such a clear picture, clear sound just from the MacBook speakers, 10 out of 10.

I understand the ITV people have done exactly the same thing. Do we need a TV set anymore, then ?? Answers on an airwave, please . . . Does this mean that as we aren't receiving a telly picture on a telly set, we can dispense with paying the £130 annual license fee . . ???

No comments: