Brian's Brain

This blog post references my hands-on feature article 'Homeland Security: Monitoring And Manipulating Remote Residences' in EDN's November 22, 2007 edition. It's one of a series of web addendums to the print writeup.

Apologies for the delay in crafting this particular blog post, which was explicitly mentioned in the main article text. The web wizards at EDN decided to pull the publishing trigger on the online version of the article a few days early...then I got busy (I just filed my early-February cover story on New Year's Day), and...

Enough excuses; on to the prose. Donner Summit (and Castle Peak) to the west of me and the Mt. Rose range to the east of me combine to do a pretty effective job of 'attenuating' any broadcast TV signals coming from, respectively, the Sacramento Valley and Reno, NV. I suppose that I could put an OTA antenna up on a mast, after checking for possible violation of neighbourhood CC&Rs, but I suspect that frequent wind gusts such as the 100 mph monsters anticipated over the next few days:

would bring it down in fairly short order, anyway. And frankly, I'm too cheap to pay for cable or satellite television service, because as last Sunday's Zits strip points out, I've already got more video entertainment options available than I have time to be entertained by them:

I'm not a huge sports fan, and I get my news from the daily paper and (for more timely information) the Internet, so access to live television broadcasts isn't a big deal to me. It may be important to you, however; maybe you wanted to see the real-time 'ball drop' in Times Square three nights back, or enjoy all the football games that occurred the next day. If so, you're going to need to place-shift a signal that's initially tuned in elsewhere. I've written before about Sling Media's Slingbox and Sony's LocationFree lines; either company's products would fit the bill in this regard. A company called Silicondust even makes a unit called the HDHomeRun (Elgato, for example, bundles and re-sells HDHomeRun with its EyeTV software for the Mac) which tunes in 8-VSB (i.e. ATSC) and unencrypted QAM broadcasts and distributes them through a home network. Thinking of my past SureWest fiber Internet access, whose 50 Mbps upstream and downstream links were conceivably capable of reliably transporting a 19.2 Mbps ATSC stream, I inquired as to whether I could open up firewall holes in order to access the HDHomeRun-generated data over a WAN connection. No dice, at least for EyeTV; here's what I got back from Elgato:

Neither the hardware or software currently support fixed IPs, which would be required for any kind of WAN functionality.

A follow-up message provided additional details:

The limitation is two-fold: the hardware needs to see a DHCP server to get an address. But even it if had a fixed IP, the software wouldn't be able to find it, as it only 'sniffs' on the local net to find devices. Technically, this could all be changed, but for now that's how it works.

I don't watch much television, truth be told; the only series I'm even mildly hooked on right now are Heroes, The Office, Lost and, most recently, Battlestar Galactica. I'm watching Battlestar Galactica: Season One on HD DVD as I type these words, in fact (and discs 5 and 6 of Lost on Blu-ray are on tap for later tonight), thereby exemplifying one means (disc sets) of alternatively obtaining TV content..that is, if you don't mind being at least one season behind! For more current material, there's always the networks' websites:

• ABC
• CBS
• FOX
• NBC

along with the multi-network, added-feature, high-def-capable, now-in-beta Hulu, for which I just snagged a beta invite. I've been quite impressed with the episodes I've watched online, and I don't mind the embedded can't-skip-past commercials...when they come on, I just mute the sound and alt-tab over to email or some other computer function until the main program returns ;-) There's also Joost, of course, along with Miro.

For stuff you can't find free online (to clarify: legally), there are always services such as Amazon Unbox, the iTunes Store and the Xbox Video Marketplace. With that said, it irks me that TV content isn't available for rent online; I realize that the economics of storage, bandwith, royalty and other service costs may not support the lower prices of per-episode rent versus today's purchase model, but rare is the TV episode that I care to watch more than once.

One other intriguing source of online content that I've been enjoying a fair bit is Netflix's Watch Now. In addition to the postal delivery portion of the Netflix program, different membership tiers come with varying amounts of Watch Now streaming time per month. Granted, there aren't a lot of brand new blockbusters available via Watch Now, but the selection is still quite impressive. The quality's decent, too, albeit not the equal of a DVD...at least not at the moment. I'll be curious to observe how, and how fast, Netflix uses Watch Now (as I strongly suspect is the company's long-term plan) to wean folks off optical discs and onto online content distribution.