Portable workspaces, a dropbox for my life

TV As It Use To Be

 

A couple of weekends ago I experience TV as it use be and what a pain it was.

 

We were staying at my parents-in-law, who have recently taken a step forward and moved to  HD digital satellite TV (Freesat not Sky) but do not yet have a PVR.  We were watching as a family the X-factor, which is currently being watch by 15 million households and accounts for of the 40% viewing share.  It is on a little bit late for my 5 year old daughter and so we normally let her watch the first half live on a Saturday night and then  the second half on a Sunday morning. While the PVR at home was merrily recording the show, we were not going to be home in time to watch it on Sunday and my daughter was not going to be happy to wait until after school on Monday to watch the second half, particularly as that is the time she gets to watch the X-factor results show, which airs on a Sunday night. Getting a family to watch 3 hours of TV every weekend is complicated and takes planning even with the latest technology to hand.

 

Luckily I noticed that my in-laws still have a VCR tucked away underneath their TV. I don’t know when it was last used as my in-laws were only just able to record a program is the days of analogue TV and video stores are few and far between in the depth of Dorset.  After rerouting all the cables at the back of the TV and a lot of luck I managed to get the VCR to record off the satellite box. So come Sunday morning my daughter was able to complete her fix of X-factor.  A couple of things struck me, firstly it this was really difficult to achieve and the quality was terrible, even though it was only a SD channel the difference between SD over HDMI compared to recorded VHS was very noticeable.  I haven’t actually watched a VHS tape in many years and I was a bit shocked by how bad it was. We also realized, and only just in time, that once we had started recording we couldn’t change channel, a request from my father in-law to watch a bit of news before going to bed almost rendered my hours of fiddling with the VCR pointless.

 

While my father in-law had imposed his own analog switch-off, in the next two years most people across Europe are about to have it imposed on them and many of their strategies for watching the TV they want to watch will be disrupted. Will this drive to much higher uptake of PVR/DVRs in mainland Europe or a faster move to broadband video?

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