End Of An Era

Believe it or not, JVC was still producing VHS decks, until today, when they announced they are stopping production of stand-alone VCRs.

More than 900 million VCRs were produced during the past 30+ years.

VHS. RIP.

Photo courtesy of http://av.watch.impress.co.jp

Real World Experience Switching to Digital OTA

A reporter for IEEE Spectrum Radio details her experience switching from analog over-the-air broadcasts to digital over-the-air broadcasts.  She found it was “neither as easy or painless” as everyone promised.

It’s unknown if her experience is typical or not, but the reality is that most people do not need to do anything to prepare for the February 17, 2009 switch to digital television broadcasting.  You only need to be concerned if, like the reporter, you get your television only from a roof antenna or “rabbit ears” AND you have an older television without a digital tuner.   If you get your television from cable, satellite or some other provider, or if you have a newer set that has a digital tuner, you don’t need to do anything.

Steve Jobs calls Blu-ray “a bag of hurt”

At today’s Apple event, Steve Jobs was asked about Apple’s OS support for Blu-Ray.  He replied:

“Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It’s great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.”

So basically, we’re not going to see Blu-Ray support any time soon because Apple doesn’t want to pay the licensing fees.

Internet downloads could see the end of television by 2012

Vince Cerf, the “father” of the Internet, thinks “the world wide web will spell the end of television in the coming years.“

He claims that since we only watch 15 percent of programming in real-time, it would be easy to download programs over the Internet in the background and watch them at our leisure.

I’m sure at some point in the future this will happen, but I seriously doubt it will be by 2012.  Broadband penetration rates in this country are sill embarrassingly low.  No one is going to download a season of Lost over a 768k DSL connection.  When we all have a 100 Megabit fiber connection and a multi-terabyte media server in the basement, then we can see things like this happening.  Until then people will be happy with cable TV, DVRs and DVDs.