I had a dream

When I was a kid over 30 years ago, I was dreaming that a TV technology in the future would obviously be able to instantly access and play almost every music album,  TV show and movie ever made.   That it would be flat and hang on the wall. And even have a computer as part of it. No it wasn't intelligent or be able to speak, but it would also have video conferencing and CCTV. That this TV would be available almost everywhere, and work on small little devices as well at large screen. That is would also play on a device that is amazing similar to the iPad too, a device that would completely replace books constantly connected to a global network constantly.

As I sit here I am realizing that I have it, right here, right now in front of me. Yea it a bit of a kludge, but it's all here.


I have my PC with an HDMI output graphics card hooked to the HDTV. I canceled my cable, and decided that were are almost there, the point where the Internet could almost replace it.  I also have my Internet Enabled Blue Ray player that get's Pandora, YouTube, Netflix and Blockbuster.
 
All this business with PVR's and recoding shows, it's just dreadful nonsense. I can watch it all now, instantly without any preplanning at all. I have a slider and can just jump forward and backward instantly, sometimes I am stuck with a short commercial, which I can live with.  
So far I have be able to watch almost anything that I really had an interest in. Granted some has had to be bit torrented or paid for. Preferable paid for when ever possible. Anyhow the point it there hasn't been a single thing I can think of that I haven't been able to find.

All sorts of hard to find, obscure movies and old TV shows. Current shows. I am sitting here watching Star Trek VII: Generations on Hulu now. It's not the best movie, but I really love classic trek, on the HD set it looks great.

I went through hell to find the smallest cheapest set that can display the video in it's native resolution. Believe it or not there is HD content available over the web now. Some even in 1080p and several sites even streaming in 1080p. It's breathtaking.  I have yet to see any Broadcast or Cable TV over 720p.   Even though most sets can play video in 1920 x 1080 resolution they have to resize it to fit. the real screen resolution of 1366 x 768 . This really kills the image quality to put it lightly.

Well I made an interesting observation.  High end streaming video works seems to work better on even a low end  DSL then it did on my cable modem. This came a real shock to me, and  would like to test this from a few more sites.  Add that to this business where the cable companies were messing with  p2p  file transfers and for a log time were doing it secretly.