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PTJ 88: Laser Beams and TV Streams

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Admit it, you aren’t prepared for the onslaught of “must see” television shows airing on Sunday nights this spring on U.S. networks. That under-powered cable company issued PVR just ain’t gonna cut it. Lucky for you J.D. has some strategies for dealing with your TV watching blues. In the news, the United States Navy announces its engineers are putting the finishing touches on a laser weapon prototype; the Supreme Court decides to skip a case against the National Security Agency over bulk phone metadata surveillance;  up to two-thirds of websites relying on OpenSSL might be susceptible to a critical security flaw; Google’s Play store deals with another embarrassing mishap; Windows XP officially bites the dust; and Battlestar Galactica may get “reimagined” again, but this time on the big screen.

 

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Long Drawn Sunday Night

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Spring finally seems to have arrived in the northern hemisphere and along with daffodils and gentle breezes, many popular TV shows are either returning for their new weird little cable seasons — or coming into the last leg of their network airings before summer vacation. (You know, when all the good stuff happens and maybe we slide right into a cliffhanger until October.)There’s a lot to watch, and unfortunately, a lot of it airs for the first time on Sunday nights.

Not all of the good shows are on directly opposite each other, but many of them are. To get an idea just how jam-packed Sunday nights are now getting, the cable and broadcast prime-time block includes the bloody blockbuster Game of Thrones, the first half of the final season of Mad Men, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, The Good Wife on CBS, the new tech-startup comedy Silicon Valley, Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep and Gillian Anderson in the Washington-based thriller, Crisis. There’s also the fan favorite Once Upon a Time, AMC’s Revolutionary War spy drama, Turn, and if you’re into British drama on PBS, Call the Midwife and The Bletchley Circle. And on top of all this, it’s baseball season and there could be some shows you’ve never heard of that your spouse, partner or kids want to watch. As the TV critic at Time magazine tweeted a few years back, “Sunday is the night you stock up your DVR for the week. It is the Costco of television.”

beepsTV1So if you have more than a couple conflicting shows on Sunday night, you need a strategy to see them all. Having multiple DVRs on multiple TV sets is one that works for people who can afford it.

Some carriers and digital video recorder companies have units that can record six shows at once. The Roamio models in the venerable TiVo line can record four to six shows at a time and with the company’s $130 TiVo Stream device, let you take your recordings to go on an iOS device, sort of like how Slingbox lets you tap into your TV from over the Internet. If you have one of these, you’re probably covered.

But what if you have a DVR from the cable company that only lets you record two channels at once, or you don’t even have a DVR? Or you can’t afford the newer models? Then you have to get creative.

  • For starters, check your TV grid for multiple airings of shows that conflict. Cable programs often re-air late at night, so maybe you can snag the 2:00 a.m. airing instead of the problematic 10 p.m. one.
  • If your cable company offers its own DVR control app, you can use it to search the program grid for shows and then set the box to record, right from your phone or tablet.
  • If you have On Demand services build into your cable package (like those at Comcast, DirecTV or Time Warner Cable, you may be able to find a lot of the popular shows there to watch whenever it suits your schedule.
  • As we’ve mentioned before on this show, network apps and websites also let you watch episodes of your favorite shows. However, they may run a week or two behind the broadcast schedule (depending on the network) or require an existing cable subscription, like the HBO GO and Showtime Anytime apps do.
  • If you have some spare cash and want to ditch the commercials entirely, sign up for a season pass from iTunes, Amazon Instant Video or the Google Play store, although you may have to wait a day to download the episode after it airs. This option also lets you watch the show on more screens besides your TV.
  • Paid services like Hulu Plus (which is $8 a month) let you stream broadcast network shows to compatible TVs, set-top boxes or devices.

TV Guide Online has a list of shows you can buy and download and what services sell them. Oh, since this is a nerd show, if the Silicon Valley show on HBO intrigues you but you don’t get HBO, you can at least watch the first episode for free on YouTube.

One advantage to doing the download or mobile-stream approach is that maybe you can fit in a show or two during your train commute or other moment of stillness where you have the time — but are not home in front of your TV.  If Sunday is not your only night of appointment viewing, now you have to find the time to watch all the stuff leftover from Sunday. Until the next Sunday.

And thankfully, Orphan Black will be on Saturday when it returns later this month.

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Stack the Deck

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The trending topics lists were humming last week as Netflix released all 13 episodes for Season Two of its House of Cards series on Valentine’s Day. Although the first season is available on DVD, the Netflix stream is where you can watch the fresh new episodes of this US adaptation of a British original. (If you haven’t seen the US version, it stars Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in a sort of Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth in Washington scenerio and it can be a bit, er, dark at times.)

With apps, Netflix has built its streaming service into a variety of devices, including Smart TVs, TiVo recorders and set-top streaming boxes that connect to a television. Three of the popular options, the Roku box, the Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast HDMI stick, all include Netflix — and a whole lot more.

These streamers also include plenty of other sources for movies, TV shows, news, sports, cat videos and even games. If you live in an area where you don’t get a lot of broadcast channels or the cable package is just too expensive to consider, a device that pulls in video content from the Internet broadens your TV-viewing options considerably.

roku3Of the three, Roku’s boxes offer the most channels, or content streams, with more than 1000 to choose from. The company also creates a variety of hardware models for a wider range of television sets. These include the bare-bones $50 Roku LT that works on just about any TV set to the blue-chip $100 Roku 3 for HDTV models. In addition to Netflix, you get Hulu Plus (if you subscribe), Amazon Instant Video, HBO GO (if you subscribe through your cable provider), plus news and sports channels. There’s a kids section and a dedicated Latino channel for Spanish-language programming. The Roku 3 can also play games like Angry Birds, as if you didn’t have enough places already to play Angry Birds.

AppletvFor people with a lot of investment in the iTunes ecosystem, the $100  Apple TV has its advantages. While it doesn’t have as many content channels a the Roku, it’s got a fair amount of them, including subscription biggies (Netflix, Hulu Plus, HBO GO, yadda yadda yadda), as well as PBS, YouTube, the Smithsonian Channel, several sports networks and some Disney options for the kids. Where the Apple TV comes in really handy, however, is if you have an iOS device, because you can stream your videos and music from the iTunes Store, your photos and other media to the big screen via Apple’s AirPlay technology. You can also mirror games on your iPad to the TV through the Apple TV, as well as the screen contents of late-model Mac laptops. Apple knows it doesn’t have the content channels of the Roku, but rumors have recently surfaced of a possible deal with Time Warner Cable to get programming for cable subscribers streaming through the device. (However, this deal may be sunk if the Comcast merger goes through.) Whispers of a new Apple TV model showing up as early as next month are also circulating, with a TV tuner, DVR capability and gaming powers all mentioned as possible new features.

chromecastNow, if you’re on a budget and have a tablet or smartphone, there’s the Google Chromecast. It’s not technically a set-top box that pulls down its own online video streams, but a small doo-dad that plugs into your TV’s HDMI port. With it, you play the video on your Android or iOS device – or even in the Chrome browser on your computer. But it’s $35 and a cheap way to watch content from your smaller screen all nice and fancy on your bigger screen. And the Chromecast works with several video services itself, including the aforementioned Netflix, Hulu Plus and HBO GO. It’s a Google product, so of course, you get YouTube and you can stream music, movies and TV shows from the Google Play Store. There are a few other channels like the Vevo music videos, but you can also beam photos or anything else you can see in the Chrome browser to the TV. The Chromecast is the most limited of the three devices right now, but Google recently released a software development kit that will let developers go wild.

So if you’re looking for a way to stream content from the major subscription services — or just want to increase your viewing options with more than just the channels in your cable package — consider a streamer. And you’ve already binged your way through Season Two of House of Cards, rest assured. The folks at Netflix have already ordered up Season Three.

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Episode 29 News: Terms of Servitude

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Diplomacy (or lack thereof) has been getting a real workout this month. After recent negotiations in Dubai, the US refused to sign the International Telecommunication Union global treaty over Internet-freedom issues. Apple, quickly releasing an update to November 29th’s iTunes 11 software, fixed a bunch of bugs and also restored the much beloved Display Duplicates menu item to iTunes 11.0.1.

Google continues to offer its own alternatives to built-in iOS apps, including the new YouTube Capture app for video recording and sharing. It also set forth the triumphant return of the Google Maps app for iOS — which was downloaded 10 million times in the first 48 hours as users fled the native Apple Maps app for more familiar territory.

instarageHulu Plus is up to three million subscribers, but Instagram may be down a few after a Terms of Service kerfuffle that stated the service could basically do what it wanted with its members’ photos, including shilling them out for use in ads. After the Internet became very angry about this and the How to Leave Instagram and Instagram Alternatives blog posts began popping up in droves, Instagram piped up again and said it had been misinterpreted.

Facebook, which owns Instagram now and was already having a banner week in annoying its user base, was also rumored to be readying 15-second autoplay video advertisements on its members’ news feeds next year. Perhaps the other whispers about Facebook doing a new “self-destructing” message app for people who are sending text and photos that maybe they don’t want hanging around after the initial thrill will be better received.

Celebrities sending naughty photos of themselves to their romantic partners may want to consider a self-destructing message app themselves, although the Florida man accused of hacking Scarlett Johansson’s phone to get her naked pictures just got sentenced to 10 years in Federal prison.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, wants to create an ultra-fast wireless network that can support speeds of 100 gigabits per second, just like fiber-optic networks can do on land. The agency is also taking submissions from folks who have their own ideas how to make such a boss network, so sign up now.

And finally, IBM is out with its annual list of The 5 in 5 — five technology predictions for the next five years. This time around, the company concentrates on cognitive computing and the five senses of touch, sight, hearing, taste and smell. Hopefully, the same machines won’t get all five senses at once and begin to learn the way humans do, because the next thing you know, they have a plan and they may not be so diplomatic about it.