[ExI] Blu-Ray etc

[Emlyn]

2009/1/2 Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>:
> At 08:41 PM 1/1/2009 +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote:
>
>> You have by [now] Blu-Rays both for the TV shows (Firefly) and for the
>> movie (Serenity).
>
> My computer can't even read those new-fangled DVD thingees. Writers are
> *poor*. (Unless they inherited loads of dough, like Laurence van Cott
> Niven.)
>
> [boo hoo]
>
> But really I was asking about Australian TV, where traditionally a lot of
> shows restricted in the USA to cable are shown free-to-air. I wondered if
> this were still the case, given that Oz is often a nation of early adopters.
> When I left 5.5 years ago, cable was not yet universal; I imagine it is now.
> Hmm, maybe not; I read in a 2005 article:
>
> "Australia is trailing most other OECD countries in the adoption rate of
> broadband services. It ranks just 21st out of the 30 members of the OECD.
> This is despite the fact that the numbers of subscribers more than doubled
> to 1.55 million in 2004. By the end of 2004, some 118 million homes and
> businesses in western countries had broadband connections."
>
> Damien Broderick

In Oz, free to air tv is pretty terrible these days. My good wife
Jodie described free-to-air tv recently as like abandoned yahoo
newsgroups, just spam and the odd "hello, is anyone there?" . Getting
worse daily.

We have Foxtel as the only real pay-tv provider, at it seems to be
pretty good, I know people who pay the $100/month for a decent set of
channels. It includes the kind of stuff USians would expect, eg: the
sci-fi channel.

Outside that, sci fi shows on free-to-air tv have always been shown in
shifting time slots, out of order, and never in full. That's not
getting any better. AFAIK, firefly never made it to free-to-air tv
here.

I kind of hate the idea of pay-tv. Yet another proprietary one-way
communications medium. I don't need to pay that kind of money to have
people pump mass produced crapola and ads at me :-)

Instead, I pay in the same vicinity for the best internet I can get my
hands on. I currently pay $75/month for ADSL2+, with a 40 gb/month
cap. I think that's pretty bad by US standards (do you guys even have
bandwidth caps??). OTOH, we have a lot of choice in providers,
multitudes of ISPs everywhere, so within the constraints of our local
setup, competition is fierce.

We just increased our plan, actually, from a 25gb/month cap, because
we were blowing the cap regularly. We've got 4 people (myself, Jodie
my wife, and my 13 and 8 year old kids), with 6 PCs in regular use
(one each, plus one is our TV, plus my 8yo boy has a spare for when
his friends are over, which is just about every day). Since my
daughter discovered Last.fm, and Jodie and I started watching stuff on
Hulu.com and the Daily Show regularly, our usage has gone through the
roof.

And that's without trying to get my hands on stuff like Firefly :-)

As far as us being early adopters; I think we really are not.
Broadband has been lagging because of crappy telstra and its crapulous
practices. Our PM is trying to get a National Broadband Network
underway, but it looks like the way its framed, the owner might end up
with total control (no more competition), and the copper might get
ripped out in the process. Bad. OTOH, we seem to have 3G here
everywhere now, very cool stuff happening in the wireless comms space,
so that's a ray of light.

Oh, and can someone please pop over to Jeff Bezos's house and spank
him for me? Where's my Kindle you bastards?

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com - my home
http://emlyntech.wordpress.com - coding related
http://point7.wordpress.com - downshifting and ranting