…the reaction of a 3 year old kid who has never known linear, broadcast TV on encountering a Tivo-less household. Via Clegg, Martin, and Foe who have more commentary.
My reaction to having to give away my Tivo (on moving to Finland) has not been to go back to watching linear TV – and not because there isn’t any to watch. We have cable here, and there is plenty of english language with finnish subtitled programming.
I watch DVDs and play games on the TV in the living room, almost exclusively; and listen to a lot of internet radio on our various PCs. Watching my favourite TV series on my PC that I’ve acquired from p2p networks such as bittorrent is of dubious legality, so of course I don’t do that at all.
Radio has taken the place of the TV for unscheduled, ambient enjoyment. Radio 4 and 6music are left on most of the day; with some shows played on-demand, such as The Blue Room (seek out Skeewiff – ‘Skeewiff Where Art Thou’ [realmedia sample]), Late Junction and “Thinking Allowed”.
Unless you are still watching a broken TV, what is your A/V media mix?
Petafloptimism 
We’ve just replaced our very “X Files” fifteen year old green TV with a widescreen Samsung job and a Freeview box. Except it turned out that the aerial dsidn’t work. as a result, for the last month, we’ve had a spectacularly good DVD monitor, basically.
…and it’s been rather good. Particularly since DVD sets are so cheapo these days,and “DVD’s On Tap” exists. Viva Powell and Pressburger (settling down to watch “Peeping Tom”).
(Particularly good way of passing the time whilst breastfeeding, also :).
xx
C.
An MP3 version of the Skeewiff track is available to download from Skeewiff’s Website
..er, that would be skeewiff dot com slash free dot htm
My AV mix has been upset by RAW recently – it’s an OS X app that can be used in tandem with iCal, becoming a sort of low-tech TiVo for radio. Between that and all the downloading of TV shows via bittorrent that I also don’t do at all, I’m starting to find the usual broadcasting model a little frustrating. Whenever the dreaded You and Yours pops up on Radio 4, I find myself frustrated that I can’t just skip to something more interesting.
Oops, I wasn’t paying attention either! RAW can be found here: http://www.bitcartel.com/raw/
After a few months with TiVo, I now get annoyed that I can’t rewind the radio if my concentration slips and I miss something that triggers my attention again… is there a good equivalent to RAW for Windoze?
I’ve tried listening to R3/R4, but being in the US (five hours behind) mucks up the timeframe in odd physical-emotional ways.
There should be a decent fit, since you get the 6pm news when you expect ‘The World At One’, and the 10pm news when you’re used to ‘PM’, and I suppose you can also get the morning Shipping Forecast at half-past midnight. But it doesn’t quite work, since the 12.45 shipping forecast is and always will be the ‘tucking up Britain for bed’ programme, and the 5.50am one the ‘waking up Britain’ one, complete with the ‘R4 Theme’. But ‘Late Junction’ is night-time listening, not late-evening listening.
So I really *wish* that BBC could offer time-delayed ‘live’ radio feeds based upon your timezone, so that you get the news programmes at the ‘right’ time. It can’t be *that* hard to do, no? Want to suggest it back to the people in BVSH HOVSE?
That would be BROADCASTING HOUSE, Nick, for it is us at BBC Radio & Music Interactive what make that stuff. Your request is v interesting – we’ll have a think, tho there’s all kinds of policy issues as well as technical complexities wrapped up in that seemingly simple request (see Cory’s piece for diepunyhumans for where the difficult bit of that is!)
If you haven’t caught it yet, can I recommend new R4 comedy The Department It’s time-shift-ready, sadly not in Finnish and with no subtitles, but it’s an instant classic.
That link then The Department
Thanks, Dan, and apologies for mislocating you 😉
I can certainly understand the policy issues at stake. It’s intriguing that a variant of this timeshifting is already happening on digital satellite, with all those ‘+1’ channels, ostensibly designed for central European scheduling, but actually serving the purposes of those who stumble upon a programme that’s 20 minutes in, and wish they’d seen the beginning. That’s a little different from the psychic-emotional impact of listening to domestic BBC radio at the ‘right’ time for your timezone, but still.
And the World Service gets around this, even when you’re plugged into the non-localised feeds, because it always reminds me of what a friend told me about serving in the Royal Navy on a submarine, where there are absolutely no natural cues as to what ‘time’ it is. All that matters for the WS is GMT and the hour/half-hour: it’s like broadcasting from deep beneath the sea, or broadcasting from space.