Consoles Now Rival VCRs As Alternate TV Viewing Channel (Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)

TV may be going everywhere - from hand-held mobile to streaming Internet services and devices - but one of the biggest alternate channels for television content is already in millions of American households: videogame console devices such as Microsoft's Xbox, Sony's PS3, and Nintendo's Wii. According to new research being released today by Knowledge Networks, one-in-five U.S. consumers already are using game systems to watch TV or movie content at least once a month.

The new report, "Over-the-Top TV: A Complete Video Landscape," which comes from KN's ongoing Home Technology Monitor tracking studies, details how American consumers already are utilizing 23 different methods for accessing TV and movie content outside traditional "live" TV viewing platforms such as linear broadcast, cable and satellite TV.

The KN report reveals that 21% of American consumers already utilize their videogame systems to view conventional TV/movie content via their consoles, and that using them to play DVDs (17%) is currently their No. 1 options, but a significant percentage also is using them to view content either via Blueray discs (6%) or via some method of online streaming or downloading (6%). Those numbers shoot-up for younger demographics most likely to utilize videogame systems as a primary entertainment device (see table below).

One of the primary reasons, says KN Vice President David Tice, is that the leading videogame systems were designed as so-called "Trojan horses" that had advanced TV viewing options such as high-definition DVD, Blueray, and streaming functionality built in them from the start.

"What we wanted to try and do is put the newer options in context with some of the older things, or the more mundane ways of watching TV," says Tice. To put the current videogame usage of video programming in context, Tice says that videogame systems are now used as by as many consumers (21%) as old-fashioned VCRs to watch video content at least once a month.

Here’s a handy website with some chronology on early radio.

http://earlyradiohistory.us/

David Sarnoff, 1964: “The computer will become the hub of a vast network of remote data stations and information banks feeding into the machine at a transmission rate of a billion or more bits of information a second. Laser channels will vastly increase both data capacity and the speeds with which it will be transmitted. Eventually, a global communications network handling voice, data and facsimile will instantly link man to machine—or machine to machine—by land, air, underwater, and space circuits. [The computer] will affect man’s ways of thinking, his means of education, his relationship to his physical and social environment, and it will alter his ways of living... [Before the end of this century, these forces] will coalesce into what unquestionably will become the greatest adventure of the human mind.”—from David Sarnoff by Eugene Lyons, 1966.

This past June, we got tired of paying more for Dish and AT$T’s miserable phone service/DSL service, and we went to Comcast for tv/phone and computer links.

After a few days, we ordered Comcast’s DVR. A couple of weeks later we cancelled NetFlix, and our VCR just sets under the Comcast Box with the DVR which is used daily.

Our total cost per month is significantly less than AT&T’s electronic robbery and DISH’s shabby treatment of 10 year customers.

Our phone connections with AT&T were so bad, my wife would try to call my office phone from her phone in other rooms in our house (different number) with about a 60% failure. AT&T/Pac Bell has not added anylines in our area for decades. New homes have been built, phone lines added and DSL services added which overload the ancient AT&T/PAC BELL system 24/7/365. Any rain would wipeout our feeble AT&T tin can service posing as a phone service.

A group of MDs, we know have been putting up with AT&T’s terrible phone lines and even worse DSL. Finally, they went to Comcast for their computers, and they can’t believe the increase in speed and reliability.

Warning re discontinuing DISH, be sure to dc your credit card used to pay Dish’s monthly bills a week or so before dcing your DISH system. For months after we dced the DIsh system, we were treated like robbers inspite of good customers for ten yeasrs, disconnecting DISH and notifying them that we didn’t want their service. We received over 2 dozen dunning phone calls bordering on hostility, emails and bills before they finally backed off.

EMPIRE OF THE AIR: ThemMen Who Made Radio – Tom Lewis
HarperCollins, New York, 1991

Chapter 5: Wireless Goes to War

Pp. 121-123

The Great War, as it came to be called, altered the nature of radio, just as radio began to alter the nature of the war. In the United States, radio became an official interest of the government. Stations were commandeered; operators were trained by the thousands; patent suits that had hindered radio’s development were put in abeyance; equipment was standardized; new equipment was developed; and orders for manufacture multiplied.

Shortly after 1 P. M. on Good Friday, April 6, 1917, the operator at station NAA, the huge naval wireless installation in Arlington, Virginia, tapped out a message to the world that President Wilson had signed the congressional resolution declaring war with Germany. The navy secretary, Josephus Daniels, saw the opportunity – at least temporarily – to get his wish: with the president’s consent, the navy took over all amateur and commercial radio stations not belonging to those operated by the signal corps of the U. S. Army. Essentially, the secretary had commandeered all the wireless interests in the nation.

The order brought to a halt to de Forest’s nightly broadcasts from his amateur station in the Bronx; however, the navy was not interested in such small operations. It set its sights on the giant Marconi transmitters, which it quickly integrated into its communications system. These stations had equipment the government needed: acres of needlelike aerials, powerful generators for transmitting radio waves, and sensitive receivers. Already the government controlled Siasconset on Nantucket (which it had seized in a fit of neutrality for handling secret war messages); now it added Sea Gate on Coney Island; Sagaponack on Long Island; and South Wellfleet on Cape Cod. (Smaller Marconi stations, like the one at Belmar, also came under naval control.) Perhaps the biggest prize of all was the station at New Brunswick, where Marconi had been installing a fifty-kilowatt Alexanderson alternator (predecessor to the larger one installed in 1918), then the most powerful available. It had already transferred the German equipment it had confiscated at Tuckerton, New Jersey, to its station at Arlington: and it had also taken over another German station at Sayville, Long Island, which had been found to be relaying by code the position of British ships to its lethal fleet of submarines cruising in the North Atlantic.

The government soon learned that other smaller stations caught in its web could serve the war effort with distinction. In 1916, Alessandro Fabbri, an impassioned and wealthy yachtsman and radio amateur, had offered the navy his station on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Though the navy first declined, after the declaration of war it commandeered the station and his yacht, made Fabbri and ensign, and placed him in command. Largely with his own money, he expanded his operation and moved it a few miles from Bar Harbor to the Otter Cliffs, a pink granite outcrop overlooking the Atlantic. Radio engineers came to regard the cliffs as the best location for transatlantic reception. Outfitted with improved equipment, the remote outpost received clearly all the frequencies used by transatlantic transmitters. Through Fabbri’s station passed most of the official communications between the battlefronts in Europe, and later the Peace Conference in Paris and Washington. The traffic often amounted to 20,000 words a day, most of them in cipher.

Stations on naval ships, as well as installations on both sides of the Atlantic, demanded qualified operators. The government established training schools for operators at Harvard and Mare Island, California. Together, they could accommodate 5,000 operators for a four-month course. Amateur experimenters were the first to join. Soon the training school was graduating them at the rate of 100 a week. By 1918, the number had increased fourfold.

Some of these operators would not return from the war. From his office in New York, David Sarnoff, acting as secretary of the Institute of Radio Engineers, composed black-bordered pages for the quarterly issues of the Proceedings: “The Institute of Radio Engineers announces with regret the death of…” Some, like Jesse Edgar Baker, succumbed to illness: “He contracted scarlet fever and died”; other died in combat: “On August 8, 1918, Lieutenant-Colonel Leibmann was killed in action while leading his men in a charge at the front in Flanders.”

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