If you know me, you’ll know that I’m a sucker for cool new technology. (However I do have some blind spots: I still haven’t got a TiVo. Perhaps I really do believe in network services, in which case TiVo is a short-term fad and a technological dead-end. We’ll see. More prosaically, I donb’t watch much TV.)
Anyway, Lufthansa now offers internet access from their long-haul aircraft, and so I decided to buy an hour of access for $9.95. Latency is quite acceptable, the sign-up process (using Boeing’s Connexion by Boeing) is very straightforward.
Right now we’re at 34,000 feet (FL340 if you prefer), just crossing the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and heading towards Iceland and Greenland. We left quite late – once again, a couple of passengers didn’t board, so we had to offload their baggage; then we had to de-ice which took longer than I expected. However with light headwinds we are told that we should arrive on time,
Reading material on the flight is Kate Fox’s “Watching the English”, a wonderful bit of rigorous sociology/anthropology disguised as a book “for the intelligent layman”. As an expat Englishman, it’s fascinating to explore where some of my weirder* behaviours come from – but also how much of my “Englishness” I’ve lost! For example, I now tend to tip the bar staff in a pub, which is terribly gauche. (Hell, I miss my local pub. I’d love to be a “regular” somewhere other than Starbucks.)
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* By American standards, anyway, but then most Americans don’t understand the English.
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Wow, this is cool. I’ll do that too on my next flight. $9.95 for an hour is not bad in my eyes.
I paid almost the same in each Internet Cafe when I was travelling Australia.
(I will write about this trip soon)
$9.95/hour is definitely not bad at all.
one thing i have to say in favour of the Tivo though is, it’s not so much about how much television you watch. i don’t watch *that* many shows, but being able to watch it on my time, at my leisure is great. being away for a month, and being able to download tv shows off my Tivo halfway across the world to my laptop in Taiwan is pretty awesome.
Re: TiVo being a short-term fad. It’s been around for nigh on six years now. In terms of consumer electronics, that’s nearly forever. However, your point is well taken. How much better would it be to have a networked service that records your television shows for you, and that you could watch wherever you can find an internet connection? Like using GMail instead of Outlook, or Bloglines instead of NetNewsWire.
The biggest difference, of course, is that watching television whilst sitting in front of a computer monitor is not nearly as pleasent as recliining on the sofa gazing blissfully at a 60″ wide-screen television.
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