Podcast #762: Vudu Movies on Us

You’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t think Netflix totally changed the game in home entertainment. First, with the unlimited DVD rentals for a small monthly fee. They essentially ended the video store business. Then, with the shift into unlimited streaming movies, anywhere, anytime, again for a small monthly fee. It has changed the way most of us watch movies, and in some cases, television series. They’ve been so succesful, others, like Amazon, have tried to copy their model. But you can’t be king forever. Someone will eventually come along with a different game changer and dethrone you.

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Podcast #761: Tivo Mantis... Cord Cutter's Dream Box?

We have read countless emails from listeners who have cut the cord over the years and many of them have turned to Tivo to become the center of that process. With an antenna and a Tivo box you can cut your TV subscription services to almost nothing. Tivo boxes support Hulu, Netflix, Youtube, Plex, and Amazon Prime so you really don’t have to give up everything. Yes there are cable channels that you may miss, but many of those have an app where you can watch some of the programming for free. Worst case you may need to buy a few season passes of a couple of TV shows that are not available through an app. Regardless, you should be able to watch everything you want and dramatically cut your yearly bill.

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Podcast #760: ATSC 3.0

In the United States and a few other parts of the globe, the standard that defines how digital television transmissions work over terrestrial, cable and satellite broadcasts is called ATSC, named after the Advanced Television Systems Committee. ATSC 1.0 is in use now as the current standard, adopted by the FCC in 1996. But the committee is actively working on the next generation of broadcast standards and has released both 2.0 and 3.0 versions - neither of which are actually in use yet. Some feel that ATSC 3.0 may leapfrog 2.0 and make it obsolete before it even gets any serious mileage on it.

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Podcast #759: Plex Interview

Today we interview Elan Feingold CTO of Plex and Jason Williams Director of Product and Growth of Plex. For those of you who do not know what Plex is, Plex is a media server and client suite of applications that organizes your multimedia content from personal libraries and streams it to their player both on a local network and across the Internet.

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Podcast #758: CEDIA 2016

Each year CEDIA (Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association) holds an event where the industry gathers to show off their wares. It is akin to a mini-CES, but also for many of us represents a best of CES of sorts. When we’ve been to attend the show, we tend to enjoy it more than CES. It takes the parts of CES that we are interested in and compresses it down to a more manageable show. We didn’t go this year but that won’t stop us from talking about some of the products we think are interesting. This year the show was from September 13-17 in Dallas, TX.

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Podcast #757: Home Theater Seating

We’ve had media/projector rooms in our homes for a few years now. We’ve talked about our electronics, our content, and even some of the decorations that go into those rooms. But we haven’t really discussed seating. That’s because for many of us the seating is simply your tradition couch or recliner.

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