TV thoughts

Still in the USA, I find that after a hard day of meetings I don't necessarily want to play WoW on my laptop, but switch on the TV instead. Either zapping to see the wide spectrum of US TV, or watching my currently favorite TV series CSI and NCIS. And I have some observations on TV, especially US TV:

While I was still in Europe, I couldn't understand what the fuzz about HDTV was about. Sure, some game stores had an XBox 360 hooked up to a HDTV and that looked great, but I'm not really interested in buying an XBox, and for watching TV in Europe a HDTV never seemed useful to me. The image I get on my standard TV is crisp and clear, with no apparent need for "high definition" and more resolution. But once I start zapping TV in the USA, I immediately see why an American might want to buy a HDTV set, provided he can get a HDTV signal. The current US NTSC TV signal is pretty bad, fuzzy, and with shifting colors. And the resolution is worse than the European PAL TV signal. Thus HDTV would be a much more noticeable improvement in the USA than in Europe. But I guess it will be still some years before the average hotel room in the USA is equipped with a HDTV set.

I already mentioned that I'm a big fan of the American TV series CSI and NCIS. That's 4 series, the original CSI, CSI : Miami, CSI : New York, and Navy NCIS, which is actually a completely different show, which just happens to have a similar acronym. Now in Europe I can see these series in English, but with Dutch subtitles, on some Dutch TV chain. I could also watch them in French or German, but usually TV series suffer a bit when translated. Of course watching TV "live" is a bit outdated, mostly I record the episodes on the hard disk of my DVD recorder. As I didn't know I would like CSI right from the start, I missed the early episodes, thus I was looking around on how else I could get hold of them. I could buy season 1 of all three CSI series, and also got season 2 and 3 of CSI, with season 4 of CSI and season 2 of CSI : Miami announced on DVD for spring 2006. CSI : New York is newer, and season 2 isn't out yet on DVD, but that is actually the series I like the least, the New York version is a lot darker than the others. NCIS isn't out on DVD at all, although it is already in its 3rd season on TV. But there are rumors that it might be released in spring 2006 as well, but that would be in the USA, and who knows when it comes out in Europe.

Buying the DVDs over here, or mail-ordering them, is an obvious possibility. Unfortunately unlike PC games, DVDs are protected against being viewed on other continents by a region code. It exists because US TV series are shown first in the USA, and come to other continents often a year or two later, so if I could buy the US DVD of last years season, I would get the same episodes as this years or next years TV in Europe. Bad for the TV business. Of course there are ways around the region code, with software of dubious legality like AnyDVD. But then I could watch the DVD only on a computer, my DVD player in the living room is hardwired to the European region. I would need to have a custom chip installed to remove the region code protection, which would void my guarantee, or I would need to use software on a PC to make a copy of the DVD with the region code removed. I think I'll just wait that year more.

While I was here, I also checked out Google Video, which recently started with an announcement that you could watch CSI or NCIS streamed to your computer with it. But I had already remarked upon that the service wasn't offered in Europe. And now that I have a look at it in the USA I notice that there is only 1 episode each of these two series, and not all the episodes as I had assumed. Video quality is passable, and if I hadn't already seen the episodes on offer, I would have been tempted to pay $1.99 for them. But it seems that it will take a couple more years before they have a decent library of videos on offer.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:18 PM Permanent Link