Streaming Movies and TV

2016 was the first year more movies were streamed than played on DVDs. Amazing, since DVDs were first invented in 1995 by  Panasonic, Philips, Sony and Toshiba. Of course, other formats had been around for a number of years before that. Hmm, over the hill at the tender young age of 22.
The first basic cable network, launched via satellite in 1976, was Ted Turner's superstation WTCG. A May 2017 study from Fluent LLC asked internet users about their cable and TV habits. Across age groups, 67 percent of people reported using a video streaming service, such as Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon Prime video. Cable subscriptions, which peaked during 2000, was reported by 61 percent of responders.

Incidentally, during 2008, cable subscribers had 129 channels to choose from, and they watched an average of 17 channels in a given week. Five years later, they had 189 channels, and were still watching only 17.5. Their bills have doubled or more since 2000.

How Big is the Internet

Some experts say that the Internet is growing by an exabyte of data every day. To put that in perspective, an exabyte equals 250 million DVDs.

After an exabyte comes a zettabyte, which equals 1,000 exabytes. In 2011, no single data center could hold a zettabyte of information.

By 2016, Cisco predicts that data centers will be sending more 1.3 zettabytes across the Internet every year. That's the equivalent of sending all movies ever made across the Internet every 3 minutes.

The National Security Agency is building a $2 billion data center in Utah that will be the world's first to store a store a yottabyte of data. That's 1,000 zettabytes or 1 million exabytes (or 1 million billion gigabytes).

Over half of Americans have watched TV streamed from the Internet.

Buying Technology

As we approach the buying season, here are a few tips to remember when buying technology. Memory (RAM) is more important than speed. Most do not use the full capacity of their computer, so getting more memory actually translates to more speed than chip speed.

Texting is more expensive than voice time, so watch your contract for cost of messages.

Buy the best components, and the cheapest cables, because all those claims about gold cables, ultra cables are almost meaningless.

When looking at cable plans, buy speed, not channels, because hundreds of those channels have nothing worth watching. Plus if cable internet is fast enough, you can watch more TV and videos on your PC for free. You can do like my brother and hook up your laptop to TV for Netflix movies. Wouldn't you like a 50 inch monitor to surf the net?

When it comes to TVs, remember that size really does matter. A larger screen is more enjoyable to watch than paying for faster refresh rate. Technology has come a long way and refresh rate is way less important than it used to be. Also, LED LCD is much better than LCD alone.

3D TV is an immature technology waiting for an audience, which will not likely happen until at least the next one or two generations. Save your money and wait.

Camera lenses are more important than the camera and most lenses can be re-used on next year's wizbang camera model.