Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Adventures in Cord Cutting - Part six - a glitch.

Not a hitch. A glitch.
As a holiday present we were given a wireless Sennheiser headphone and transmitter. The connection to the back of the tv was simple. A snap. And these things work great. With my hearing, though, I can hear every little signal change from either the network transmitter or my own devices performing operations.
No matter.
These made watching The Dark Knight Blu-Ray trilogy a lot more immersive while everyone was asleep upstairs. I just crank it and enjoy.
Or music.
I can stream Spotify on the devices and walk all over the house. These babies are strong.

So, with them working and working well, we decided to get a matching one (you can connect up to 4) so Beth and I can watch together and she can have her volume (low) and I may have mine (ear crushingly loud. It's weird that I have this incredible superhearing and yet want everything to be as loud as humanly possible....)

Sunday night I grabbed a pair, completely mixing up which one was the new one and which was the original and settled in for some Sherlock.

Then the glitch happened.

About midway through the show everything froze. Figuring it was a signal issue (KOCE is in Costa Mesa and about 35 miles away) I jumped back to rewatch and figure out what I missed.

It froze again. In a different place.

I tried another show. Hollywood Game Night, which was surprisingly funny (Thanks TIVO suggestions!) and, all was great. Until the last 10 minutes. And everything froze again.

The next day I decided to put some music on while I was getting some work done. I opened Spotify and just as it was about to load, the entire TiVo crashed and rebooted.

When it came back I now had TWO Spotifys and TWO Pandoras. The latter being two different apps with different icons.

So, I called Tivo.

Historically, Tivo has the best customer service in the biz. And this was no exception.

And no one could figure out what was wrong. The only thing everyone could agree on is that it could be a faulty hard drive.

Somehow I have convinced myself that it has something to do with the new headphones. But, they plug into the TV, so how could THAT be?

Tivo has an excellent return policy and we are still under warranty. They are shipping out a new one and we will send them back this one.

Hopefully this was just a momentary set back.

I'm not sure it was even worth a blog post.

So, to include some real "cord cutting" info

I don't miss cable.

Maybe HBO a little. Since they were smart and put each of the first three new Girls episodes on YouTube I realize just how much I miss that stuff. On the other hand, YouTube kind of sucks because, if you are in the middle of a show and you have to do something else, YouTube doesn't remember where you were and you have to go through a whole fast forwarding mess.

Other than that I actually am looking forward to getting through a bunch of stuff and sitting down and buying the first season of "The Returned". Only, I am betting that, by the time we get to it, it will be available on Netflix.

Someone asked me what I would do without CNN or Cable news?

Are MSNBC or FOX or even CNN really news networks? The Big Three have news offices all over the world and their weekend counterparts are much more informative. And, truth be told, I'm just to freaking busy to catch up.



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