What do you have in your pocket?

As I write this column the annual Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, is taking place in Las Vegas. It is the world’s largest electronics trade show where companies gather to launch products ready for the market place and introduce ideas still on the drawing board. Many of the technological marvels making their debut at the 2018 show will one day become as ubiquitous as our mobile phones, others will quickly fade into oblivion and some will never see the light of day. 

All of us at Travelers Rest are “of a certain age,” and it is mind boggling to think of all the technological advances that have been achieved since the mid-twentieth century. Forty years ago computers filled entire rooms, telephones had dials and math students were still learning to use slide rules. 

Do you remember when you purchased your first handheld calculator? My father was the first in our family to buy a Texas Instrument Calculator to use on his job in the early 1970s. I don’t remember the cost, but I know it was expensive. A few years later calculators became more affordable and I purchased one for myself. It was an amazing device. It fit in my pocket or pocketbook and I took it with me wherever I went.

Fast forward almost fifty years and I still have a handheld device in my pocket, one that is ostensibly a telephone, but it does so much more. These mobile devices are tiny marvels and they have the computational power of a room full of mid-twentieth century computers. With them we can make telephone calls, snap photographs, calculate numbers, keep our calendars and address books and so much more. Used as an interface, our “phones” can monitor our fitness when connected to a wearable fitness monitor, function as a remote control for TVs, turn on and off the lights in our houses, and show live-feed video when someone rings the bell at your front door, even when you are away from home.

Over the next few weeks I will cover some of the technological innovations being introduced this week in Las Vegas, as well as introduce you to ways you can use your smart phones to interface with other devices. Meanwhile, I thought I would update TR Times readers on the ongoing “experiment” of cutting the cable cord at our house. 

As I wrote back in November we are subscribing to Hulu Live TV instead of cable TV, and as such we have the same service in Florida as we have in New York. When we arrived at TR in early November, we had only been using the Live TV feature of Hulu for a few weeks. In New York, where we are connected to the internet with a cable company, our downlink speed are up to 50 Mbps (megabits per second). In comparison, at TR we are limited to our Centurylink DSL, with a maximum downlink speed of 10 Mbps. 

That being said, the plus to our internet based TV is that we have the same service in New York and Florida, and we can even watch TV on our mobile devices when we are on the road. Over 50 broadcast and cable networks are available to watch live, and while CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX are not available live in all geographic areas, they are available on demand. The service also includes a DVR function to record shows for later viewing, although playback includes commercials.

The drawbacks include the occasional freezing of the picture while watching live TV, which occurs with some frequency here at TR when the downlink speed fluctuates. However, that does not occur up north with our higher internet speed. We don’t have that problem when watching shows that are streamed on Hulu, Netflix or Amazon Prime, only with the live TV, which we watch mainly for news and financial broadcasts.

The other negateve is the DVR functions. It does not include user programmable functions for setting recording times. We record a nightly broadcast on CNBC which often runs a minute or two past the scheduled end time of 6:00 p.m., and invariably we miss those last few minutes on Hulu, as there is no way to set the time for a recording to end. In NY we always set the end of the recording at least a few minutes longer for program overlap and news flashes.  You also cannot fast forward through the commercial on recorded programs, although that feature is available with Hulu’s enhance DVR service for an additional cost.

All in all, switching from cable in New York to Hulu Live TV was a good move. We have more access to programs and networks during our months in Florida, and we are saving a considerable amount of money.