Here’s what we need—more TV.  According to TV-Free America (gee, I wonder where they stand on the issue of television-watching?), 99 percent of households  in the USA have at least one television. That means more people in New Mexico and Arizona have TV’s than have indoor plumbing. If you live in Mississippi, don’t get too excited, Mississippi is tied for fifth for the states with the highest percentage of homes without indoor plumbing.

The average home has television on for almost 7 hours a day which means we as Americans watch 250 Billion (that’s billion with a ‘B’) hours per year.  If we converted those hours to minimum wage pay and applied it to the national debt, we could pay it off in a year in our spare time (earning  nearly 2 trillion dollars).  To put that in perspective, there are only 52 million hours in recorded history. As a nation, we watch TV about 28 million hours per day. That means every 2 days we’ve sat on our back sides as long as recorded history. That’s staggering.

That said, let me tell you how you can watch even more television with a simple device called Slingbox (www.slingbox.com). This device takes your cable, TV, or DVR (think TiVo) signal and delivers it to you in another location. For example, if I’m a Southeastern Conference (SEC) football or basketball fan travelling outside of SEC television coverage, I can turn on my computer and watch the television in my living room from a thousand miles away. Even better, I can use my iPhone, BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile phone to watch my television, DVR, or cable box from anywhere at anytime.

A Slingbox looks like a small step stool or one of those plastic things used in step aerobics. It’s a little larger than a brick and is connected to your TV, DVR, or cable box. Here’s how it works: Slingbox accesses and compresses your television picture and sound (or TiVo, cable, etc.), the breaks it up into tiny pieces and sends it across the Interent. This is a simplistic way to understand video streaming (think YouTube or any other video you watch on the Internet). The challenge is to put the video pieces back together quickly without losing any. If you have a fast network, this is easier, if your network is slower, video is choppy, grainy, stops and starts, and audio is thin, but this is where Slingbox shines. Slingbox monitors network conditions and video quality and continually adjusts how it streams the video from your TV to your computer or phone. The result is a continuous acceptable-to-high-quality video that’s available anywhere. That means you can watch TV in your back yard. Your children can watch anything from your home TiVo while travelling in the car to see grandma and grandpa. If you’re travelling to say, Great Britain where your television choices might only be BBC1 and BBC2, you can still connect and watch NCIS or Dancing with the Stars.

All in all it’s yet another, albeit cool,  way for us to sit on our backsides, increase the national debt and watch history pass us buy.

Technically Yours.



Bott Technology Solutions helps small to midsize businesses with computer technology needs and may be reached via e-mail at gregbott@bottinc.com or at 601-207-0509.