A Journey To The Streaming Universe Part One
I Don't Take Streaming Technology For Granted. Also, Some personal recommendations from HULU, Roku, and Netflix
For over 20 years, I was a resident of rural Maine, specifically, Mount Desert Island, which, in Summer, is a vacationer’s paradise, and a hugely popular tourist destination. M.D.I. hosts the sprawling and magnificent Acadia National Park, visited by millions of people via Land, Sea, and Air every year. It’s beautifully sublime and surreal. Magical. No one in their right mind would want to spend any time indoors in front of a TV set after being confined for 8 months of a Maine Winter. This was literally taken in my backyard in the peak of Summer:
Once the Fall recedes, however, and the tourists pack up and go home, cold and snow pretty much force people inside. The days are short and the nights are longer. TV can be both sanity and salvation. Internet connectivity provides a connection to the outside world from what can seem, at times, like doing a stint at Ice Station Zebra.
When I left rural Maine in 2015, and moved South to Florida, the internet infrastructure on M.D.I. was an inequitable hodgepodge of DSL, Cable, and wireless broadband that, depending literally on where you lived at a particular geographic node, left you with little or no choice in a quality internet provider, much less the ability to stream content. So, some people would have access to cable TV and internet with one provider, and some unluckier (yours truly) would have to find seperate providers. To be fair, streaming technology was developing as well.
I lived at an intersection of two major roads, and I suppose due to the lack of population density, no Cable or DSL. I ended up with a hybrid: A wireless broadband service of dubious quality that broadcasted via radio and was picked up by a sort of hybrid modem/receiver, and DIRECTV. The reason I never used DIRECTV for the internet is that it was even SLOWER and MORE unreliable that the wireless broadband service. To be fair M.D.I. is, geographically, both flat as a pancake at sea level in certain points, and in others, rises to 1,000 feet above sea level. The radio signal literally had to “hop” between physical radio broadcast nodes over various points where the topography would rise and fall dramatically.
I spent countless hours investigating, or calling and emailing tech support, for a “broadband service” that would drop out several times a day, especially in poor weather conditions. Despite the dubious quality, I eventually used the same ISP for phone service, a disastrous decision I would come to regret. People were no longer using landlines, yet, we weren’t at the level of good wireless coverage and smartphones. In addition, any rain or heavy snow would interrupt the DIRECTV signal, the wind could blow the dish off-axis, and if you didn’t have the DIY ethic you had to wait for a repair person to come and adjust the dish. Then pay them a hefty maintenance fee.
Personally, Like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”, I would get haunted and stir crazy, and even in heavy snows, I would bundle up and trudge to the spot where this DIRECTV dish was mounted, and with ice and snow stinging my face, carefully climb a ladder and wipe the snow off the dish so the movie or TV program would resume. At one point, I even purchased a high-end satellite signal meter to aid in repointing the dish after a “Noreaster” would blow through. You can lock down a dish, but it is inevitable that heavy wind gusts will blow it off-axis.
So, moving to Florida, despite seeing some complaints online, I have to say that Xfinity has provided a fairly reliable service with comparatively few outages. The difference is night and day. Consider that I was BARELY getting dial up speeds with alleged “Broadband” in Maine. Getting the ROKU stick, with simple USB plugins has been a miracle of convenience compared to the literal physical challenges of maintaining tech as a rural outlier. Being able to choose WHAT to watch and WHEN is effectively unchaining yourself from programming you don’t desire but have to pay for anyway. I will never take it for granted.
In Part Two I will be sharing some quality programming I have enjoyed on ROKU, Hulu and Netflix.