Welcome to Pragmatic.
Pragmatic is a weekly discussion show contemplating the practical application of technology.
Exploring the real-world trade-offs, we look at how great ideas are transformed into products and services that can change our lives.
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I'm your host, John Tidgey, and I'm joined today by my guest host, Josh Sentis.
How are you doing, Josh?
Hi, John. Thanks for having me on.
This is a it's quite an honor.
You had Horace on here a while back.
And this is a I know Marco listens to this.
This is a serious deal.
So, hopefully I can keep up.
Yeah, I'm sure we'll be fine.
It's just one of those things I put out there and asked a few people
about downloading versus streaming.
And I've had I have lost count how many times I've argued with people on Twitter about
this. And as you know, most Twitter arguments tend to sort of devolve quickly.
They, you know, at 140 characters at a time, they fall apart quick, even quicker.
And it's just crazy, but- Benghazi.
Yeah, well, it's just- Anyway.
So, but the point is that it's something that's bugged me for ages, and I was looking for somebody
who was into streaming because I'm into downloading.
So, I thought it might be interesting to explore the pros and cons of that
and just try and settle this once and for all, at least in my mind anyway.
So, you want to give this a shot?
Yeah, sure. Yeah, we, yeah, there's definitely, well, I think part of the
divide, at least for us is, is geography, because, you know, as I've
already understood it, you know, you're down there in Australia, and the
internet connections down there have not always been great. I mean, they're
not that much better here in America, I don't think, but I think that plays a
lot into it, you know. Absolutely. It seems to me a lot of the, whether you
prefer downloads or streaming really depends, can often depend on your internet connection
because streaming has a lot of advantages. It doesn't take up as much storage space.
Typically, it gives you wider selection, all these different things, but but it's a lot
more bandwidth intensive because of the download, you just download it once and you have it,
but it also takes up space in your device. Yeah, you know, you're limited to just what
you have downloaded. Yep, absolutely. And you're hitting
on some key points right there. So absolutely right, totally
agree with everything you just said. What I want to do is try
and tackle this in sort of like this three angles I want to
consider. The first one is like the technical pros and cons of
each method. The second one is the trust problem, which is like
how much do you trust different aspects of your choice. And I
guess that doesn't make sense yet. Maybe it'll make sense in a
minute but and then there's the cost which is just the raw cost is it cheaper
to download is it cheaper to stream and and why and I guess the other thing is I
just want to put some boundaries on it and I wrote down this note boundaries
and the thing is what I just want to talk about audio and video what else is there to
stream I think well I guess technically if you're browsing the web you're
streaming text you know and if you're using something like Instapaper
technically you're not you you'll you'll download it to Instapaper and then you'll
go out and about, you won't be streaming it, it'll be downloaded.
So, I guess there is that text component.
So, yes.
Like Marvel Unlimited, so you can stream comic books.
Yeah, sure. If you're into comics, absolutely.
So, yeah, another good example.
So, just trying to sort of describe that a little bit.
But the other thing to keep in mind as well is that I don't want to just talk about mobile streaming
because streaming also applies just as much to desktops, because there was streaming on desktops
long before they were streaming to a mobile device.
So sort of, yeah, and there's also the other aspect which is streaming within a house.
So something else we'll touch on later is the whole, you know, I'm streaming airplay to a set of speakers or whatever I'm doing.
So there's a whole bunch of different angles to look at.
So I wanted to start with the technical side of things, which is the pros and cons of the technical.
And because everyone is like raving about streaming and let's see,
you got Spotify, Pandora, just on the music side,
you've got Beats and there's a few others out there as well.
So all these, you pay them a monthly fee and they will allow you to stream
whatever music they've got in their catalogue. On the video side, of course,
you've got, you know, Netflix, Hulu and HBO Go,
I think.
Yeah. Yeah. And there's some other ones, there's like Crackle and, you know,
but yeah, you hit the major three, I think.
Yeah. So- YouTube.
Oh, YouTube. We forgot YouTube.
Damn it, you're- How could I forget YouTube?
You're damn right. YouTube, yes.
So, all of these options are all streamed and there's all sorts of good reasons for that.
But in any case, the problem with streaming and the history
behind it is that any interruption to your download
And you can lose your place.
And a lot of early protocols when you're doing streaming, yeah, if you lost
your place, it was stiff. It was right back to the beginning again.
You couldn't like start halfway through.
It's gotten a lot better in the last five, ten years.
But back in the beginning of the Internet, it was terrible.
Streaming was hideously unreliable.
Well, even recently, it's been bad.
Sure. There's been some podcast clients I've used.
Like for instance, I was trying Google listen
back in my old Android days, and it was purely streaming.
There was no downloading.
And so I would, I kind of live in the sticks
and I'd be commuting and I'd go through a poor coverage area
and it would like hit a hiccup, lose signal,
and then you would try to play it again
and it would start trying to play,
like the scrubber would show it being
in the middle of the podcast,
but then it would start playing from the very start.
(laughs)
So, I'd have to start the whole thing over again and then find my place.
Yeah. Yeah.
I don't understand technically how that even happens.
I'm like, can it not track, can it not store where it actually is in that stream?
Yeah, it's just it's all it comes back to the protocols.
And honestly, some of the protocols were just built on the assumption that you would have
a decent connection or a constant connection.
and as soon as it gets interrupted, it just loses its mind
and has no choice but to go back to the beginning.
It's sort of, but things have evolved, you know,
and there's better technologies
and better protocols out there these days.
So it's something that it's been an evolution, I think,
and things have improved,
but ultimately it comes down to the reliability
of the network in question.
And on a landline, you might think,
okay, I'm connected on a landline like other,
I've got ADSL, I've got fiber, I've got coaxial cable,
maybe, I don't know, maybe some people still do,
I guess they do.
And, you know, all, yeah, it's going to be
a pretty high reliability thing,
but then you've got network congestion
and it could be congestion anywhere on the network.
Your ISP could be getting congested,
there could be issues with a connection on the host
and you're trying to stream the data from.
So the reliability of your network is going to affect
how effective streaming actually can be.
So the great advantage, and you hit on this already
in the first minute we were talking about it,
and that is the cost of storage on your mobile device.
If you stream it, you don't have to store it.
And of course, storage costs money.
And historically, storage costs a lot of money.
You think about how much memory used to cost.
And iPods, the original iPods
with their spinning hard drives,
not that they could stream anything,
but when they switched to flash, the four gig flash,
These things are only just barely cheaper for a 4GB of memory or whatever it was
compared to a 30, I forget how many gigabyte iPod it was,
with a spinning disk in it. Yeah, I mean, it was very expensive.
So if you had a mobile device, yeah, you just couldn't afford the memory.
So streaming makes sense for that.
Well, even if you're, I mean, if you're on the iPhone, storage is still kind of expensive.
Oh, sure. Yeah.
They still, they only come with 16 gigabytes standard still.
and it costs like $100 to get an extra 16 gigabytes
and how much cheaper is flash storage now
than it was just a few years ago?
- Yeah, absolutely.
And at this point in time,
I sort of did some math based on the US prices of iPads.
And I know iPads, iPhones, not quite the same thing,
but to get the big range,
'cause only the iPad goes up to 128 gig.
So I got 16 gig to 128 gig
is an increment of $300 of price.
Now if you assume that you get two years of usage out of your device, then in terms of monthly cost, you're paying $12.50 a month for having that extra storage.
That $12.50 could be going towards streaming and then you could stick with a 16GB model.
So if you're streaming for less than $12.50 a month in your total expenditure, you'll bet you're ahead.
And you don't have to worry about managing that on your device, because how many times you plug your device in, you've got the content downloaded,
and you've got to shuffle things around.
Oh, I really want to listen to this today.
I really want to watch this today.
Delete, delete, delete, delete, delete.
I've only got a 16 gig device, right?
- You know, I just thought of something, you know,
a huge, a huge thing you'll soon be able to stream
that I missed that was announced earlier this week
is that in iOS 8,
you'll be able to stream your photo library.
And I think for a lot of iPhone users,
that's a huge pain point, you know,
for the 16 gigabyte users, even for 32 gigabytes.
That's probably one of the main uses of storage on my phone
is photos and videos.
- Yeah, that is a really, really good point.
Absolutely.
And 'cause once everything goes up into iCloud,
your photo stream's gonna store it
and it'll roll off your device
and then you can pull it down whenever you want it,
wherever you want it.
And that's, again, that'll be, yeah,
streaming data from the cloud.
So yeah, good one.
I didn't, I've missed that one entirely.
So, all right.
So the other issue with having more memory
and more storage on your mobile device
is that usually that will cause your battery
to drain more quickly,
especially if it's solid state memory.
So in the end, honestly, it's a matter of compromise.
So streaming sounds like the way to go
for a mobile device primarily.
The problem though is that the size of the media
has increased along the way.
So it no longer is just streaming music
at a really low bit rate.
go like dial this back to 1995 with real,
the real player, like real networks and their RM player.
And that was streaming stuff at extremely low bit rates.
And I mean, it sounded God awful, but you know,
it was the first, I think,
real mass attempt to stream audio.
And now what are we doing?
We're streaming 1080p video.
You know, it's like the bandwidth requirements
have increased incredibly in the last little while.
And that puts more strain on the network and that causes more congestion on the network.
And that then counter that basically then starts to defeat the streaming.
Because if you know what I mean, it's like it's like what we want to stream now is going
beyond our capacity to stream it.
So we're killing streaming.
But now streaming, well, if you're on mobile, a lot of these have ways of degrading like
Netflix. I'm not quite sure what the technical specifics are for Netflix, but I know it
definitely degrades if it has a problem.
These streaming services, you can kick them down
into lower quality modes.
Like for instance, on Beats,
Beats music can kick down to 64 kilobits per second.
Spotify, I think, goes down to 96 kilobits per second.
So, mostly streaming music services can go down
to extremely low bit rates to save on bandwidth.
- Absolutely.
- At least on that end.
Now, music's a little more flexible than video
or some of these other things we've been discussing.
- Yeah, absolutely.
No, you're absolutely right.
And that is an interesting compromise
'cause what that means is that you can continue to watch
or listen to what you're watching or listening to
and you'll lose some of the quality.
But the bottom line though,
is that had you actually downloaded that
before you went out the door,
you would have experienced no loss of quality.
So it's like you're trading off potential quality
to overcome the loss of connection
and the loss of streaming.
So it's an interesting sort of trade off,
but I think it's still a good trade-off to make,
especially if you've bought into the streaming option
because it's either that or you can't watch it at all.
So when I was thinking about this,
I was thinking about how thick did the pipes have to be
to make streaming useful and possible?
So starting out with just,
you know, I know it sounds weird streaming text off the web,
but I mean, that's really what web browsing is mostly,
text and images.
So if you're on,
So just the three options I'm gonna give,
put on the table are the fixed line option,
the mobile phone, or sorry, cellular network option,
and then the wifi option.
So if you're just streaming texts and so on,
dial up is fine, like 56K, 33, 6K,
you know, maybe even, you know, oh God, 28, 8K maybe.
- You could do it, you could do it.
- Oh, sure.
- Oh, yeah. - You get a gopher and...
- Gopher, oh, hi, man. - A Kermit.
Kermit, oh, dear.
Yeah, now we're showing our age there.
Anyhow, so then, of course, 2G networks.
And the funny thing is, of course, there was always wireless access protocol
and I think that was 9600 board from memory
that worked on before that.
But 2G, I think, generally, you know, let's just run with that,
you know, edge maybe sort of thing.
So then you've got Wi-Fi A or B, so 802.11a or B.
And that's gonna handle it just fine.
Streaming of music and audio is the next sort of step up
and you really do wanna sort of go beyond dial up for that.
So you're looking at probably
a low level ADSL one type connection.
3G would be preferable.
And if you're in a house, maybe Wi-Fi 802.11g maybe
would probably be best.
Then you start stepping up into more hardcore stuff.
If you're going to do standard definition video, then you'd want ADSL 2 really.
So, the sorts of speeds to be getting that.
3G might cut it, 4G would be better.
That's just standard definition video.
And Wi-Fi N, I think, would be preferable.
You could probably get away with G, but I think N is probably better.
And you can sort of see some of that in the evolution of the Apple TV as well.
So when they added HD video of course they went to dual band and now more recently AC
on the Wi-Fi side.
And if you're going to do HD video, fiber is highly recommended and 4G is an absolute
must.
So, you know, it's got to that point where we've had to fatten up the pipes to basically
make streaming a possibility still.
Well, the other side of the problem, at least on mobile, and let me know if you don't have this.
I have this problem in America.
I don't know if you have this problem in Australia, but as LTE, as 4G has become more prevalent, 3G has become
worthless because they have dedicated so much more bandwidth to LTE.
So now if I get into a 3G area, I might as well just not even have a data signal.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, you're right.
And then the similar things are actually happening here as well.
So Telstra's done a massive rollout of LTE and that's our biggest carrier
and they have to some extent robbed Peter to pay Paul with their frequency spectrum
so similar kinds of problems happening here as well
and it's not a matter of being used to the 4G download speeds
they are literally crimping and back on the 3G and putting all their effort into the 4
So, yeah, it's, hmm, it is a problem.
But in any case, all right.
So, streaming is also very dependent upon the encoding technology.
That's something that's also been evolving and that requires hardware and/or software to encode and decode it.
So, you know, for example, video H.264, up and coming H.265.
And, you know, the obvious culprits MP3 and AAC, for example, for audio.
So that's been evolving as time's gone on and that's also assisted streaming.
And the different streaming protocols over the years, I don't want to go into these in too much depth, just to list them off just for the hell of it, is like UDP,
User Data Grant Protocol, RTP is Real-Time Transport Protocol, RTSP is Real-Time Streaming Protocol and RTCP is Real-Time Transport Control Protocol.
And these are all different ways of attacking the streaming problem
and they have different features and functionality
and as I've gone from start to finish in that list, they're getting more advanced.
So there's a link in the show notes if you want more information about that,
but I don't think it's sort of beyond the scope of this.
But so bottom line is for streaming to work,
you have to have access to a network when you want to stream what you want to stream.
That's probably obvious, but you know, that's the advantage of downloading
is that you don't, all you need to do is have a little bit of pre-planning.
So you say, okay, I'm gonna watch this,
or I'm gonna listen to this,
I'm gonna download it before I leave my wifi
or my ADSL2 connection, my fiber,
my Comcast connection or whatever I've got.
And I'm going to then walk out the door
and even if I've got 2G, 3G, 4G,
I'm gonna choose not to use it.
I'll listen to it on my local device
and I don't have to worry about streaming it.
Don't have to worry about congestion,
I don't have to worry about any of that other stuff.
So it takes a lot of that peace of mind away.
It gives you a lot of peace of mind,
takes a lot of that stress away.
So, but because of that, the pre-planning means that you kill spontaneity.
So, if you're out and about and you want to listen to that one song, you know what happens?
You're out there and it's like, oh, I could really go for, I don't know, Katrina and the
waves walking on sunshine.
I don't know. Bad example?
Maybe. Probably.
Definitely. Anyway, point is, you want to listen to that.
You don't have it in your library.
Well, you're out of luck, aren't you?
If you've downloaded it, if you don't have it on your device, even if you got in your library at
home, that's no good to you.
So, what are you going to do?
you're out of luck. So, whereas streaming in that case, you know,
you could stream it because they'll probably have Katrina and the waves in the
catalog. I mean, well, who wouldn't?
Well, you know, if you're walking your dog, you know,
I'm guessing you're a Futurama fan.
Yes. That's good.
Well, I think that's part of the reason why the streaming music services are so
popular instead of downloads, because music,
I think probably even more than any other medium is definitely a mood
sort of thing, right? You know, you're driving your car and you're listening to one song
and suddenly you're like, "Hey, I want to listen to something else entirely." And with
streaming you can do that. And downloads, that's a frustrating thing. The other problem
with downloading is that, and one of the things that streaming has totally spoiled me on,
is managing your data. And maybe this comes up later in the show, but like, you know,
iTunes, it's almost like a second job to go through and, you know, manage your metadata,
manage, manage your album art, you know, load things, load things onto the device,
load things off of the device, you know, even if you have something like iTunes match,
there's still a certain amount of manual fiddling there. You know, something with like comic books,
something with a lot of videos, you know, I've been trying to rip my Blu-ray collection
for playback on my Apple TV and it takes so long. I have all these automated tools to help me out,
to add the metadata, all these things, but still I have to find it, you know, figure out, okay,
where am I going to store it? You know, is this tagged properly? Is this, you know, encoded in
the right way? You know, and the cool thing about streaming is I just give them 10 bucks, somebody
10 bucks, you know, every month and they handle that for me and I don't have to think about it.
it. As long as I have a solid internet connection, I'm just
good to go. And it takes a lot out of my Omni focus.
Absolutely. And I was about to cover that. And so, yep, now we
have. And I think you've said pretty much everything I had on
my notes list. And that is...
Sorry.
No, no, no, no, that's fine. That's fine. It's exactly the
point. And that is, you are taking on the burden of managing
all of this stuff that you want to listen to, because you don't
when you're going to listen to it. So you've got to have it all set up and ready to go if and when
you should choose to listen to it. Whereas if it's streamed, you don't have to worry about any of that.
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So I just wanna now talk about trust.
And this is something that bugs me about streaming.
And the more I thought about it, it also actually bugs me
about what I do, which is primarily downloading.
So first of all, I have to trust that the content
that I'm getting from the person in the cloud,
whoever it is, the company, it doesn't matter,
Pandora, Netflix, Hulu, whoever,
I have to trust that it's gonna be there tomorrow.
'Cause they could go out of business.
They could get bought by Facebook.
They could get bought by Google and then killed.
Yeah, they can. In the case of Hulu, they just randomly take things down because they feel like it.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, you don't know.
And just because they've got, you know, the secret life of Walter Mitty up there today doesn't mean it's going to be there tomorrow.
Or maybe they'll just decide that, you know, the original Star Wars movies never existed and they're only going to show the special editions.
Yeah. And then you'll be there beating your head against the wall like every other true fan.
It's like, come on.
But anyway, don't open that can of worms.
Point is, you can't trust them, can you?
I mean, can you trust them to be there next year, in five years, or what about ten years?
So, what happens when they're gone?
So, people, the counter argument to that is, okay, well, there'll be other services, they're going to start up
and they're going to take their place, but will they have the same catalogue exactly?
Will they have that one movie that you really want, that one album you've always wanted?
You rely on them, you trust them, you give them the control.
But the funny thing is, because there's no real ownership, but the funny thing is
that storing it at home,
that has a whole different level of trust problems.
Do you trust that the hard drive you're storing on
or solid state drive you're storing on
isn't about to fall over?
Like it's gonna like have a hardware failure
or get corrupted.
I mean, you know, it's built on HFS plus
and that's solid as a rock, you know?
No, that's a Syracuse joke.
Anyway, sorry.
- No, no, I got you there.
Well, no, it's funny.
Well, I, you know, as I said, I've been ripping my Blu-rays
And I finally have a system set up
where I feel pretty confident in it.
So I have two four terabyte external USB hard drives.
And so I rip to one,
and then I mirror to the other one every night.
And then on top of that,
I subscribe to CrashPlan for cloud backup.
And then I backup my rips into the cloud,
which is probably why my bandwidth bills are so high.
(laughs)
- Yeah.
I have three copies of everything, you know,
and everything in my setup,
I have three copies of everything.
Everything on my internal Mac hard drive, I have three copies
but that's a huge pain to manage even still, you know.
- Oh yeah, absolutely.
Well, I mean, that's hardcore, but you know what?
Three is a good minimum.
My problem is that most of my media,
I've got something like eight terabytes,
hang on, no, I'm using 12 terabytes of storage up there.
It's not all used.
I think I'm only using about nine of it.
And that's mostly video, but there's audio in there.
There's podcasts in there.
There's I mean, I keep podcasts from like five, five years ago, because, well, why not?
It's always a good time to listen to Build and Analyze.
So, you know, the point is that, yeah, what do you do?
The point is that I can't throw anything away.
I'm a digital. Yeah.
Anyway. So, what I tend to do is if I've got stuff that's not media, so documents I've
worked on software I've written, you know, whatever, I will, and
for obviously family photos and family videos, I'll back them up
onto Blu-ray discs, and I keep them in a fireproof safe. I
recognize it's not in a, it's in the same building, therefore,
it's not geographically protected from a fire or a
single incident like an asteroid hitting the house. But
I'll run the numbers on that, I guess. But statistically, I
would rather have an offsite backup like you've got like
crash plan. But there's no way with my ADSL1 connection on
384k up, that that's ever going to happen.
I mean, I had iTunes match, I signed up to that and I let it back up my
40, 50 gig, whatever the heck it is, music library, and it took
one and a half months and it still, at the end of it, screwed up.
So, I just, you know, I gave up.
You know, it's just- iTunes match is everything bad about downloads combined with everything bad
about streaming. Beautifully put.
That's good. I mean, honestly, I just I can't do crash plan.
I really do or anything like it. I'd love to maybe someday when, you know,
the present meets where I live, then yeah, who knows?
But for the moment, I'm stuck with hard drives.
So, bottom line is that that's that's where the trust falls apart is
for the downloaded option is that if one of my hard drives dies, I'm living with the
the real possibility that I'll lose everything on it.
You know, and if that happens, well, shrug.
"Oh dear, I've still got a bunch of the originals.
I can always re-rip the DVDs and Blu-rays if I have to.
I'd rather not, but you know,
hey, if that's what happens, that's what happens."
Because I'm not gonna buy another set of damn hard drives
to back up the hard drives that I've already got.
It's sort of, (sighs)
anyway.
Yeah, so, but you don't have to-
- It's a lot of management.
- It is.
- You're your own sysadmin.
- That's exactly right.
It's like, I'm at home, punch out, right?
I don't have to do work on computers.
Well, hang on. Yes, I do. And it's like, yeah.
So, streaming solves that problem.
But you hand over the ownership to the people streaming you the content.
You have nothing, you possess nothing and you owe them everything.
So, that's the tradeoff.
Well, at least, you know, with every form of DRM, you don't truly own the content.
But this is streaming.
I feel like it's more honest.
I feel like we understand the relationship.
I stop paying you, you stop giving me things, you know, as opposed to
like iTunes and I'll say I buy a lot of movies out of iTunes and stream them.
You know, I don't technically own them, right? So that's done on my part.
But, you know, that's a value proposition I'm okay with now. But, you know, part of the trade
off I see with streaming it will like we've been talking about is that management aspect is that
I don't have to I don't have to worry about it. I'm paying someone else to worry about it for me.
But in exchange, it's it's kind of a grab bag, right?
You know, I subscribe to I guess to be streaming subscriptions.
I'm on Netflix. I'm on Hulu. I'm on HBO.
Go. I have Beats Music and Rdio, and I've subscribed to Google Music.
And so these other ones in the past, some always testing out different
music streaming services. I'm on Marvel Unlimited.
And, you know, you never quite know.
Some services are more consistent than others, like HBO.
Nothing's ever vanished from HBO.
go. Marvel Unlimited, they just keep adding things. I don't think they're planning on removing anything.
But like Netflix, Hulu are sort of like roulette, right? Even some of the music streaming services
now are sort of roulette. Like, you know, I went to play a song on Beats the other day that I'd
played forever and ever, and it was just gone. The rest of the album was there, and just this
one song was gone. So, that's one of the complications is all these, the media,
licensing and you know that's that's one of the many more moving parts in the whole streaming bag
is is this whole legal aspect. So you know I think you have to have a mix you have to have a mix of
you know if you want a movie and you really want to be yours and be yours forever then you know
you need to buy the physical media rip it store it back it up all that stuff you and you have to
to love the movie, you know, you have to love that piece of
media to want to do that. You know, I couldn't just you know,
you know, if you don't like the police academy movies, you
probably have a hard time, you know, ripping all nine of them
and copying them over and backing them up and everything.
Right. So, um, it's sort of, it's very interesting. You know,
one of the things that you know, people say about digital media is
that takes away that certain specialness of owning, you know,
a laser disc, running a vinyl record, you know, having a physical artifact there.
But I think, I think, you know, we can have some of that back in that, you
know, streaming makes things, uh, makes it makes media cheap, right?
Like, you know, suddenly, um, that first issue of Spider-Man isn't all that
valuable because I can always just pull it up anytime I want, I can just open
the Marvel unlimited app.
So, you know, search for Spider-Man hit Spider-Man number one, and there it is.
But if it's something that you really love, something you always want to have
access to like, you know, one of your favorite movies, then you
do cherish that you do do things to make sure you always
have that.
Absolutely right. And I think that that's, that's also the big
difference. Just just getting back to something you said just
before about DRM is that streaming is essentially is a
form of DRM. But when you buy a, when you buy a movie, and you
rip it and store it, like you're saying, like I've done, you've
done is that, you know, you actually still own that piece of
physical media, it's not going to get taken away from you and provide your houses and burn down
and it with it, then you know, you've still got that for as long as it lasts.
Whereas if you compare and contrast that with I'm going to go and pay to see, you know, the
latest Avengers movie or Iron Man movie or whatever the heck in the theatres, well, you
pay to see it once in that environment.
You can't take it with you.
And so, if they stop showing the movie tomorrow, well, tough luck.
You've just missed your chance.
And that's more of the difference between downloading versus streaming
And there's different expectations and I guess it's important to understand that up front
So, in any case, there's a third angle I want to look at this
And that's the angle of cost
Now, when I say cost, I don't mean the difference between
"Oh yeah, it's cheaper to stream something in terms of it cost me 10 bucks a month"
let's say for Netflix, actually, I have no idea how much Netflix costs a month
but... - About 8 bucks, I think, oh, I think it's going up to 9 in a couple of years
but I think it's, well, something like that. It's cheap.
Yeah, OK, so let's call it 10, let's call it 10 bucks, nice round number.
What's wrong with that? - OK, sure.
Anyway, but yeah, so some nominal value each month versus if I want to buy
one movie, it's 20 bucks in iTunes, you know, or
It's 20, it's or it's a $20 Blu-ray down at Best Buy
or wherever the heck I may be at the time.
Best Buy sell Blu-rays, don't they?
- Yeah. - Yeah, okay, good.
I was just checking.
I actually haven't been to a Best Buy, but in any case.
- You're not missing much.
- I didn't think I was, but still.
Everyone just says, "Oh, you know, I was going to Best Buy."
And I'm like, "Oh, yeah, okay."
I haven't been there.
I've been to a bunch of shops
when I was over in North America,
but I didn't go into a Best Buy.
Anyway, okay, so I'm gonna put myself off track there.
Yes, all right, okay.
So cost, cost, cost, cost.
Yes, so I'm not talking about the cost,
the relative cost of the media.
I'm not talking about that at all.
What I'm talking about is the cost to stream download it.
So if you download it, you download it once,
you never have to download it again.
If you stream it and you stream it more than once,
then there's an additional cost to that.
is also an additional cost usually if you get partway through the movie you have to stop and then start again
it'll have to backtrack a little bit so you're going to get additional cost and if you're unfortunate to have to start from the beginning again
yeah that's going to be more of a problem
so the problem with streaming is that it hides that cost every repeat listen because nothing is maintained locally
you're down for downloading it again
so the first time it's you know it's an even game but every subsequent time it costs you money but how much money is the question
And a lot of this comes back to where you live.
And I know that we were talking about this
just before we started the show actually.
And that is in my case, in Australia, we have a,
well, the biggest problem is simply the balance
of population to surface area of the country
is not in our favor because we have something like 29
or we have a 30 million now, something like that anyway,
that many million people compared to the US,
which is what 350 million or something like that
- Yeah, it's a lot. - Yeah, a lot.
- So, a lot more. - Even we're pretty spread out, you know, I live in the sticks.
Oh, sure. But I mean, my point is that in America, the physical...
If you don't include Alaska in this, the area of the United States...
- Continental United States. - Yeah, continental United States minus Alaska,
that is very, very similar to the surface area of Australia.
So, you know, we are both very big countries.
It's just that you have 10 times the population and then some.
So that means that you have much, much higher demand
and economies of scale,
therefore work out more in your favor.
So, Japan's another example
where they've got a much smaller surface area
and they still have a reasonably large population.
So again, the balance is in their favor.
It's a lot easier to invest in
lots of fiber optic cables going everywhere,
lots of big data centers
and switches and exchanges and so on.
So for me, living in Australia, unfortunately,
I'm way behind the eight ball
because economically it's just more expensive.
And that's just a reality of economies of scale
and you'll never escape that here.
So what I'm paying at each month
is I'm paying $40 every month for a 200 gig on ADSL one,
which is by most modern standards is slow as rubbish really.
- Yeah, that's really slow.
- It's terrible.
time hitting that bandwidth cap? Yeah I do I never I have never hit it I think
the most I ever got in a month was about a hundred and forty five gig and that
was when there was like Xcode releases plus a bunch of firmware kind of what's
going on right now actually I wonder what it'll be this month but anyhow so
it works out about 20 cents per gig per month now what's interesting is if we
then shift that to mobile so now I'm out on cellular and I'm paying and because
it's difficult to judge plans. I've had to do a delta between two iPhone
plans. So it roughly works out to a difference of $23 per month to get an
extra two gigabytes of download. And that works out at $11.50 per gig per
month. So that's, you know, compared to 20 cents, that is a heck of a lot more
money. That's massive. So the thing is that with streaming, if I'm on a mobile
device, streaming simply makes no sense at all.
Whereas if I'm in a house, that's the only time I could even consider streaming.
And even so, ADSL 1's bandwidth restricts me to what I can actually feasibly
stream. Because otherwise, I mean, I've hit stream on a HD because the trailers on the
Apple TV, you know, they stream.
So you click on the HD trailer.
It's like, oh, no, I clicked on the HD.
And so it'll sit there buffering for like 15 minutes.
And then you'll start seeing the first 20 seconds, maybe the trailer, 30 seconds.
And it'll stop and buffer for another 15 minutes.
It's ridiculous. So, you know, those trailers are high bandwidth.
Is it? Oh, sure.
1080p. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. That's why you click on the SD version.
You know, you have to you have to buffer for five minutes.
It's terrible. It's just it's terrible.
Well, I'll tell you.
Yeah. North America.
- Yeah, well, I'll tell you what, believe it or not,
dial-up is still a thing here.
- Oh, yeah, same.
- And just maybe five years ago, I had a rough patch,
I had to move back home for a few months,
and my mom still had dial-up internet, like 56K.
- Ooh, rustic.
- So, yeah, very rustic.
- I love it.
- And even then, you know, just trying to load a webpage
was almost impossible.
- God, these days, yeah.
everything assumes you've got decent bandwidth.
So much for I've got highly compressed JPEGs on my website
and they're no bigger than 300 by 300 to save you, you know,
page load time, right?
No.
Well, this is also an issue we still deal with at Tidbits.
And because we have a lot of readers in Australia,
New Zealand, and in the rural United States.
And so for that reason, we do heavily compress our images
in the email edition, because we want to try to keep the size down.
And whenever we're talking about downloads,
we always try somewhere to mention how big the download is
because for a surprising amount of people,
that is still an issue.
- Yeah, well, on behalf of everyone
who's on limited bandwidth, thank you.
(laughs)
That's what I'm talking about.
People thinking about that because yeah, you're right.
People still are in that situation.
So, the thing is, of course,
the numbers that I just quoted before,
the whole 20 cents a gig a month for the landline
and 1150 a gig a month for the cellular.
Yeah, that's, you know, Australian figures.
I don't expect you to pull numbers
off the top of your head,
but I'm imagining that the,
based on my understanding anyway in North America,
that the quotas, particularly when you're out and about
on 4G, let's say, are a little bit more generous
than what I have to pay.
Would that be accurate?
- Let's see, 4G, you know, I have to confess,
I let my wife pay the Verizon bill, so.
- Oh yeah, that's fine.
- I don't have to look at,
but I think we pay something like 120 bucks a month
for both of us, and it's a plan.
We have unlimited text, unlimited voice,
and then the data, I think we share like two gigs
between the two of us now.
And it used to be four, and we dropped down to two
because I hardly leave the house anymore,
and she has wifi at her work.
- Oh, no, I'm sorry.
That was for four gigs, four gigs a month.
And so it's cheaper now.
I don't know by how much, but it's...
- Probably sounds like, based on those figures,
maybe it's about half what I'm paying,
but the sounds are roughly about half, let's say.
- Yeah, yeah. - Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I do know that on the landline side,
you guys are a heck of a lot better off,
'cause you said you, I think you said you had Comcast.
Is that right?
- Yeah, we have Comcast,
like much of the continental United States.
- Right. So, I mean, that's a lot cheaper
than what I'm shelling out for.
And I think you've, you said you had a much higher,
I mean, I've only got, I've got two, I say only 200 gig.
Thanks to my bandwidth, I'll never hit that.
But, you know, in your case,
you were saying you had a bit more than that, I think?
- Yeah, 300.
So, but I go over it all the time
because I get something like 60 megabits down on a good day.
- Oh my God.
- Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
You know, not to brag, but it's,
when it works consistently, sometimes,
Some days it doesn't, usually does.
But for the most part, it goes anywhere from 30 to 60.
But I just got luck of the draw on that.
'Cause I could probably move two houses down
and get like 20 down at best.
And even before I bought my own modem
and my own new router,
we had something like 20 megabits down.
Like just buying our own modem
increased the speed by that much.
Wow, okay.
Yeah.
So that's a tip for you guys out there if you have crappy at home broadband, buy your
own cable modem, get a Motorola, you will thank me later.
So yeah, it's extremely variable in the United States.
You know, or if you get like – this is so frustrating.
We have a local telephone company and they think they're very much a telephone company.
They don't quite understand that they are a telecommunications company.
And they got several million dollars from the federal government to put in fiber.
And they did, except their fiber, A, you have to have a landline before they even talk to
you about the fiber plan.
And B, it's ridiculously expensive.
It's something like 100 bucks a month for like six megabytes down.
This is supposed to be fiber.
It's fiber, but it's like DSL speed and except just more expensive.
The mind boggles.
That's terrible.
That's criminal.
Yeah, yeah, it should be.
So, you know, for us, you know, as much as I hate Comcast, it really is just better or
best only option around here.
Okay, well, fair enough.
Yeah, it is.
It is interesting.
And it's the sort of thing that as a geek, it makes me want to move, but, you know, to
a better house like, oh, we would have got this house down.
it's just this one doesn't have 60 Meg down.
And your wife's looking at you shaking her head thinking, "What?"
But the pool, the pool out the back.
Well, you don't know what you're going to get, right?
Because the wiring is so crappy and it's so hit or miss.
Because the technologies they're using to deliver internet
were not built with internet in mind.
They were built like back,
they put this stuff down in the '70s and '80s.
It's coaxial cable meant for a SD TV signal
or it's copper wiring meant for telephone calls.
The hardware on the network end at the residential level
has just not caught up with where it should be.
Moore's law does not apply there.
No, definitely not.
It's more like wire it up, put it in the ground
and then forget about it for a hundred years.
But, okay, cool.
So bottom line though is that in reality,
wired internet is always gonna be cheaper
than wireless internet,
which means that if you're gonna be streaming,
the most likely application is streaming
when you are within range of wifi
or whether you're on a device that's connected to
an ether network and a local intranet within your house
that is going to get you onto the internet
via a landline solution.
'Cause that's the only way to economically really justify it.
So, bottom line is that if I had to sort of summarise
the way I see it is that downloading is the more economical solution,
but it comes with a lot of overhead with managing your own stuff.
And I think that as a supplement, streaming can be really handy to have
for those occasions where you want access to something that you don't
you don't know you'll need. And I've heard some people
will use streaming as a discovery service. So, it's like, oh, I want to-
Let's try a bit of music from this artist I've never heard of because it's-
There's low cost of entry. So, you can listen to whole songs.
And then if you like it, you could always go and buy their album, you know,
through Amazon or through iTunes or Google Music or whatever.
You know, whereas doing that the other way, I mean, iTunes, I think, what,
They had 30-second, 60-second snippets out of the songs, I think, extracts.
I think it's 90 seconds now.
But the point is that, you know, you can't listen to it over and over and decide, oh, yeah, I really like that.
I know I don't. It's not really designed for that.
It's designed for, I heard this tune in the shopping mall.
I'm not sure what it is. I'll go listen to this excerpt from iTunes.
Oh, yeah, that's it. And I'll buy it.
It's not really good for discovery, whereas the streaming is great for that.
And with Netflix and stuff, if you're the sort of person that watches a movie
and you don't ever want to watch it again, you're not like, you're not a movie hoarder.
So, you know, I'm unfortunately, I'm a movie hoarder.
I've got a bunch of movies in there that maybe I've only watched once
and I may never watch again, but they're there just in case I want to watch them again.
Anyway, I mean, that's sort of attitude.
You know, like I said, I'm a digital hoarder.
We've talked about this before.
I have on a previous episode, so I'll let that go.
But the point is that I think that downloading still is the better option
It's just that streaming can be a supplement to that and it can be a very handy supplement to that
Well, I see it as almost the opposite
I guess it just depends on your mindset, you know
Cuz I like that freedom of choice that you that you have with streaming that you know
Yeah, you know I get Netflix
It's something I'm still getting used to because like we have this problem
I think a lot of people, we're roughly 30-ish,
I think a lot of people of our generation
have this problem where they got Netflix
and they spend more time looking through everything
than actually watching stuff.
- Yeah.
- And that's something we've gotten better at,
but it's still a problem.
Meanwhile, I have a brother who's half my age
and he grew up with this stuff.
And we grew up in the age of Blockbuster
and the movie rental store where you get to pick one movie,
you pick one movie.
- Yep.
You look over everything, you choose carefully.
You read the back of the box,
you read if there's a review on there,
see how many thumbs up it got.
Very carefully choose your movie.
But my brother who grew up on streaming,
he just starts watching a movie.
If it sucks, he just turns off, watches something else.
He doesn't even think twice about it.
And that's really the smart way to deal with
an all you can eat buffet, right?
You get a little bit of everything.
If you don't like it, you just don't eat it.
But for me, I much prefer streaming if it's available.
But I think a lot of that psychology has to depend
on your own network limitations.
Like if I were in your shoes and I was still on
a one megabit connection, yeah, I would hate streaming.
'Cause it's terrible.
I feel terrible for you 'cause when you have
that slow of a connection, it just isn't tenable.
And it's something I almost,
it's a luxury I almost take for granted nowadays.
I can just post something on the internet and it just, most of the time it just works
flawlessly and just plays instantly and looks nice.
Although even then, like HBO Go, you hear all this stuff about it, but it's not that
great of a service.
Like the quality degrades a lot.
You can just tell it's one of those things they don't put a lot of resources into.
And so that's another frustration.
But still, the alternative here in the States is I would have to rent a more expensive cable
box, you know, and even then, the quality of cable TV here,
even though, you know, you have to pay extra for HD. And even
when you do, it still doesn't look great, because they compress
the signal so much. So really, even with spotty quality that
streaming sometimes can provide, it still looks better than what
the cable company provides over, you know, their own boxes, you
know, the 1980s, boxy technology that they they've over
compressed. Yeah, absolutely. And I hear what you're saying. And I guess that my world view is on this issue is heavily
tainted by the accessibility of streamed media. But what I find frustrating about this is that by the time the rest of
the world catches up, then we will be left behind again. Because let's assume that they then give us, that I get in the
next you know they're worrying out a thing in Australia called the National
Broadband Network or the NBN for short and it's you know fiber to close to
your home and then copper the last you know last mile or whatever but the idea
is that you know you can probably get a fiber all the way to your home gonna
cost you more but that's gonna have decent download rates by then we'll be
streaming 4k you know like in North America because the bandwidths are
already that far ahead and it'll be streamed 4k and then after that it'll be
God, no, 8K, 16K, 32K, God knows how many K.
You know, it won't be seven speakers,
it'll be 700 speakers and, you know,
it's not gonna be the same unless the whole room's got shakers under the floor.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, the way it's going,
I just have this rather pessimistic view that
we'll always be a little bit behind.
The problem with streaming is that
it almost kills itself.
The more people that do it
and the more the technology pushes forward,
it then restricts the number of people that have access to it because of the congestion,
because of the bandwidth requirements. It's sort of, yeah. But you know what? I'm not sure we're
ever going to resolve this. It depends, right? Doesn't it? There's too many variables.
I think how it's going to work in the United States is that I just, cable companies put these
bandwidth caps there for a reason. And the specific reason was because they want to keep the
streaming thing from becoming any bigger than it is. So I mean, I think you're right. And ultimately,
it will kill itself because the cable companies hold all the cards in the United States.
Yeah, I mean, they own Congress, you know, this, this is unrelated, but this sort of unrelated,
but the, you know, they're pushing through this BS net neutrality regulation, that's really
probably going to, you know, totally commercialize the internet in a whole new way and in the cable
companies favor and it's going to pass no matter how many people complain just because we have a
cable company lobbyist in charge of the the Federal Communications Commission here in the United
States. That's not good. Yeah, no, and that's sort of the frightening thing is that the, you know,
the handful of companies that own the pipes really are going to control the internet. So
I think really the only hope, and this is so cynical but I think it's going to be accurate,
is I think the only hope, at least here in the United States, are deep-pocketed companies
like Apple who can negotiate with these companies.
For instance, Comcast, back when they were throttling Netflix, you didn't notice that
if you're on the Apple TV because Apple has a special deal with Netflix where they have
their own stream for the Apple TV.
was one that Comcast just didn't mess with. So you know, you try to watch something on
the PS on a PlayStation three, and it would, you know, take a few minutes for it to kick
in and it kept getting fuzzy, and all this stuff and never had that problem, the Apple
TV. And, you know, the rumor is now is that Apple is building some CDNs and it's talking
with you know, it's in negotiations with Comcast for something to do with Apple TV. And so
I, unfortunately, I think it's probably going to be, you know, for the future streaming,
it's going to be, at least in the United States,
the best option is we're going to have to, you know,
shack up the company like Apple,
who has the deep pockets and the drive
and the negotiating skill to get around these things.
And it's so depressing.
- Yeah, it is depressing, isn't it?
I mean, it sounds like,
I don't want to turn into a discussion about net neutrality,
but we do follow this, you know,
a lot of people over here are following it
with a lot of interest because it has wide ramifications.
It's the sort of thing that, yeah, it's disturbing.
But in any case, I think that the ultimate answer
to downloaded versus streamed is that
if you can get away with streaming everything
and you wanna take that weight off your shoulders,
then by all means stream it.
But I think that the issues of trust and ownership
are ones I may never get over,
even if I do get extra bandwidth.
And that's a personal choice,
but you know, that everyone's gonna draw the line
in a different place, but I still stand by.
I do believe that from an efficiency point of view,
and I get that's the engineer in me that just won't die.
That is from an efficiency point of view,
downloading is a better option,
but you are taking on a lot more mucking around
and time and effort that you otherwise wouldn't have to,
and you lose a lot of spontaneity.
So perhaps the ultimate answer as always is a bit of both,
but in the end, I don't think it's an,
I don't think any one person can get any one answer.
And so maybe that's where we have to leave that discussion,
but yeah, anyway.
- There are some outliers, like for instance,
this is something Bradley Chambers and I talk about
on Twitter all the time, Marvel Unlimited,
it costs like 70 bucks for a year,
when a typical issue of a comic book costs like $4.
So, very quickly, it doesn't take very long
to completely pay off that subscription.
But of course, that's an outlier,
that's not what most people are streaming.
but yeah, it depends on the media.
It depends on, it depends on the price.
I guess it really depends on the price
of acquiring that media and storing it, right?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So the one other thing I just wanted to quickly touch
on something that you wanted to talk about,
I think briefly at the beginning as well,
was streaming within the house.
And I suppose there's two ways of doing it.
And the first way is Bluetooth and the second way is wifi.
And I guess the funny thing is that I realized technically
it's streaming.
Bluetooth is kind of like a point to point link,
which it's sort of, it's more of like a virtual digital
sort of a tether than it is sort of streaming.
I say streaming is like the,
I'm sending packets over a network and that's what wifi is.
Whereas Bluetooth isn't quite so much.
It's sort of like a point to point
as opposed to a point to multipoint.
But you know, I guess I'm maybe I'm splitting hairs there.
I probably am actually, I think I am splitting hairs.
but irrespective, I gotta have a rant
about what I hate about Bluetooth is that,
the issues that I've had with certain Bluetooth speakers
in the house when I'm trying to get my iPhone
to play through them is 'cause it can only do one at a time,
you connect one, it boots the other one off.
And then some of them will remember one device
as a priority, other ones will remember
the last connected device as priority.
And every SAM speaker seems to be different.
So like we've got Bluetooth in the car
And it behaves differently to the Bluetooth in the speakers in the kitchen.
So, you know, it's crazy, you know, and it's not a very standard standard.
No, it's not. And it's just it's insane.
But it does work once it's connected.
It works really well. It's quite reliable.
And, you know, it's I don't have any complaints.
It works pretty well.
But one of the things that I did try a while ago, way back when it was first an option
was Airplay to audio to a set of speakers
through an old Airport Express that I had,
which is the old power brick style,
like a power brick on steroids style, the huge ones.
And I just plugged that in through a 3.5 mil jack
into the back of some speakers.
And it worked reasonably well,
but the problem was that I still had an old wifi router
that wasn't even an N, it was an ABG, I think.
And it wasn't an Apple one.
Hang on, does that make?
Yeah, that's right.
I'm trying to get my chronology right.
Yes, it was.
And since then I've upgraded to a time capsule,
which is dual band N.
And I now use the Airport Express as a secondary network.
So I try and keep the, which is an N network,
but I keep it off the rest.
And it's for all the other miscellaneous non N devices,
if you know what I mean.
So I've got the slow network and I've got the fast network.
And the reason is because of the streaming.
Because I've gone beyond the audio
and I'm now onto, I've got three Apple TVs in the house.
I got two 720p ones and I got one 1080 one.
- That's impressive.
I wrote a book on Apple TV and I only have two.
- Oh, okay, cool.
Yeah, well, I mean, oh, you know what?
I know I stand corrected one 720 and two 1080 ones.
Anyhow, irrespective, the point is that I found
that recently, 'cause we've got two MacBook Airs
in the house and they were connecting over wifi.
And even on the dual band N,
we were having issues with the streaming
because it was just too much bandwidth
because we were streaming from the laptop
connected to the hard drives that had the library on it
to an Apple TV, whilst another laptop was also going
on the same network as well as the other Apple TVs
and it was just choking.
And this is dual band N and it was choking.
Mind you, that was 1080p video.
So the whole streaming thing seems to work well in theory
but you need to make sure you keep your wifi clean.
If you go to AC, I suppose,
but I don't think the current Apple TV support AC,
Correct me if I'm wrong. No, they don't. Yeah, probably your best option that case is
is Ethernet. Yes, that's what I did do. Yeah. You know, if you have that option, not everyone
does. Well, no, no. I put my MacBook Airs onto Ethernet. I bought a Gigabit.
It was, yeah, eBay.
It's some cheap brand from some part of Asia.
I don't care because I love this thing.
It's like this three USB port, three USB three port.
Oh my God, that's a tongue twister.
USB three, three ports of that,
plus a gigabit ethernet port.
So I've got that plugged in
and it's taken all that traffic off the wifi
and it leaves the wifi free for streaming
out to the Apple TVs and it works beautifully.
So that's what I've done anyway.
- Yeah, well, my problem is at the desk
because I don't have any sort of external speakers.
I have my MacBook Pro and it's on a laptop stand
that angles the speakers in such a way
that they sound pretty good.
I'm not an audiophile.
I used to, back in my PC gaming days,
I had an entire home theater receiver
on this giant desk that I had
and I had home theater speakers right there on my desk
It was connected to the PC via optical Toslink.
And so that, yeah, it was pretty awesome.
Yeah, yeah.
But I also had a ridiculously big desk.
Like, I mean, it was like 12 feet long.
So nowadays I only have about four feet on my desk.
So, you know, I don't bother with the speakers.
But the problem I have,
most of what I listen to is podcasts anyway.
So it's, you know, audio fidelity isn't that big of an issue.
And if, you know, I'm listening to music and I want to, you know, really hear it well,
I have a pair of Sony earphones, yeah, headphones that I can put on and they sound pretty good.
But the problem I have is that there are so many apps nowadays, audio apps,
that are only available for iPhone or the better versions are only on iPhone.
Like Beats Music, they have a, I'm guessing that soon they will have some sort
Mac native client, hopefully, you know, you spend $3 billion in something. Yeah, yeah,
you know, we hope but the Yeah, the, the the web client is terrible. One, it runs on flash,
and two, it's missing a lot of features, no keyboard shortcuts, etc. You know, so if I want
to listen to anything on beats, I have to do it from my iPhone or iPad. And also, there's a number
of interesting podcast apps that I'm trying out and I can't play those on the Mac very
easily and so, and of course the iPhone speakers are terrible in every way, but my Sony cans
don't, the plug on isn't great so it's not great to plug into the iPhone, plus I still
want to hear notifications and things on my Mac and then, so I'm just, an issue I'm just
struggling with. One thing I tried, I tried Airfoil, which is a neat app by Rogue Amoeba,
they have all these great audio apps. They have a utility that comes with Airfoil called
Airfoil Speakers, which turns your Mac ostensibly into an Airplay receiver. You would think
that would be the solution, but the problem is, A, there is a 10 second delay on Airplay,
which is annoying, but then B, it's not terribly reliable. Sometimes you can Airplay to your
Mac, sometimes you can't, you have to restart it, you know, restart, Airflow speakers.
So I, you know, I'm struggling with this thing.
And I thought about, I thought about having a, just a Bluetooth speaker on my desk, right?
And then I'm like, Oh, I connect my iPhone and my Mac to it.
But you know, as you said, you can only have one paired to it at times.
So that's not really a great solution either.
And so I looked into, you know, AirPlay speakers.
And in theory, that would be great, but the problem is, you know, it's hard to find an
AirPlay speaker for less than $300 to $400 that is reliable.
And all the, you know, there was one, I think Extreme Mac makes it, it doesn't have a battery,
so it's perfect for a desk, it just plugs in, and it's like $80.
But the reviews keep saying, "Eh, sometimes you connect to it, sometimes you can't."
I'm like, "Well, that doesn't work.
I need something that works every time."
I'm almost at the point, I'm thinking about just buying another Airport Express and plugging
it under my desk so I can have a reliable AirPlay device I can plug speakers into.
But it's such an annoying problem.
Everything's going wireless, but the wireless isn't quite there yet.
For instance, my wife, I just got her an iPhone 5C for her birthday a while back.
She had a 30-pin speaker dock in the bathroom and she likes to listen to music while she's
in the shower and her 5C didn't work with it anymore.
We got her a Bluetooth adapter for that but only her phone can connect to it.
I can't connect my phone to it now.
Yeah.
I'm with you.
I understand exactly what you mean.
It's just I honestly think your final conclusion regarding your particular issue is the best
way to go for the time being and until the software catches up.
And, you know, there's a school of thought that says if it's a speaker or a screen, I should be able to
stream to it.
And I honestly think that that is the right attitude, but it's just not there yet.
I'm not sure this because there was just so much at WWDC, whether or not
the whole continuity thing will also provide that.
I don't know enough about that yet.
I'll look into it.
But unfortunately for the time being,
what would work would be, yeah,
just getting another Airport Express.
And honestly, getting a cheap pair of speakers,
it's still reasonably good quality.
You don't have to spend a lot on it.
It'd probably end up costing you half
what a reasonable AirPlay speaker
with all integrated would cost you.
- Yeah.
- So, you know, it just take a little bit more space
on your desk and, you know, a couple extra cables,
but you know, so maybe it's not as minimalist as you might like,
but you know, how long was your desk again?
Or did you keep that desk?
No, no, no.
That's elsewhere.
Now, the one I have now, it's a custom made one.
It's about four feet long, three feet wide.
It's covered with crap already because I have like on my Apple TV
testing stuff on my desk.
So I have like converter boxes and HDMI splitters and all these various things.
Oh, dear. Sounds a lot like my desk.
That's cool. Put up a shelf. There you go. That's your solution. Hang it from the ceiling. That could work.
Oh yeah. There's an idea.
Okay. Well, I think we might wrap it up at that point. I think we've covered it.
Unless there's anything else you'd like to add just quickly.
Nah. I think we've streamed everything.
We have. We've streamed the episode. There you go.
So, if you want to talk more about this, you can reach me on Twitter @JohnChichy
and check out my writing at TexasOcean.com.
If you'd like to send any feedback, please use the feedback form on the website and that's
where you'll also find the show notes for the episode under Podcasts Pragmatic.
You can follow Pragmatic Show on Twitter to see show announcements and other related materials.
I'd also like to thank my special guest host Josh Sinters and what's the best way for people
to get in touch with you Josh?
Josh Sinters I'm on Twitter @JSinters, J-S-I-N-T-E-R-S.
You can also find me on tidbits.com or joshcenters.com.
And my book, Take Control of Apple TV is at takecontrolbooks.com.
Awesome.
Fantastic.
I'd also like to personally thank Wet Frog Studios for sponsoring Pragmatic.
If you're looking to add some curb appeal to your product or company, remember to specifically
visit this URL, wetfrogstudios.com/pragmatic to get a great result at half the normal price.
And yeah, that's it.
Thanks for listening, everyone.
And thanks again, Josh.
Thank you, John.
John, thanks for having me. Anytime.
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