Seamed integration
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Working for a software company, particularly in the industry I'm in (financial services), I quite often hear the words 'seamless' and 'integration' (often together) batted around. Increasingly I find myself flinching at the very mention of the phrase. So few of the software tools I use these days are as seamlessly integrated as they actually make out, and unfortunately (as yet) our own tools fall into that category.
The same is often true of things in the real world too. For example, my mother's husband recently purchased yet another box to sit underneath the television. His goal was to get access to just a handful more channels via either freesat or Freeview. It works to some extent, but frankly I remain unconvinced of the practicalities. Both boxes receive a significant proportion of the same content, with just a handful of channels separating them, and both suffer similar ailments depending on the severity of the weather.
Aside from the fact that I don't really watch television much beyond the early evening news when I come in from work, I don't really see the point of having so many extra channels. My mother's husband doesn't even watch the vast majority of them, and he's an addicted channel hopper (to the point of annoyance). And yet, we now have various devices in our living room capable of receiving lots of things nobody in the household would ever normally watch unless we were being paid to do so.
But we could still go even further. For a ridiculously high monthly fee—and the addition of another box—we could sign up to one of the two main subscription television services. That's right: one more box to cram under the television and a subscription to even more channels that we definitely wouldn't watch. And yet across the country—even across the globe—millions of people are doing just that. Why?!
Surely in today's modern age such things must already be out of date. We have the Internet, which is capable of connecting us virtually anywhere we are in the planet to anything else that happens to be jacked in to whatever we want to connect to. And yet we quite happily spend our hard earned money on expensive televisions, only to further augment them with boxes we don't understand that pull down channels we don't want… for a fee!
There must be a better way. Content providers, such as Sky and Virgin Media, must be laughing at our willingness to pour money into their accounts for something even the most avid watcher is probably going to use to less than 1% of its potential.
In today's modern age, it baffles me that we can't yet plug our televisions direct into the Internet and select exactly what we want to watch exactly when we want to watch it and pay just 1% of what we would pay the current providers to get 100% of our money's worth.
But no. We have the technology and the means, but in terms of Internet delivered content, we're still living in the YouTube generation. I can't wait to grow out of it. And I don't really watch television.