07/20/2006   English German
  Edition # 62  
San Francisco, 07-20-2006

Onlinetvrecorder
Figure [1]: The German Friday TV crime show is now also airing in San Francisco.

Michael Through a service introduced in the second-to-last newsletter, named onlinetvrecorder.com, we can now also receive German television in San Francisco. So I watch the Tagesschau almost every day now, and Angelika watches her beloved Tatort.

If you plug the laptop into the TV, the picture appears on the screen in top quality, and as you can see in illustration 1, we have nicely set up our little dinner tables while watching the Friday TV crime show. Ah, that's a real treat again!

We usually only know hours of commercial-free television from our pay channel HBO. However, with the shows streamed over the internet, we also watch the German commercials, which often seem completely absurd to someone who has spent almost 10 years in the USA.

What also stands out is the courage of broadcasters like 3Sat to air programs that really only interest niche audiences. How many people can actually engage with a program about Sigmund Freud? 0.1%? It's amazing that this somehow pays off. You can really see what's missing in the American television world, where every 'public' broadcaster has to operate profitably without license fees and therefore has to focus on mainstream tastes.

The service offered by onlinetvrecorder is apparently completely legal, as the receivers that capture the German TV programs are located close to the German border in Holland, and the internet servers that offer the files for download are in the relatively lawless zone of Antigua. Let's see how long it takes for the TV giants in Germany to find a way to shut down the service. Until then, we'll be watching recklessly! I've even built a kind of TiVo for onlinetvrecorder.com, using Perl, so I can enjoy watching the shows from my computer.

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