RUSH: Yeah, I’m doing that myself. (interruption) No, because I can. It’s cool. I’m doing it ’cause I can. (interruption) No, no, no, no. I’m doing it because I can. I just think it’s cool to be able to do it. We’re being asked here, ladies and gentlemen, there was a story in USA Today, maybe yesterday, the day before, about how cable television is imperiled because people are now getting televisions equipped, the ability to watch Internet programming without having to have a satellite dish, without having to have cable or what have you, things like Apple TV and whatever others. I hooked that up, a couple rooms in my house just to try it and to me, it’s cool. You download, buy TV shows or movies on iTunes, and watch it on your big screen. (interruption) Well, it’s 720H — it’s not 1080i or 1080p. That’s the drawback. On DirecTV some movies are 1080i. iTunes is 720 and of course the bigger you blow that up the less the picture quality is and there’s no closed-captioning on 95% of it, which is a drawback for me but still it’s cool.
Apple has this thing called AirPlay. You can sit there with your iPad and you can transfer what’s on your iPad to your big screen. So you buy a TV program on iTunes, you transfer it to your iPad, then you sit there and watch it on the iPad, and then hit AirPlay and it moves it, if you got it all set up right, to your television set, and you have control over it with your iPad controls, or whatever remote system that you use. I hooked it up just because it was cool to do. I need closed-captioning, though, or else I need a speaker right next to my ear. The farther away I am from a speaker the more echo, and especially if there’s a music soundtrack I’m dead trying to hear dialogue in a television show or a movie. But if I get a speaker, and I have one, a little remote wireless Bluetooth speaker that I put on the couch right next on my left ear, and I get about 90% of the dialogue that way. If they ever get to the point where they put closed-captioning on everything, like iTunes or whatever — I guess one of the reasons they don’t is to limit download size, because that’s probably gotta add to it, but it’s still cool.
I have not stopped watching my DirecTV. It’s never gonna replace that as far as I’m concerned, but it’s still cool to do. And I’ll tell you this, you know, I watch a lot of stuff on DVD simply because of captioning. For example, there’s a show that I really like called Mad Men. Season four for Mad Men is available on iTunes, but it’s not captioned. The DVDs are not coming out ’til March 29th so some of this stuff actually ends up on iTunes, and Netflix, I’m not trying to leave any of these others out, I just use iTunes, but I have Netflix, too, but I don’t want to say anything about it. I use iTunes. But stuff is available much sooner than they put it on DVD in many cases, but the DVD has the captioning, these other shows don’t. I found one movie so far on iTunes that has captioning, and that’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, a movie which really let me down. It starts off with a great premise and then halfway through just dies. There was a John Grisham movie, started out as a book, some little kid watches a murder in the forest or in the swamps of Louisiana, and it was one of the greatest openings in mystery literature, and it figures Susan Sarandon starred in the movie, so what would you expect?
Anyway, this story in the USA Today was all about how this was gonna be the end of cable TV with more and more televisions being — now, my TV’s per se are not equipped, well, they are, ’cause it happens, but I had to do a bunch other rigmarole to make this all work. But I just find these tech advances, the consumer electronics show going on, somebody has come out with a camera, a hand-held point and shoot digital camera that has a mirror in it somehow so that when you take a picture, like if I’m gonna take a picture of you I can put myself in it right between you because there’s a mirror, so you don’t have to aim the camera at you and stick your arm out as far as it will go just take a picture. There’s a mirror in it and you end up in the picture somehow. I saw it demoed but didn’t hear the explanation of how it works. This stuff all fascinates me. Once the newness of being able to do it happens I kinda get over it and I go back to what is most complete for me, which is anything with closed-captioning. Plus, if I can get something on 1080i high definition then I’ll watch that instead of 720. But the smaller the screen it doesn’t matter. But if you got big screens, the more you blow it up the bigger it is the greater the degradation.