This is Technology Bytes, episode 97 for January 12th, 2025.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
Today, I’m going to talk about the VCR.
Now you may think that’s a technology that has long passed us by or that we have long passed by.
And I think you’re absolutely right.
And it’s funny that we still call what we do today, a VCR recording.
I actually had to look it up.
It, it stands for video cassette recorder.
So it’s actually the device that does the recording and playback on what was previously a VHS tape, or maybe even a DVD while that might’ve had a different acronym, I don’t know.
But the reality is, or I don’t know why I’m stuck on that word today.
Anyway, the, the fact that we still use it is, it’s kind of like the Kleenex.
It’s kind of like those words that, um, are companies or, or idea, but everybody uses them as a global way to reference a given item.
But the funny thing is, is that in today’s world, we really do all of that recording digitally, at least I do.
And, um, I think about times past when, even as I think about it, it’s not VCR.
It was a recording on a hard drive on the DirecTV system.
And that was one of the first times that I ever used it in a more digital format.
And, you know, I often said it was a marriage saver because I could record sports and then watch them whenever I wanted to.
And that helped because my wife would say, well, I want to do this or we need to do that or whatever.
And knowing that there’s a game on in times past, I would have said, I really want to watch this game.
Is there any way we can, you know, do something different time-wise, whatever.
And then I got to the hard drive recording on DirecTV system and that conversation became very different.
But today in this modern world, most of our content is streamed to us.
And although it feels very much the same as the cable delivery of days past, it is very different and the reality is, oh my goodness.
And the fact is that the digital recordings that we do now are available to us all over the place because they are done in the cloud.
And so if I record something and set it up at home to do so, I most often have access to that through my iPad or through my phone or, you know, other ways to watch because it is saved in the cloud.
Um, I use YouTube TV right now for my, um, TV service.
And so that’s the way that works.
And we use it for all kinds of things.
When it first came out, I almost use it entirely for sports.
And then my wife started using it for her shows and other types of entertainment.
And that’s when we made the leap to what we call time shift TV watching where everyone used to sit down and watch Seinfeld at this date on this day of the week and this given time, or maybe friends or other shows like that.
Now we time shift our TV watching.
We record things.
It doesn’t matter what time it comes on.
It doesn’t matter what’s going on.
We watch it on our timeframe.
And then when we’re out with friends or in the public or, you know, other situations, we say, Hey, don’t tell us don’t spoil it because we haven’t watched it yet.
And so that’s really become a way different thing to talk about it as well.
But it is cool that we have that ability and so much of it cost us basically nothing, although obviously we’re paying, you know, what I feel is way too much for our television service as it were.
But we have this ability to watch when we want to watch, and it is a very cool technology.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytesatmerigfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes Microcast, I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
