Sadlly, there are a few things that I wish U-verse would add to their feature list that currently doesn’t exist. A couple of them are being done by other TV services, yet some are suited perfectly to AT&T U-verse’s IPTV delivery system.

Feature Request 1

This one exists already, but U-verse doesn’t have it working on their system. I have a number of series recordings that we like to keep up with. The challenge is that in the event of a conflict, I’d like to rank the series in order of importance. So, if one of our shows that we like but we don’t have to watch would conflict with a higher priority program, the higher priority program would win. If it can’t work like that, an email notification letting me know when a conflict exists would be very helpful.

Feature Request 2

I’m not a baseball fan, at least not on TV unless it’s the last couple of games of the World Series. The other night the baseball game ended up going into extra-innings, and that caused my recording of House, MD to only record the last 15 minutes before it shut-off. We were watching TV, but just not that channel. You’d think it would be possible for the U-verse system to be aware of this overrun on time for live events and display an alert message on screen that says the scheduled recording may be impacted.

Continue reading for my last upgrade request

Feature Request 3

I’m a big fan of fantasy football. When I’m watching the Sunday games, it would be nice to have a little fantasy football ticker that would highlight what’s happening with my players. Since U-verse already integrates with a few other Yahoo! properties, I’d think this would be another easy integration.

Television entertainment delivered via the Internet provides so many options for integrating information with entertainment, or perhaps we could now call Inter-tainment.

Post from: EveryJoe

The SL80 and SL90 models blend the bezel, LCD screen, and speakers into one, solid piece of hardware. The SL90 produces a 3,000,000:1 contrast ratio — a new high water mark for LG — and the thing is freakishly thin at just 1.15 inches. It has a 240Hz refresh rate and an ambient light sensor to automatically adjust brightness. The SL80 has the same set of features but uses a flourescent backlight, which drops the contrast to 150,000:1. The SL80′s thickness is 1.8, due to that additional flourescent lighting.

The SL80 will ship later this month in 42″, 47″, and 55″ models, ranging from $1,600 to $2,800 in price. LG hasn’t committed to pricing for the SL90 yet, but promises that 42″ and 47″ models will be available in time for Christmas.

Image: LG Electronics.

Post from: EveryJoe

Hulu has been covered at a variety of angles by b5media‘s authors and on EveryJoe. I first wrote about it back in December of last year when it was in private beta release.

Hulu is now public and they’ve had some mainstream commercials about their service being aired since the SuperBowl. They’ve also recently released a stand-alone desktop application for you to get all the great content from Hulu onto your computer screen without the need for your browser to be open and screen real-estate to be lost to browser controls.

The video quality is outstanding on my laptop. I could easily watch probably hours of TV shows like this. Most of the shows have commercial interruptions but that’s fine with me. I understand that’s the price you pay for free TV.

There’s so much content available on Hulu from recent shows to old stuff like one of my favorite shows as a kid A-Team. The search function could be a little bit better about finding the actual show you’re looking for, but I understand when they try to find close matches.

Post from: EveryJoe

I got to learn that the only reason we have video games now is because the military had a lot of bored people running different boring assed computations on computers as big as an entire room. So, what do nerds do when they are bored? Well, they try to program games, that’s what. I mean, only a nerd could take one of these:

And make it into a game called Tennis for Two, in which two people get to play tennis… Like you couldn’t figure that out. Check it out:

No, serisously. This is a tennis game. Almost as good as tennis on Wii Sports, isn’t it?

And this is where the creation of video games started! Pretty sweet, right?

There are like 4 more episodes of this series that I’m definitely going to be watching, but mostly only because there are people like Ken and Roberta Williams of the old school Sierra Online clan on the documentary talking about the awesomeness which are video games. If you’re able to, I’d definitely check the rest of the series out. Not only will you get smarter, but I heard you also get better looking and that’s never a bad thing.

Post from: EveryJoe

The Discovery Channel has recently announced that they will be doing a 5 hour, prime time series called Rise of the Videogame, which will inevitably talk about… the rise of videogames. At least that’s what I’m going to assume they’ll be talking about. It’d be kind of funny to call it Rise of the Videogame if they were really talking about board games. Then it’d be Rise of the Board Game and I know what that would include. Hundreds of people falling asleep in the middle of the documentary. Because while board games, can be fun, they’re not as fun as video games.

According to this article over at Kotaku, the documentary people will be interviewing such cool people as Will Wright (Sims creator) and Ken and Roberta Williams (who founded Sierra Online – think Leisure Suit Larry and Kings Quest). There will also be more people interviewed, because only interviewing 3 people would be really boring.

The documentary will focus on the political and social aspects that shaped the way game designers developed and wrote games the way they did and they will be starting with games that started all the way back in the 70s. I’m sure we’ll be hearing a little about Communist Russia and the attempted assassination of presidents. Or I could be totally wrong. Who knows. You’ll just have to watch to find out.

The first episode of the series will be on The Discovery Channel on November 21st at 8PM eastern and will show one episode a week on Wednesdays until December 19th. I’m totally there. A documentary about video games? That’s got to be a nerd’s fantasy!

Post from: EveryJoe