::A Geek in Korea::

My wife got a call from the KT company about a service we could sign up for. This is a normal thing, as she get offers for free phones for using their service without upgrading for several years. They usually call and offer a phone if she’ll upgrade her service plan to something slightly more expensive for a few months.

This time it wasn’t about a phone. It was about a product tied into our Internet service. We have “Megapass” Internet. There has been a product roll out of “MegaTV” in Daejeon, and we got an offer for three months of free service. What’s “MegaTV“? IPTV. What the hell is that? Imagine on-demand movies in a set top box delivered via the Internet. It’s like AppleTV, except without the stupid.

When I came home from work, there was a wire from my Internet connection socket over to our television. The MegaTV box sits like a cable box, and when you fire it up it’ll show a menu. It’s not programmed with live television channels like cable, but instead has a large list of titles available for instant viewing. Choose a title, and it’ll play. The stuff is compressed. The newer the material is, the better the compression seems to be. The grainy action stuff reminds me of something slightly better than DiVX 3.0 era compression, not that great, but watchable.

There are newer titles available for a small fee, like a pay for view movie, except it’s ALWAYS available to watch. You don’t have to wait for a title to start, you just press a button and it begins. It also will remember where you stopped watching something and bookmark it for the next viewing.

While the number of foreign movies is as larger than any corner store, they have several television series too. I started watching “The Shield” a few months back, and now I can watch the series from the beginning. This alone will make it worth the low subscription fee if we keep it past the free trial offer. The Shield ran on the same channel that carried “Battlestar Galactica”. If THAT ever came available, I could watch the entire series with my wife with subtitles. That would kick tremendous ass.

Right now, both my wife and I are weary about greater access to on demand movie and television access. She said she had intended to run some errands, sat down to see if there was something she wanted to watch, and only realized the time she had wasted when I came home from work.

I got up and watched a movie this morning. Deathproof was free, and it was so bad it left me with a headache that lasted for five hours.  I had to take a nap because it hurt my brain so much. At least it was well compressed and looked better than some of the older movies I had checked out. Planet Terror is 100x better in every regard.

Then, I went and upped the ante by purchasing a Rifftrax for “Batman and Robin”. (HOLY CRAP. WHAT AM I DOING?! VOLUNTEERING TO WATCH THAT? WHY!) The MegaTV service has nearly half of the Rifftrax catalog on demand. If working out the sync issues is easy enough when watching it on the TV, this could be a regular thing for me.