• by Sean , March 28, 2007

I'm a big fan of video. I fully surrendered years ago to the fact that I'm a huge walking case of ADD -- just like the rest of my generation. It's much easier to watch something than to actually use more than 6% of our brain interpreting sequential strings of words into ideas.

And now video has made its way to our cell phones. Great! It's so convenient to have the power of live news and entertainment on our belt clip.

But I don't have the patience. First of all, cell phone video works nowhere near as well as you see it portrayed in commercials. It's jittery. It's slow-loading. Service reception isn't strong enough ... unless you're standing in the middle of the Financial District of Manhattan on a clear day. And in most cases, quality is so poor that one would be hard pressed to discern whether the "latest news update" they're watching on their 1.5 inch screen is anchored by Shepherd Smith or the late Sony Bono.

It's also ad-supported ... meaning before I wait eagerly to watch a clip from, say, CBS Evening News (they just recently launched a mobile service), I get to wait for a 15-second advertisement to connect, buffer, play, stall once ... re-buffer, continue playing with bad pixelation ... and THEN wait for another request to be sent for the ACTUAL content I wish to view, and wait for all of this to happen again.

OK, I know I'm picky. To get what I have visualized in my mind, I'd be walking around with about 34 miles of 2 inch triax cable trailing behind me. Hmm ... now that I mention that, think I could get a good deal on some bulk triax?