Low Definition TV

I had something of an Alan Partridge moment when I decided to try to watch the Oscars. As you may recall, my capacity for receiving video footage that is not packetized is distinctly limited. It seemed like there wouldn't be any conveniently accessible webcast of the Oscar ceremony, so I needed to find a way to get live broadcast TV onto my TV set.

I've tried indoor aeriels in the past. Depending on the channel, the quality varies from poor to unwatchable, the only exception being the channel that shows Indian pop music videos in the morning and Korean news in the evening.

I noticed that there was a wire hanging outside one of my windows, which appeared to be connected to an aerial. The only problem being, this being at the opposite end of the apartment from the TV. I quickly rigged up a connection between the two, but lacked a critical piece to connect the external cable to the about 30ft of assorted coaxial cables connecting to the TV. I could make a connection by holding the two bits together, and it seemed like it might be working -- but I couldn't be sure, since the TV was in a different room around the corner.

So I carefully rigged up a mirror leaning against a footstool (yes, I own a footstool. Deal with it), so I could just about see the TV screen if I leaned down and cricked my neck while holding the two pieces of wire together. From that distance it looked like a decent enough picture.

So I went out and got the necessary connecty bit to make it a more permanent connection. And now I'm sitting here watching the ceremony, in glorious ultra-low definition -- although the picture is viewable, it's covered in snow and static. So much for HDTV -- and honestly, who really needs it? Surely no one cares that much about picture quality? So long as you can roughly see what's going one, it doesn't really matter after a while. Still, at the end of this, I'll unhook the wires (since I'll keep tripping over them otherwise), and go back to my improvised IPTV solution.