I guess I should really start to reconsider my islate tag now, especially in light of all the slates now being unified under iOS. But that is some admin for me and not really the topic of the post today. The idea that I want to get out there is about the iPad and how, over the last few months, it has really changed the way that my family and I look at media within the house, especially since the 4.2 update and the addition of Air Play.
For the last several months, my wife and I have been talking about what we use and don’t use around the house. One of them certainly seems to be all the extra channels on cable. Yeah, maybe once a month we’ll watch hockey or I’ll have the news on in the morning, but outside of that, all we watch is Treehouse (a children’s channel). That combined with the fact that we have the majority of the other content that we watch on some manner of media or another, suggests that we could cut broadcast out and not really notice that it is missing. So that is exactly what we have done for the past few weeks. The result? Nobody has noticed anything different. The biggest enabler for this seamless transition? The iPad. It is the hub for our streaming radio, and last night after finding the Global TV app and finally installing Air Play Server on my old G5, it can now also be the hub for our video consumption as well. It is still one of the things that Bug loves, and now that the sound can be put through the house speakers, I’m sure her Baby Piano melodies are only going to become that much more engaging.
iOS, and the iPad in particular, has connected the data rich environment that was once limited to the den or office to the rest of the home, and done so in a manner that the entire family can access. Granted, this is all still at the consumption side of the spectrum when it comes to working with computers and devices. But what it does do (or at least suggest) for my daughter, is that data and connectivity can be connected to the greater environment. Being 1, she doesn’t appreciate that, but by the time she’s old enough to see how the entire system is working, hopefully she won’t have to as she will have had truly grown up with an Internet of Things with the iPad (or similar device) being the enabling gateway. And before you leap from your desk, or bed or wherever you are, remember that early computing started as a predominantly consumption driven paradigm.
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