Just got an HD Homerun (and cable TV) at home so I can play with multicast and actually test some toys I'm working on. (The Homerun is a pretty neat device: it can tune up to 3 digital cable TV channels and rebroadcast them over ethernet using IP multicast. VLC can view them.) So I've been watching CNN in the background to see what happens. Things I learned today:

1) My home 802.11n network can just barely manage tolerable 13 Mbit/sec without dying completely. It's still glitchy; like watching digital satellite TV in the rain. Lower-bandwidth channels work fine. Direct ethernet connection is (unsurprisingly) flawless. It'll be interesting to try MoCA later.

2) CNN looks very professional but insults my intelligence repeatedly. I guess that's not such an amazing discovery.

3) New York is apparently the "third-ranked park city" in America. I was going to make a snarky comment that sure, it has a lot of parks, if you like looking at nature through spiked iron fences. But I guess what they meant by "third-ranked park city" is "city with third-ranked city park", ie. central park, which I guess is indeed an exception to the nature-behind-iron-fences rule. Thank you, CNN.

Anyway, IP multicast. Kinda fun, it turns out. But TV: still stupid. Overall I guess it's a wash.