“All for this one moment”

“All for this one moment” is Lufthansa’s marketing tagline for FlyNet, their in-flight Internet service. One of the ads reads (I don’t have the exact wording right so, so I paraphrase) “Read your email or cheer about the goal in the 92th minute”. Now… that with the goal is of course an issue, because how could you possibly see it? Sure, there are live text tickers on news sites and there is Internet radio, but that’s all lame, right? So I bought myself a PC with some big disks, two TV capture cards, upped my DSL connection at home to 3072/512KBps, and got myself a copy of SnapStream’s Beyond TV. Outcome: Live TV from Germany, football included, streamed from my home PC to my notebook to anywhere I go – given that I get at least a 96 KBps link. The maximum feed I can get out of this with a good connection to home is about 496 KBps, which gives me near VHS picture and sound quality.

The screenshot is taken in the Lufthansa lounge at Munich airport. Connection is via Vodafone’s WLAN. Greece playing Japan in the Confederation Cup right now. (Of course they’ve got that here on the regular TV screens, but it seemed like a good moment to show that).