Archives for June 2015

I noticed that as the years go by and technology is becoming more and more streamlined and convenient for everyone to access, heavy downloading is slowly starting to become a thing of the past. Many people probably don’t notice this yet because all they see in stream services that’s readily available nowadays is all good things.

My opinion about this is that I’m still hesitant with entrusting my content on a cloud (regardless of how companies ensure us customers that our data will be 100% safe and secured) or putting my backup online. I would rather very much download, hoard on media, keep it in external storage devices offline than have it online. I’m sure it won’t be forever that I can manage to be online, too. So there’s that.

There’s also the pressing concern w/ external devices that they break and/or become corrupted as the years go by. In my experience it all depends how well you take care of your things. It’s been more than 5 years and they’re still functional and not even once that any of them got infected by a virus, neither have I dropped them. *knock on wood*

If streaming works very well for you and makes your life a whole lot easier, then good for you. I guess I’m just too paranoid about content seeping elsewhere once it’s online and that saying that goes along the lines of “anything you upload online is there forever.” Or I probably watch too much sci-fi TV series, hahaha.

Music and video streaming in this day and age

As soon as Spotify became available here locally, most if not everyone got rid of their local iTunes Library content and switched immediately to streaming their music. I almost did the same thing until I came to a couple of instances where I couldn’t find any songs or albums available for streaming for some particular local artists and even for international musicians.

The way Spotify works, from what I observed is that they’ll definitely have the discography of almost all mainstream artists. The only exceptions would be the few who especially had their music be restricted to being offered to be streamed online for free (I know who you are thinking, haha!). About that.. I don’t really care as I’m not a fan of her. 😛 And there are other ways of getting music for free.

Anyway, after free music streaming comes free TV/movie media streaming. Services like Netflix and hulu are popular for this purpose. Unfortunately that one is not available here yet.. though people have found alternatives or workarounds to making it work in countries where Netflix is restricted.

In the Philippines, recently the online media streaming website iflix has been launched and the people who use it are growing day by day. Personally I haven’t tried it and I’m more hesitant about it. I would most probably only give their service a shot (and this is an if and only if situation) if they have local media content dating back to the early 1950s. Philippine shows and movies. Basically, shows that cannot be found anywhere else online.

At its current state, I assume it has about the same content as Netflix and most of it are probably faster to watch if I just get it elsewhere where HD is an option. Given the slow internet in this country, livestreaming IMO is not an option and I would rather wait for a video finish downloading than stream it live and have it lag and waste time.

Which do you prefer for your music and shows: Downloading or livestream?