The winning streak is over. For 43 consecutive games, Notre Dame has always beaten Navy. Navy hasn’t won against us since the 1960s….. until today. The only thing I can be happy about is that – despite being thousands of miles away in a country where you can’t watch the game on any TV station – I was able to watch the game live and support the Fighting Irish.
It’s all thanks to a little bit of technology called the Slingbox.
I’ve talked about Bangladesh and their cell phone network before. Bangladesh has an EDGE network covering almost all of the entire country. And it’s this internet connection which allows me blog, upload photos to my flickr page, and upload episodes to my YouTube channel. But, this connection (when it isn’t be blocked due to government censorship) is also good enough that I can stream video from my Slingbox Pro back home in Canada. Slingbox is this little box that you can hook up to your cable or satellite TV and your home internet connection to stream your TV to anywhere you have a decent internet connection. The quality isn’t that bad as you can see from the screenshot above.
Being able to watch Notre Dame football isn’t just something I like to do as a fan. I was a student there before I came to Bangladesh and started this project. The players on the field aren’t just faces on a TV screen but are flesh and blood people I would see on campus all the time. I even got to know a few of them like David Bruton (#27). I was his TA for Intro the Sociology. I have to admit I became a bit nostalgic and homesick when I saw him.
What pisses me off though is that if I wanted to do the same thing in Canada – I couldn’t. Canada does have an EDGE network but it’s data rates and restrictions make heavy use like using a Slingbox economically prohibitive and practically impossible. In many respects, Bangladesh’s cell phone plans and pricing is more in line with the developed world. Canada, on the other hand, has pricing that is more in line with the third world. It’s actually cheaper to get a data plan in Rwanda (or here in Bangladesh) than it is with Rogers Wireless in Canada.
One more screenshot after the jump. Those fellow Fighting Irish fans who want to avoid further trauma may not to see the final screenshot.
Continue reading ‘Using a Slingbox from Bangladesh to Watch a Moment of History Live’
