Here's a hypothetical.

Suppose that you were in a situation in which you no longer had access to any of the TV channels you know and love. Instead, you'd get whatever 2 - 3 channels happened to be operational at your destination point.

Aside from the local news and assorted sports highlights (only important games would be broadcast live), what 5 - 10 shows would you most wish for to be airing when you arrive? These can be shows from the present or shows from yesteryear. Note that you'd still have whatever DVDs you wished to bring with you or could purchase, but as far as TV time goes that's it.

Thanks.





(In case anyone was wondering, for my Armada / Energon fic I was pondering what life'd be like for the humans living on Cybertron.

Given how far it is between Earth and Cybertron, I figure that simply beaming Terran television networks to the planet wouldn't really be an option. Even under a best-case scenario (a massive daisy chain of relays all devoted to airing one single thing), there'd still be some degree of time delay; best-case would be several minutes, while worst-case would be several hours.

Thus, it'd be more realistic for someone like the Armed Forces Network to set up shop on the planet and have a station or three be broadcast. Of necessity, programming would have to be kept to a bare minimum due to both time constraints and licensing requirements. In fact, a glimpse at this programming guide here will show you that it's how AFN does things to begin with.)

www.hulu.com?

Got to thinking about that, too.

Realistically, even the best internet connect speeds between Earth and another planet would be slow as snot, and so whoever was running things elsewhere would likely clamp down on bandwidth-intensive sites.

I think a better analogy to the situation would be how pre-recorded shows were distributed around the world before satellite television and the internet became globally common. Tapes would be posted in the mail from network to network.

Assuming that in your scenario faster-than-light travel is common and easy, but faster-than-light communication is expensive and difficult, that's how it'd be done.

As the old joke goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a pickup truck filled with floppies.

If I was living on Cybertron I'd just cope without TV. I mean, it's an alien planet dude. That'd be pretty awesome in and of itself. Plus there's probably Transformer datatracks or broadcasts or whatever so I'd just tune into those for the news.

Signals would be faster than spaceships. Anything current they'd want to see would be there.

. . . Unless the ships are using FTL, in which case any signals they pick up from Earth will be years/decades/centuries old and so badly distorted as to be unwatchable.


"Next, on All My Circuits. . ."

Hell, if these are the G1 Transformers, Jazz, Blaster, and Rewind probably already have pretty much every DVD ever released.

If we have FTL for ships, wouldn't we also have that capability for data storage devices? Or some other technology that would successfully propel transmissions (subspace for example)?

I dunno...it just seems to me that the transmissions would get there first in pretty much all cases.

Now if it's a matter of not being enough people there and really no need for full spectrum of choices or anything, then maybe there'd be just a limited feed, but I don't think it would be a physical limitation so much as a policy one. (Sort of like how Canada can't watch the Daily Show clips on the internet )

Thing is, the series clearly had it that space bridges and whatnot existed between the two planets, meaning that if anybody (human or Cybertronian) wanted to get from point A to point B they could just go through the hole and be there in a matter of seconds. At that rate, a person could hypothetically get their daily newspaper the day it's actually published. OTOH, the only time direct communications are shown is when it's of a military nature. One episode actually had Sally arriving on-planet at about the same time a video message she sent did.


In fact, when you think about it, that's probably how a real-life situation'd play out: the emphasis would be on actually getting troops and supplies from planet to planet with all due speed, but non-military communications would take days or even weeks unless it was an emergency situation since the priority would be on getting official messages through.

Theoretical, one could keep a space bridge open and sent a data feed through it. Could also use a smaller one to safe energy.

I'd have trouble coming up with even 5 shows these days, tbh. I barely watch broadcast TV now, and only subscribe to the most basic of packages. The few shows I want to watch, I usually just end up buying on DVD or Blu-Ray. I might watch 2 or 3 throughout the regular season, but normally I just couldn't be bothered.

It would be high-latency, but not necessarily low bandwidth. It might take a while to respond to the request for the video file, but once it started up it'd stream no problem.

This hypothetical doesn't even make sense. Your saying that we can bring whatever DVDs we want but you want to know what handful of TV shows we would rather someone else broadcast instead of bringing the DVDs with the rest of the DVDs we brought? Your talking about going to an alien planet but wondering whats on the boob tube when you get there? If you want to continue the same sedentary, shut-in lifestyle on another planet, why not save yourself the trouble of traveling and just stay at home?

"I'm going to go to a planet full of warring alien robots but instead of worrying about the the war going on there or what I may learn about an entirely alien planet, Im going to sit on my ship and watch the 6th season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and maybe some Heroes and definitely Firefly cause that spacey stuff is so cool.....read my fanfic!"

Totally agree. I doubt they'd have that much downtime on a crazy planet like Cybertron anyways. Plus, who needs TV when your life is ALREADY science fiction?

I thought that, too, but I think you'd run into issues with data corruption utilizing broadcast methods across interstellar distances. Even utilizing a tightly beamed transmission method at a distance of light minutes, I think you're going to have problems with data corruption due to interference from other objects (oops! we lost those bits because a weather satellite crossed the path of our transmission signal, or because a pulsar just happened to emit radiation on that frequency, or ...). That argues for a lot of bits dedicated to error correction, which translates into low bandwidth for data, even if the bit-wise throughput is as fast as you can pump it or faster.

The proverbial station wagon full of magnetic tapes would win out here.

OTOH, for precisely that reason, FTL travel must also be astronomically more expensive FTL communication. Any method that allows the transport of matter allows for the transportation of information, after all. What this sort of scenario describes isn't one where FTL communication is impossible, just one where the difficulties involved in FTL communication are sufficient to make it worth sending matter instead, most of the time. That is, if you're going to have to generate several trillion megawatts to pop open a spacebridge for a phone call, you might as well spend a few more and send over some people to see what's what while you're at it.

Pretty much.

Plus, you've got to figure in just what it'd take as far as equipment and personnel to simply sit there and make sure that whatever bits and pieces of data come through are coming through intact. While it might be logical to have someone somewhere trying to ensure that military or governmental communiques get from A to B in one piece, I highly doubt that (in a realistic scenario) anyone's gonna care about the schmuck who's trying to use Napster or play World o' Warcraft.

And when you consider just how many people would likely be trying to access the net at any given time for any given reason, you've got a massive load on a system that can probably not hack all that much to begin with.



Plus, you've got to figure on the prospect of having a space bridge open indefinitely for the single purpose of having folks send video, audio, and data back & forth. That'd eat up a jiveton of energy in short order, such that it'd likely be the equivalent of sending a shuttle or two through the system once or twice a day.

Instead, I'm thinking that only "urgent" items like major news broadcasts, emergency phone calls via Red Cross or another such group*, or select major events (such as the State of the Union addresses) would be worthwhile to beam "live", and even then there'd still be a degree of time delay. Everything else would be allowed to lag somewhat, and for the sake of argument I'm assuming that a 4 - 6 hour lag for TV & radio broadcasts and a several second lag for personal internet and telephone communications to be reasonable.



*If the Red Cross or another such recognized charitable organization is asked to deliver an emergency message to a soldier, such as concerning a birth or death in the family, more than a few commanders will give such messages priority over all other personal communications so as to ensure that it gets to the person with all speed.

In real life, providing entertainment to soldiers deployed overseas is a major concern for the US military and a number of other militaries. This is because soldiers who are kept entertained generally have a better degree of morale and are in better shape mentally & emotionally than those who go without. Not only that, but it's also a little bit of home; even in areas where local entertainment options are plentiful (such as Germany and Japan), individual soldiers can still get to missing what they had back home.

For the US military, we have things like the Armed Forces Network (which maintains a series of radio and television stations aimed at keeping soldiers informed and entertained), Stars & Stripes (an official newspaper), and the USO (which arranges to have entertainers and celebrities come and visit with the troops).

This is in conjunction with what assorted civilian organizations and entities to do support the troops. For example, every so often the local Borders asks people to donate books to be given to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. And at one point, there was a group that was trying to provide model kits to wounded soldiers so that they'd have something to do while recuperating.

So yes, trying to figure out the mechanics of getting media to a distant planet - even in real life - would be a great concern if anyone seriously tried to propose space colonization.

Hmm.

If you treat the spacebridge like a Stargate, SG-1 has already developed a system; the gate/bridge can carry radio signals both ways, so there can be periodic check-ins (usually done via MALP, but there's no reason you couldn't use a pre-existing computer on the off-world end), and any important data can be sent as a compressed file.

You wouldn't be able to watch live or access the internet, but it'd get Col. O'Neill his pre-recorded Simpsons episodes.

And since this is Cybertron, there's probably a pre-existing planetary network set up for people who really want live interaction (can we turn Fort Max's computer core into a dedicated WoW server?)

Equipment should be a non-issue, once we've admitted the possibility of FTL travel. Not that FTL itself matters directly, but the level of technology thereby implied carries with it a substantial amount of available computing power. And you should need minimal personnel, unless and until something breaks. As long as everything is fine, you might need somebody on either end to make nobody knocks the power cable out of the wall. The moment something breaks, you probably still need ... one guy on either end.

A heartbeat of some sort (that is, a signal that the encoding/decoding systems on each end recognize as an "I'm alive" message) can be thrown into the signal at regular intervals, error checking is part of the encoding/decoding process. Stop receiving heartbeats long enough, page the techs. Until then, everything should be quite automated. But, yeah: not a connection you'll do anything requiring speed or throughput from, and 'official' uses will necessarily take precedence over unsanctioned activities, anyway.