I’ve been running every day, over 100 days in a row now, and one of the things that has helped me on this journey is the TV that I’ve placed in front of the treadmill. As I started running, I put on some of our older DVDs, watching 15-20 minutes of one each day, taking about a week to get through a movie. I got Star Trek: The Next Generation for Christmas and have been going through it, hoping it will last me until March or April sometime.

The other day I was at the gym running while the kids were swimming and I watched some of the NFL playoffs while on the treadmill and I noticed that the time went by quickly. I thought that the games I’ve recorded on my DirecTV TiVo would be something I’d love to watch at times on the treadmill in the basement. I have coax run part of the way down there, so we might be able to make this work, but it doesn’t give me any control, which is some of what I’d want. A Slingbox might be what I try.

What does this have to do with SQL Server?

This got me thinking about how easy we can move information around with SQL Server. It was an easy platform to work with years ago, but when Reporting Services was added, it became trivial to generate HTML, which is a very easy way to distribute and present information to anyone that needs it. A lot of the growth and power of our modern society comes from this.

I wish that other types of media would start to understand this and realize the opportunities and capabilities that come from vastly increasing our choices of distribution and reception of media. I see some of the sports groups are starting to do this and I was tempted to get the Super Bowl from the NFL’s online system, but since I can record it and watch it later, it’s not quite worth the money. Especially as they want to bundle all the games into one pass.

Slicing and dicing information, allowing someone to consume the pieces they want, is a great way to find and add incremental revenue. Eventually I’m hoping that more companies will adopt this practice.

That and having more standards to ensure we can easily move data around. I am sure we are not too far from having devices like the Apple TV that we connect to every TV in our house for music, video, and even data.