Thursday 6 August 2015

Around the world in HDMI



Shawn Downey, Easylife's Managing Director, takes a tongue-in-cheek look at its progress in recent months as he puts pen to paper on a computer!




According to Wikipedia, The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858 by businessman Cyrus West Field, it operated for only three weeks, reports suggest he blew it up as he cranked up the voltage to get a better result. 





Subsequent attempts in 1865 and 1866 were more successful and so many cables were being laid that miners were called in to build custom tunnels. Read more here in the Easylife Artefacts Museum.

150 years later and it is this technology that forms the backbone of the internet, with copper being replaced by fiber optic. Reliability, is now as good as the best DNS server available, or as good as the most observant digger driver choosing to lay new drains in your street.




'My pants are on fire!'



HBCM In 1924 John Logie Baird one of the pioneering inventors of television, blew a hole in his trousers when he accidentally electrocuted himself with 2,000 volts as he devised a means of displaying a picture on a cathode ray tube. This quite remarkable event resulted in a street argument in his home town of Hastings (UK) where his landlord promptly evicted him.






'It's really easy!'


Some years later in 2015, the Easylife engineers have found a way to hitch up to this fiber optic telegraph system (also known as the 'world wide web' or 'Internet') and formed the worlds first point to point video and audio HDMI link service. "We give you, the Easylife XDS HDMI link", I bellowed with an air of confidence!


Now every customer who has a power socket and broadband access can create a world spanning HDMI link and set it up in under 10 minutes.



'It's really complicated!'


If you find connecting to your home WiFi network to be a bit of a complicated task (as it sometimes is for me) then you might find the thought of connecting the Easylife XDS 4K boxes together to be a little daunting. Don't worry! Did you know that your default WiFi SSID and password are usually printed on the label on the bottom of your router? Armed with this new information setting up the XDS HDMI link is easy! Simply plug the units in and switch them on. Then connect to your home WiFi network using the details on the bottom of your router. Done. 






'Do you offer a range less than 6,000 miles?'


Well, yes and no, because just like a piece of string, it's a long as it is short. You may well be looking for a 6ft link and nothing like the 6,000 miles conceived 150 years ago. Regardless of the range Easylife's XDS HDMI link is about getting 1080p full high definition from one point to another anywhere in the world. That's exactly what can now be achieved!




'The penny drops'


Shawn Downey explains how the idea first came to him. "Back in October 2014, whilst on my way to Germany, I was walking around the airport and reading an article on my phone. It was about the latest internet standard, HTML5. As is so often the case, I started to imagine how I could use this technology to make peoples lives easier. It didn't take long for the idea of a world spanning HDMI link to present itself and as the idea grew and formed in my mind, I became more and more focused on it. I blotted out all distractions, even my surroundings, as I concentrated on how it would work and what features it could provide.

Shawn goes on to explain, "The idea soon came to a head when I realised that I had wandered in to the ladies toilet by mistake! I just couldn't understand why there were all these women in the gents. I guess it was at this point that the penny dropped and, as if by magic, the product has materialised just 9 months later."

To sum up; creating the XDS HDMI link has been an eventful journey that has not been without its twists, turns and calls of nature.




Easylife is set for a full release at the end of the summer (pending several patent applications with the Patent office) but the service is ready to go now using the Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox . You can try out the service by visiting the website easylife.com and kindly feedback to us any bugs, issues or desires and we'll action every comment!

Easylife.com is an operation of iMedia Communications Ltd.


HBCM Facts retrieved from displayed material at Hastings Museum

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