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So you got tired of watching video on your computer and you decided to have it stream to that big screen HDTV that you spent so much money on but now you aren’t happy at all with  the results. The video is either grainy and low quality and looks like crap on that fifty inch television or it looks great but has the frame rate of a slide show as it skips and stutters all over the place. What do you do?

Here are few tips to get the best streaming experience for your home setup. First lets start with the hard truth. Nothing beats copper. If you are doing any kind of wireless streaming know that it will never be as good as a good old cable plugged in at each end. If you have the time and the inclination wiring your home for Gigabit ethernet is the best bet. The next best thing is to find a router with Gigabit LAN ports (they are still hard to find) and running CAT 6 or fiber cable between your television, your router and your computer. Once this is done you will never have to worry about interference, stuttering video, someone starting a huge download on the network, someone else gaming online or a cat walking past the router antenna and interrupting the WiFi signal.

Realistically though many people cannot run wires in their house, it could be too expensive, too complicated or not worth it because it is a rented apartment. In that case wireless is the only option but you can still make sure that it is the best WiFi network possible for video streaming. Most people who go out and buy router today will buy a wireless N router but you can go one step further and buy a router that is dual band Wireless N. What this means is that it can run on the 2.4Ghz channel like other N, B and G wireless routers but if there is a client that also has dual band hardware it can switch to the 5 Ghz spectrum that is N only and run without interference at much higher data rates. Of course every network is only as fast as the slowest wireless device on it so every time that you upgrade a router to a new standard you also need wireless PCI cards or USB dongles that support the same standard.

If you are running a wireless N network in compatibility mode where it still supports B & G devices and are experiencing occasionally hiccups make sure you do not have any wireless B or G devices using the network as every time they transmit or receive packets they reduce the speed of the entire network to B or G speeds.

Most new routers also support a feature called Quality of Service or QoS which prioritises data packets of a certain kind. You can go into the settings page and configure your router to make sure that video streams are the highest priority followed by online gaming or whatever else you need the most data capacity for. All this will make sure that you have a truly enjoyable experience streaming and watching video on your HDTV.

If you are one of the people who bought an HDTV just before they started to incorporate ethernet and WiFi connections and you would like to stream content to your television there is a device on the market to help you out.

The ideal use case scenario is someone who wants to stream content to a television that does not have any internet connectivity. Someone who has a really high end television that they are not willing to trade in yet or someone who does not want to spend the money on a new television for this one feature even though they want it.

The  Wireless PC2TV Receiver is just such a device. It allows you to stream any kind of video from your desktop or laptop PC to your television without any cables and with minimal setup.

It looks like a tiny wireless router that has every manner of audio and video connection on it. You just connect the video and audio cables, which are all colour coded, to the input of your television. If you want better sound it has extra cables to route audio to your home audio system as well. You then install the InternetVue Wireless PC2TV software that comes on a CD on your computer.

Once this is done it will run an auto setup wizard that will find the wireless network that the InternetVue Wireless PC2TV Receiver has created and will connect to it automatically. Once this is done you should be able to stream whatever video you want from your computer to your television with just a click of a button.

The genius in the InternetVue Wireless PC2TV Receiver is a feature that many of its competitors lack, a simple remote that will let you pause, play and give you basic play back controls right in your hand. What this means is that you do not have to use the laptop or desktop once you have chosen what content to stream to your television. You can even let someone else use the computer once you have setup the content that you want streamed. Once the viewing has begun you control it all with a simple remote that can be used by anyone no matter how technically unsavvy they may be.

For people who do not have a wireless enabled computer or for people who live in an area with many wireless networks that cause disturbance in their WiFi network there is also an option to connect the computer to the InternetVue Wireless PC2TV Receiver with an ethernet cable plugged into an RJ 45 socket in the receiver and the computer. This will give you a much more stable connection that will prevent any stuttering of video that may be caused by a WiFi connection that is experiencing issues.

So no matter how you would like to connect your computer to your existing television, with or without wires the InternetVue Wireless PC2TV Receiver is one of the simplest and most painless ways to do it.



A recently published Nielsen report has put Apple, the former computer giant from Cupertino at the number one spot in the smartphone market in the United States. The data does show though that Canadian rival Blackberry is still in a very close second place with Apple’s current arch rival from Silicon Valley, Google snapping at the heels of both in third position.

A closer look at the data though shows that while the current market shares may be close once one looks at the trends that have led us up to this point things start looking a lot less cut and dried. Blackberry for instance might be just one spot away from total dominance in the smartphone race but if you look at its market share over a period of a year or more the trend is unmistakable. The Blackberry which was one the smartphone of choice specially for corporate users is fast losing ground to Apple and Google.

As far as has hardware goes Blackberry has had just a couple of releases in the past year, the most prominent of which was the Blackberry Torch. Critics quickly panned it as being underpowered as far as the hardware went and crippled by an outdated operating system. Apple on the other hand had another hit with its completely redesigned iPhone 4 and despite some early controversy about the antenna design it continues to be a best seller for the company. A mid cycle release of the first ever CDMA iPhone for Verizon gave Apple another boost and renewed interest in the iOS platform.

The most activity though has come from Google with its steady improvement of the Android platform and with very regular new point updates every few months. In the hardware department too the stiff competition between all the hardware providers such as Samsung, Motorola and HTC to differentiate their offerings has led to the most frequent refreshes and updates ever seen in this market with Android phones seeing the most innovation. Most new features like Near field communications chips, dual core processors, 3D cameras and 3D screens have all debuted on smartphones running on the Android platform this year and the trend is expected to continue with new four core Android smartphones expected before Christmas.

All of this is reflected in the trends with Android showing the highest rate of acquisition in the past year. About forty percent of people who acquired a new smartphone this year chose to go for one running the Android OS as opposed to just under twenty seven percent of new users choosing an iPhone. The aggressive downward push as far as the pricing of Android phones goes has also led to greater uptake of Google’s platform. Blackberry on the other hand managed to capture less than twenty percent of new smartphone sales in the United States as it failed to attract many new customers to the ageing platform. Even corporate users who were once hardcore Blackberry fans have also found fewer reasons than ever to stick with the platform as Apple and Google build more enterprise compatibility into the iOS and Android platforms. The two companies from California are thus set to be the only real contenders in the near future.