In case your Aunt Josephine and Uncle Earl were unable to actually attend their nieces and nephews matriculation from high school this year doesn’t mean they have to miss it. In fact they can now watch it in the comfort of their matching Lazy Boys with their iPad’s on their laps thanks to HCPSS TV.
All HoCo public high school graduation ceremonies are available online “within hours of the ceremony” on the Howard County Public School System TV website.
And don’t even think about downloading a ceremony and adding your own commentary to put on You Tube. According to the HCPSS Weekly News for Parents email bulletin, “the webcast cannot be downloaded and taped…”
On the other hand you could shell out twenty bucks for the DVD and then have your way with it.
At first I was thinking, "who on Earth would want to spend time watching a graduation on their computer." But then, I thought back to my own graduation from Hammond at Merriweather, and I thought about how insanely hot and crowded it was. Then I came to the conclusion that this is a great service to our senior and disabled family members. Not everyone can handle the heat and crowds at the actual graduation. This is a great way for those people to participate.
ReplyDeleteActually, even with a DVD you couldn't "have your way with it". DVDs are protected by an encryption scheme, and in order to copy the contents of a DVD (e.g., in order to do your own video editing of clips) you need to break that encryption. Typically this is done with special software that supports copying DVD materials.
ReplyDeleteAs it happens, distributing and using such software is illegal in the United States under the provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. There is no legal way to duplicate DVDs or extract video from them, even for personal use. As noted in the linked article, you can thank Hollywood for that.