Sucker For Sports Montages

One of the best self-gifted purchases I made this Christmas, was a little thing called a Hauppauge HD PVR.

For years, I thought there was NO WAY you could "yoink" HD footage off your cable/satellite box and record for your archives.

I was wrong.

Mind you, this is something the networks and studios fear more than Britney Spears fears sit-ups. Because in theory, once you YOINK a pristine 1080p (or even 720p) piece of content (movie, football game, music video) you could then - in theory - email that to the entire world, and they could then save, copy, burn to DVD, sell distribute to anyone in the world with perhaps nothing more than the click of a button.

It's the same dynamic as the ol' Napster tsunami that effectively destroyed the record industry and brought on the age of legalized downloads via iTunes and others.

But for legality sake, this device is sold legally and supported by the company. And it works GREAT! Because if you are like me, and just want to save and archive little nuggets of entertainment you have already purchased via your cable/satellite company, then you are free to do so.

And stretching my digital rights just a little bit, I am now uploading a few such items to YouTube and linking to them via this webpage. That puts me in a gray area, where I could get a notice from rightsholder to take it down, or eventually be blocked by YouTube itself.

But crikey, every time I post something I know is not my personal content, I see 20 or more others with the same thing. So, whatever.

I 'm not making a red nickel off any of this stuff, I just like to share cool video content.

The content I am a sucker for, are sports montages like the one above from HBO's Excellent 24/7 Winter Classic series. I appreciate every little edit, music choice, and camera angle in these 2-3 minute pieces that I am sure took weeks for a top notch video editor to assemble and massage into perfection.

But for years, YouTube had such CRAPPY definition to their videos, it was pointless to even put them up there. Hell, I remember when ALL YouTube videos were a blocky and pixelated mess due to inadequate bandwith issues and primitive compression codecs for video.

Well my friends, we are in a new age.

Now, Czabe can YOINK these little juicy nuggets and post away in glorious 720p (okay, not "glorious" but let's just say "delicious" 720p) and we'll just hope the internet killjoys don't start making things very "un-fun."

So in addition to the Winter Classic montage above, I have the following short form videos up right now as well. Two yummy intros to last year's Super Bowl of the Packers and Steelers, plus the NFL Top 10 list show where the #1 "Worst" Free Agent signing was dubbed: "Anyone to the Redskins!"

Ohhhh... dagger!

So sit back and enjoy. More to follow in 2012.....