Maximum PC

Have you seen that Windows 7 Commercial that shows a student over in Germany and he laments that he doesn't understand their TV's humour?

He says that by using Windows 7 he's able to connect to his PC at home in the United States and watch he video in Germany.

After watching this commercial I have a couple of questions about this scenario...

1) The commercial sort of implies that he decided to do this once he got to Germany. So if he didn't already have this setup before leaving is it safe to say that he would require somebody to visit his place and do some setup before he could do this?

2) This commercial is aimed at the lay customer who isn't computer savvy. How "easy" would it be for someone to do this? I imagine someone seeing this commercial and wanting to do this and getting frustrated that it just doesn't work out of the box.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCAwITgtCY8
LOL, yeah. It doesn't make much sense at all. But none have really.

1) To me, that's what I'd think. He'd have to call home and have it set up. Why he just didn't bring his 50MB tongue push-up video with him on the laptop is beyond me. Or, ummm...youtube?
2) Hell, I don't know how to do that with Win7 out of the box and the assumption that it's not set up as questioned in #1. This is a better ad for Windows Home Server I'd think.

If it's that easy, then it doesn't really sound like Win7 is very secure. You mean Germans can just run into my computer that's turned off!?

or they're just simply endorsing poor security practices and the use of remote assistance or remote desktop...

I suppose the simple answer is the use of a slingbox...


and for those who haven't seen the commercial.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCAwITgtCY8

I'd agree that he'd have neeed to set it up prior to leaving (or, call home to have someone turn it on....) But, it's neither RA nor RDP (nor "bad security practices") that are involved.
Gentlemen, let me introduce you to Remote Media Streaming.

While I don't use it (laptop has a copy of my complete music library on it - if I'm going to want a show (read: need to play TV-catchup) when I'm out of town, I copy it to my external HDD first), I haven't heard anyone say that it's hard to do. And, the quick read of the page says "really easy."

That does look easy and I'll give it a try to see how it goes.