There are some people who climb on board their boat to get away from civilization for a day. This means leaving cell phones, computers, and televisions behind while they escape into the great outdoors. Other people, spend such a large part of their life on board that they want the modern conveniences, especially televisions and radios and their phone. There are ways to make both happen, but you may need a few things before bringing movies and electronics on board.
The Right Electronics
If you want your boat to have a television, you will need to first ensure that you have a screen that will work on your boat. For most boats, you will need to leave the big screen at home. A smaller sized television, monitor, or a laptop screen is often large enough for boating. Beyond that, you will also need to decide if a DVD player is good enough so that you can watch movies while on board, or if you prefer to stream movies from your boat. Either is possible, with the right equipment, but viewing live television is a little tricky on boats.
The Equipment
Keep in mind that wires cannot reach it from the mainland, unless you are docked, and satellites are often unreliable since your boat will move constantly on the water, even if you are docked. This means you kind of have to plan for putting a television on board. Chances are good, even your cell phone reception will not be great on the water. When taking a long trip, movies are your next best friend. A DVD player means that you do not need anything more than a television, the DVD player, and marine battery connectors that will not let you down in the middle of a rough night at sea. If you want live TV, things become harder to deal with. Instead of a satellite, you may want to get an automatic tracking antenna. They are able to pick up a signal regardless of where you are, and they can also work to ensure you have radio signal. If you are committed to the satellite, you have to pay a little more to get a multi-axis satellite that is enclosed in a dome.
Why Put a Television on Board?
There are a lot of reasons that people want televisions and radios on-board. There are some people who go out on the boat for weeks at a time, especially if they have a sailboat. Others may only go out for the weekend, but either way, storms tend to roll in quickly on the water and without warning, it can cause major issues on a boat. Live television and radios can prevent bad things from happening because you will have time to prepare. On shorter trips, this is not as big a deal, but when the sun goes down and you are not ready for sleep, televisions allow you to have entertainment. This can help during the heat of the day or at night when you are unable to sleep. You may also want to take movies on board if you have children who may get bored when on the boat. No matter what your reason for wanting access to televisions, putting one on a boat is doable, and at the right times, can be a great thing.
In most areas, summer time is starting to kick in. The coming of summer promises to wipe away the cold and give everyone more to do. This also means a lot of planning. Planning for backyard barbecues, family reunions, and so much more. You too can plan ahead for the upcoming pool parties and other things that you will do during the short summer months, but if you are hoping to try something new this year; you can do that too. One of the newest summer trends is hosting an outdoor movie viewing party.
An outdoor movie party is a great way to spend your summer nights with friends and family. You pick a movie, or a particular theme of movie, and you relax in the great outdoors while enjoying it. It is a great way to host an event that not everyone has been to in the past. You can choose to go with comedies, independent films, old black and white classics, and more. You may choose to have popcorn for snacks, or hamburgers to eat. Then you and whoever you invite can lay on the lounge chairs outdoors under the stars and watch your movie picks all night long if you want to. The things you need are negotiable, beyond a way to watch and hear the movies.
When you host a movie night, everyone will be talking about it all through the winter months. Especially if you remember to invite your neighbors to the event along with your family and friends. If you pull off the perfect movie party outside, you may start a new event within your neighborhood and next season, someone else may choose to be the host for it. It will be a great way to bring everyone together. With a movie night, you can laugh, cry, or simply enjoy the good movies the way that they were meant to be enjoyed. As a bonus, once you get the necessities, everything else you put into it is on you. You can go big or go small. As long as the movies are good; no one will care.
When most of us think about watching a good movie, we envision a work of fantasy. Some of the most popular movies of our time are not based on reality, but are mostly computer generated masterpieces that have a lot of action and special effects. These are great movies, but this was not always the way movies were made. Even now you can find some videos that are not based on fiction or merely entertaining creations. There are a lot of documentary type movies available and they are currently in the movie spotlight.
Fiction movies are fun to watch. They are entertaining. They may make you smile, make you cry, laugh out loud or shake in the seat you are sitting on. They are designed to capture your attention and give you something to make family movie nights great. Most of them are good at doing just that, but what more do you gain from them? Chances are good, you will not learn how to enhance your super powers, become a better husband, or anything else by watching fictional characters live in a fictional world. For the “facts” you need to venture into other genres of movies and more fact-based films.
It is fine to want to be entertained by movies and videos. We all need to have a great time that is worry and stress free. However, perhaps just once in a while you will turn family movie night into a night where you devote yourself to learning something new. Your family will benefit from it and once you show your kids that learning can be interesting, they will continue to learn as they grow into adulthood. This could be a new spin on a fun night together and may open up the door to other interesting, learning based, trivia style games and activities on other family fun nights.
Remember back to the good ole days when a night’s entertainment meant that you would load up in your car and venture out to the nearest video rental store? You would spend hours looking for titles that were both old and new. They were the days before DVDs could be shipped through the mail and Redbox could spit them out of a machine. They were the days when families searched for the perfect movie for family night and now you can experience it again.
If you miss the days of checking out a movie the old-fashioned way, chances are good; you can search for a video store in your local area and find one. They are not commonly used anymore in smaller towns. They are more of a hidden gem than they used to be, but they are still used by many dedicated movie fans. You should keep in mind that virtually every city has a video store in it, so you may have to travel a little to get to the movies that you love, but these older style video stores often have movies that you will never find in a kiosk.