So we had a severe storm come through on Sunday afternoon, knocking our power out for about 9 hours. Fortunately, we have a whole-home generator which kept us cool and dry and we had no damage. However, when our area loses power, the cable company loses power too. We live in a tiny town so they don't bother with backup power, so--even though we have power at the house--we have no Internet/TV/VOIP service. Fast forward to today, we still don't have those things. Seems the storm knocked out the power plant that feeds the cable node that serves our area. I'm grateful that we're not facing what others are still facing (no power, no AC, no sump pump) so ours is a first world problem for sure; but it's opened my eyes to a few things. Seems that a fair bit of our devices now require Internet access to work at all--even though you'd never expect them to. For example,
Plex -- no worries for entertainment, we can just stream something from our personal library of content. Wrong. Plex requires Internet presence to run--even though you're not streaming online content. Can't even watch the OTA antenna stuff. Seems that you can reconfigure Plex to work in this situation, but you have to have Internet access to be able to do the setup. If Internet is gone, it's too late.
VLC -- no worries, I'll just watch using VLC instead. Wrong. VLC apparently requires Internet, too. VLC won't even load properly.
Mini TiVos -- no worries, we'll just watch DVR'd content that we've previously recorded. Kind of. Apparently, Mini TiVos *may* require Internet, too (some of ours work and some don't--not sure what that's about).
Fortunately, a fair bit of our local content is ripped in a format that Quicktime can handle (a lot of it isn't, though) so we're able to still entertain ourselves. I mean, who reads books anymore?
Although this is more venting than anything, it's still a PSA to say that I'd recommend testing things to see if they work when your online access is gone. You might be surprised.