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ReplayTV's Remote Remote
plasmar writes: "ReplayTV has announced a new service due to roll out this Fall that lets you control your ReplayTV unit from a Web browser anywhere in the world. Full story available here." Just what I need, someone reprogramming my settings. I come in from dinner, and all of a sudden I'm watching 30 hours of Ron Popeil's Showtime Rotisserie Grill.
Given that this service will allow you to control your Digital Video Recorder via the web, the DVR will naturally be connected to the net, probably by a modem. Television has traditionally been a one way medium with the exception of pay channels, and more generally cable TV. Therefore, most TV watchers in America watch channels and programs with impunity, since no one knows what they're watching. However the ability of the DVR to connect to the net will give BigBrother (or BigBusiness), to know your television watching habits, increasing the amount of information available in your "profile", something most people won't think about.
Arun
Also, there are some things being pushed on consumers by corporate middle managers that have absolutely no point. WAP is the best example I can think of at the moment...
Seriously, can't you just ring a friend and ask them to tape it for you?
The Kill Your TV Website:
http://othello.localaccess.com/hardebeck/
No this is serious. He claims that Sesame Street may teach your kid to recognize letters and numbers, but it shortens their attention span.
It happens that, when I was a kid, I stopped watching television when my sister left for college. I had never really actively watched TV before, but would sit passively while she changed the channels. With my sister gone, I would at first just sit in silence in the empty house. But I started listening to music which, unlike TV, allows you to devote your attention to other things while you listen.
I read a lot, ground telescope mirrors, acted in the high school theater and eventually became the set director, started college at 16 while still attending high school, scored 890 out of a possible 900 on the SAT Math II achievement test and was accepted into CalTech, where I published in the astrophysical journal and did research on the 200" and 60" telescopes.
I still don't watch TV, and have a successful software consulting business.
Mike
Note - you can find refs to my papers in the "Publications" section of my resume. Abstracts are available online. I didn't say it in my original letter but the work that was published I did while employed as a research assistant the summer after my freshman year.
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-- Could you use my software consulting serv
While they probably have hardware compressors and fancy algorithms, if you can use any PC you can use a public open-source compressor and just get a bigger hard drive.
It really wouldn't be that hard.
You'd probably get better realtime media streaming performance in the BeOS but then there'd be a chokepoint and I don't think the company is deserving of support by third party developers anymore.
Better to give people yet another reason to use Linux.
Are there any readily available hardware video compressor boards that aren't too expensive and have open source linux drivers?
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
People who like to watch TV and want to make a few extra bucks would sign up to be commercial monitors. Either they'd enter the station they're watching into their handheld web browser or this would be handled for them by a set-top box.
When a commercial comes on they press the "commercial start button". When all the commercials end they press the "commercial end" button.
People who subscribe to the service would receive a little unit that plugs into the internet and, when a commercial is on, turns off the sound, maybe blackens the picture and pauses their VCR.
For this to work reliably there'd need to be a voting system so you'd only skip content if a lot of monitors said there was a commercial on. Monitors who were consistently outvoted would be dropped from the monitor pool.
If you don't blacken the picture the subscriber could notice there was an error and override to turn the content back on (or if the commercial looked interesting)
There are things you can do to try to detect a commercial technologically (like have hardware listen for sudden changes in audio volume) but I'm sure advertisers will pay technologists to find a way to defeat it. I don't think there's a way to defeat the power of thousands of bored couch potatoes who feel they're putting something over on the corporation.
This invention was conceived by me, Michael D. Crawford a couple of years ago. I place it in the public domain as of Friday, August 11.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Linuxmedialabs.com place seems to sell boards, but not for cheap.
You could also buy a standard tvtuner board and use these or these drivers.
This is actually an excellent idea. I've often left town and forgotten to set my VCR up to record, and this is a fix for that problem. Besides, someone would need to be REALLY bored to "h4x0r" your ReplayTV unit.
Consider this:
You are at work.
Server crashes.
Southpark is on in an hour.
A) Miss the show and save the server
B) Screw the server and catch the show
C) Save the server, record the show and watch during your comped time off
It seems that this would be usefull, just keep those script kiddies away.
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
The danger is not from crackers filling ReplayTV's harddrive with Matlock, but the fact that it gives ReplayTV, Inc. (Or whoever...) A deep insight into what you watch.
I can imagine being at work and reading on the web that something good was on - Sure, being able to set it to record would be a convenience. (Of course, I would then like it to FTP the show in DiVx format to my X-Drive, so I can watch it from my desk the next day, but from what I hear, that's 2-3 months away...)
But do you really want some company knowing that not only do you secretly watch 'Anne of Green Gables' you actually *tape* it? I thought not.
(Broadcast) TV and Radio are one of the few places that you have this kind of anomynimity anymore. Imagine what Nielson will do with the database of "What People Tape".
Remember the 'Bork Tapes'? Years ago, when Judge Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court, the Washington 'City Paper' did a story listing all of his video club rentals. Good ol' Bork had extremely boring tastes with nothing scandalous, but the fact that anyone's rental history is fairly public scared the crap out of enough lawmakers to very quickly pass some legislation.
This is worse.
One question for ReplayTV:
Does the net connection report what you are watching, even when you are not taping?
Also, when are you getting that super-secret X-Drive thingie done???
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Switch back and forth between multiple shows at just the right time. The playback could be quite funny.
Now, if you can download video to someone else machine.....hmmmmm...stop me before I get in too much trouble.
Fight Spammers!
Rich
The juxtaposition of this and your sig gave me an image of Bill Gates sitting at a terminal with an evil grin on his face while in a distant house, someone's refridgerator was reaching a nice glowing cherry red (K=Kelvin)
Rich
a) Tivo runs a modified Linux PPC.
b) Yes, you can even get a shell prompt on it (thru the serial port on the back no less).
c) Yes, you can even pull out the drive and mount it on your Linux box, with some minor effort.
d) We're getting closer to figuring out the drive format they use to store shows.
Therefore e) within a few weeks or months we'll know how to pull shows off the unit in MPEG format.
If you want to help, get a Tivo and come by the Tivo Underground forum at www.tivocommunity.com.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Seriously, why would you want to control your TV from a web browser in the first place? Are some people so lazy that they can't even budge from their computer to adjust the volume? This all just seems like an invitation for script kiddies to mess with peoples' TVs. If I was a ReplayTV user, I'd be pissed.
Still, I can see how this would have some advantages, so hopefully ReplayTV will implement a secure-enough system (hint: security through obscurity never works!) that the lamer members of our population won't be able to ruin yet another new thing.
Very nice idea. Would have been handy a few weeks ago to adjust a few recordings while I was on vacation. Now Dish Networks just needs to hurry up and scrap the DishPlayer and get a Replay based reciever out. And add an ethernet jack, since my house has no normal phone lines anymore.
I think the real possibilities here lie in the user interface. The ReplayTV/TIVO are simple and easy to use, but not that powerful.
Add the web and some powerful database servers and you could do some pretty neat things:
a) Have it record every movie that Roger Ebert and Co gave 2 thumbs up to for ever.
b) You could quickly pull up a list of the top 400 sci-fi movies of all times, check the ones you liked and presto, they would be recorded if they ever came on.
c) etc...lots of possibilites...
Simplistic versions of these sorts of things exist or are coming to the set-top boxes themselves, but I think it will be tough to make them really work well.
ps - I'm a TIVO owner and love it. All you doubters should get one (or a replayTV) from circuit city or someplace else with a 30 day return policy and just give it a spin. On the down side, I no longer exercise or read books. sigh.
It will get better ratings than Survivor and Alley McBeal's kissing Ling Scene. People will just hack into it and have every system out there record The Hacker Channel during sweeps week.
Talk about must see TV. :)
Fight Spammers!
this reminds me of a classic article from The Onion...New Remote Control Can Be Operated By Remote...no more leaning forward to get remote from coffee table means greater convenience for viewers.
i wanna be a karma whore!
This is good news for those of us looking forward to the day when we can say "I just hacked your refrigerator and put it on defrost"
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I'm sure that this could have some useful application in the real world, but to me it seems like a "gee-whiz" innovation.
However, the ability to tell my tv to record this week's episode of space ghost while I'm out of town could prove useful.
Then again, the evil corporations will track your recording habits through their webpage and build a profile with which to bombard you with more useless advertising.
There's no escaping it...big brother is watching you.
---
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
The box has a built-in modem that you connect to your phone line. The current software polls a central server once a day for program guide and software updates. I would assume that they would download the new recording schedule to the box when it polls the server.
Can anyone think of ANY good reason to have something like this?
Presuming that you think that there is a good reason to have a ReplayTV/TiVo in the first place? You're recording programs while on a business trip, and find out about a special you would like to see, but will be on before you return. With a service like this, you could have it recorded.
- Even just with Australian cable (FoxTel) there's more that I'd be willing to watch than I have time to watch it. Missing one thing means I have time to watch something else
- What, don't people have 10 minutes to program their VCR/ReplayTV in the morning?
- Don't people check the TV guide ahead?
- Do all ReplayTV owners live alone? Is there no-one to program the unit if they happen to be on holiday?
Since getting cable, the number of programs I really don't want to miss has probably only gone up by 2 or 3 (Still undecided on Earth, Final Conflict & Lexx). If you're not anywhere near the unit, why do you need to program it for something?Oh, yeah, major hacking target...
Some of you seem skeptical of why this would be a good idea. As a ReplayTV owner for almost a year, let me explain.
Replay is designed to be a very simple "set top" type box. It has no keyboard, only two LED's and one button on the front panel. The entire UI is manipulated via the remote.
It works OK, but there are certain operations that are undeniably tedious when attempted via a remote. For instance, entering "Clint Eastwood" via an on-screen keyboard, to program it to record all movies that Clint is in. You have to use arrow keys to move around an on-screen alphabet and press ENTER on each letter. You get used to it, but it can be quite annoying.
By providing a web-based alternative UI, it gives some users a way to work around the limited I/O capability of the set-top box. On the web site of course you can use your mouse, keyboard and so on. Conducting various searches to look for things to watch would be much less tedious when you can use a richer web-based UI.
And consider the possibility of building scripts that visit the site automatically for you. You could figure out arbitrarily complex criteria for recording programs, put them in a script, and have it run your replay for you. This would give you lots of flexibility that you don't have right now.
I'm sure from ReplayTV's perspective, this is also probably going to turn into another revenue opportunity for them. Remember, Replay's service is free for life, so they have to have an ongoing revenue from alternate sources. They already sell ad space in the "Replay Zones" menu. I will almost guarantee you they will be selling banner ads on MyReplayTV.com to generate more revenue.
I agree there are definitely privacy and security concerns here. For instance, a web site with banner ads would have the potential to allow ReplayTV to link viewing habits to other web-oriented habit information collected by ad services like DoubleClick. Replay also knows your zip code (in order to give you the right cable listings) so the potential for geographical demographics are interesting too. And then of course the whole idea of someone hacking the web site and using it to program other people's boxes.
That having been said, I think there is a good chance that the Replay folks will get this right. So far I've been impressed with the technical competency of their staff, both in their hardware and their web site. For an example, disable Javascript in your browser and visit http://www.replaytv.com. Unlike many sites which just go brain dead in this case, Replay's site recognizes the issue and lets you view a less snazzy version of the site. Very smart.