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The Next Generation of PVR has no Hard Drive
William Kucharski sent us a story about the next generation of PVR (Tivo) device. This time there will be no hard drives. Instead the content will be stored at your cable company and streamed in real time to the reader. The upside is that this effectively removes many of the limitations of existing PVRs and could make all media available on demand all the time... eliminating the concept of "Channels" entirely. The main downside is that control is moved out of your home, returning PVR users to the dark ages where they had to watch commercials.
I suspects this limits you to the ~300x200 res supported by the BTTV capture driver. I don't think this resolution is sufficent.
;)
I have a Hauppauge card with built in mpeg2 compression, but the linux driver for it is still deep within development, and with no help from hauppauge.
I pretty much expected this, so I'm not bitter
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
It is cringeworthy. Luckily you can run it with the window borders turned off.
BSD drivers are unlikely, yes. Is there any bt8x8 support under the BSDs?
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
There's a company here the UK, recently launched, called Homechoice that does VoD, based on BT's ADSL network. According to their FAQ, "[y]ou can pause, rewind, or fast forward it and even watch it as many times as you want over your 24-hour rental period."
A friend of mine has it - apparently one month they got their on-demand charges to over £100 because of the sheer convenience of clicking a button to get a movie they (more or less) wanted to watched streamed to them instantly.
The biggest problem with HomeChoice, from what I hear, is their range of content. And this comes down to business issues, rather than technical. I believe a lot of the TV channels they have show older re-runs than you would expect to get on a normal cable/satellite/digital terrestrial service.
No idea what HomeChoice's back-end looks like. I pressume the infrastructure costs have come down significantly since the Time-Warner (?) trials in Florida in the early '90s - the trials that get quoted so often as to how VoD will never catch on (and I guess that's the what Wired was talking about in the above comment).
Homechoice also does a bearable always-on 'net connection, although with some pretty significant limitations (128k, NAT, etc) - but I imagine it's quite attractive to your ma-and-pa style home users. ADSL Guide probably talks about their net services. You'll probably have to dig around their message forums to find some users of the service.
As far as Blockbuster goes, I thought I read something recently about them doing a JV in the UK to provide VoD-style services. Can't find a link to that story, but here's something about them doing a JV with DirecTV in the States. Blockbuster thinks, probably correctly, that their brand is worth something in the PPV/VoD market.
The biggest issue you'd have to overcome to provide your own service would be the hardware. You could probably use a UK TiVo without to much problem (has the right voltage and TV standard), but you've have to get the guide data from somewhere. I spoke to people at LinuxWorld in New York back in January who were using TiVo boxes in Australia, and had hacked up the box enough that they could get the guide data from a local web site with local TV listings. I'm not sure if they've released that software, or if it crosses the line regarding the community support of TiVo, meaning that the hacking community will not try to undermine the TiVo service, which would cause financial damage to TiVo - the company. If the software to get guide data in Australia existed, it wouldn't be hard to write similiar software for the US and UK, meaning that people could get full functionality without paying
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
Fortunately, this is a sector of the industry in which competition still exists. The consumer will ultimately choose whichever product delivers the most value. This will probably come in the form of a box that does not depend on a subscription service and can store data locally. Ideally, the "guide" data will come from a place where it is already being paid for, such as the program guide included with DirecTV service. All they have to do is figure out some way to export the program guide from the DirecTV receiver.
On the other hand, this is a market that Microsoft is entering, so perhaps they'll simply tell consumers what to do (and buy, and view...) by eliminating competition.
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Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I don't know what technology these folks plan to use for this system, but I do know what the right choice for a large media streaming deployment is; Ikadega's DirectPath(tm) technology. Check out http://www.ikadega.com for more information.
(BTW, Yes, I do work there.)
Dog is my co-pilot.
OTOH, it is easy to expand your capacity - 3 hour, fairly crappy tapes cost around 0.89 sterling where I live. That's six hours if you don't mind really crappy picture quality (which I don't) and sound quality (which annoys me more). You can keep buying more tapes without limit. But fitting a new disk to your TiVo is expensive, and for the non-geek, difficult.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I don't archive anything. But I often get 'behind' by up to a hundred hours (eg over Christmas when lots of stuff is on, or when a particular show is being repeated one episode every day). A huge stack of videotapes is no problem, I couldn't really do anything equivalent with TiVo.
I am at home, I just may not have time to watch TV (or at least not to watch it at the same rate it is broadcast). But I can just accumulate stuff and watch it later when I have less to do. Your situation may differ.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I don't need TiVo's 'intelligence' - I wrote XMLTV to grab listings in advance and semi-automatically pick what to watch. I still have to program the VCR for tomorrow's programmes, but that takes only five minutes. I'd much rather have some Perl code and an open file format (whether or not I wrote it myself) than rely on a subscription to some black-box consumer electronics. </plug>
(BTW - have a look at my TV preferences if you're curious - though this does include some shows I record for my younger brother. Honest...)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I'd just get this service and stick a hard-disk recorder, or plain VCR, on the other end.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Or in other words, it is just a glorified vcr, but that's a very good thing.
Unlike this new POS, which says "you can have your neat new features, but you have to take this stick up the behind along with it."
The enemies of Democracy are
I've never seen a VCR that...
:)
Right. Thus glorified.
The enemies of Democracy are
Well, I don't like to break this to you, but... $200 is not cheap. That's more than an average VCR costs.
For a Tivo-like device to become useful and cool to the home user (i.e. be able to filter out ads, etc...) the manufacturer has to be able to make a profit on the hardware *alone*. Oh, and it really ought to cost $150 or less for most people to buy it. So, manufacturing cost would have to be about half that at most - $75. You've got to remember all the compression and decompression hardware on there as well, so I'd guess you'd need a hard drive that costs about $30.
And 30 pages in your credit card bill: priceless
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Why? It goes back to scarcity. If everything is available at all times, there's no incentive to either decide that something is specifically worth watching or taking the time to actually watch it.
For example, a few years back, I taped Monty Python. All of it. I have every episode on tape and I've never watched them - half the time I forget that they're even there. But when I see that Python is on TV, what do I do? Tune it in. Same thing with Babylon 5. And just about everything else I have on tape or DVD. It rarely gets watched unless either I have friends over or something external (such as it being on a current broadcast schedule) reminds me that it's there.
There's also the "I can just watch it later" aspect. I've got the anime series Bastard!! on tape and I've been meaning to watch it again for probably two months now, but whenever I have some time, I face the choice of doing something else now and watching Bastard!! later, or watching it now and skipping the other thing.
VOD will fail for the simple reason that we are more driven by scarcity than most of us realize.
Last time I looked at the local computer rag
some 70-80 GB disks had fallen below $200.
One gig holds a 30-60 minutes of compressed video.
The early PVR systems were pricey at $15 / GB,
but there are hack web sites that tell you how to
add your own disk cheap.
I would not be surprised in the near future you
could get a hundred hours of video storage for
a hundred bucks. Then why rent the remote disk?
I suspect this will be a commercial failure.
I think the days of money-making PVRs are seriously numbered, because this is one of the few areas where either a Free Software or Open Source alternative will eventually kick all the commercial products asses from a usability standpoint. Instead of just being an abstract political thing, it will be a concrete user interface and feature issue.
With certain types of applications, such as word processors, closed software isn't really at any significant disadvantage to Free Software, because there isn't any commercial pressure to make the product suck. In fact, a commercial developer wants (and is encouraged to) make the product as good as possible.
But as soon as you get to media-reading-related products, the developers start to be pressured by outside influences to compromise the quality of the product. We have already seen this with web browsers, with the recent story about MSIE's "Smart Tags" being a good (but not the only) example of that sort of thing.
You can also see the problem with DVD players. The hardware appliance DVD players don't have Firewire ports, the software players can't capture still frames, etc. Some users expect these features because they are natural things that someone would want to do. Eventually, unlicensed players (which, due to bad legislation, will tend to be developed by decentralized teams, and that encourages open source) will be so more feature-rich than DVDCCA-licensed players, that users will have a significant incentive to use them.
And you can see the problem with the most popular existing PVR, Tivo. Tivo is a fine product IMHO, but it also has some flaws that aren't caused by bad programmers or lack of vision, but rather, they are caused by Tivo's desire to have a good relationship with its partners. For example, there's no "30 Second Skip" and there never will be, and the fast forward intentionally over-corrects to encourage the user to watch the end of a commercial. There are also rumors that future Tivo releases are going to have new disadvantages that the existing software doesn't have. (Something is going to eat up some additional disk space, but we don't know what that is yet. But you can bet your ass that it's going to be something that users aren't asking for, and that it's related to Tivo's partners.)
A PVR that is developed free of commercial interests, will have none of these disadvantages. Right now, the components for building one on Linux are (allegedly) very primitive (I haven't even gotten it all working yet, but that's my fault), but they'll get better. Eventually they'll cross a quality threshold that the commercial PVRs are not allowed to cross, and will be so much easier to use and more capable, that users will prefer the open/free ones.
So if you're going to bet the farm on a commercial PVR and you don't have any good means to suppress open development (DMCA combined with Hague is your best bet right now), then you're not going to be a farmboy for very long.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"The upside is that this effectively removes many of the limitations of existing PVRs"
By reintroducing all of the limitations and annoyances of existing cable TV (commercials, network outages, etc.).
I won a 14-hour model in a wacky 200-word essay contest they were having. (mine was something like "I want a Tivo. Please send me one.") I never would have purchased one on my own, but after having used it, I can safely say that I would certainly buy one now.
The biggest difference between it and a VCR, is that I can't tell my VCR things like:
-"Record every episode of the Simpsons, regardless of when the network schedules or re-schedules the episodes"
-"Record every show with Actor X in it"
-"Fill your remaining space with shows you recommend based on my viewing habits"
-"Let me watch a recorded show while another is being recorded"
-"Record at a sensible resolution, not that lousy VHS stuff"
Even without everything but the first item, the Tivo is much easier to use. Just select from the menu or type in the name of a show, and record every episode ever with just another click. Sit down at the TV later and pick the show you want to watch from a menu of 20 or so shows that you are much more likely to enjoy than just channel surfing.
Is right here:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/VCR-HOWTO.html
All you need is a cheapo $50 winTV card and the patience to get it all set up.
Other alternatives include using bttv-grab and mpeg2encode, rather than vcr and avifle+divx as outlined in the howto. I have yet to get it all working quite the way I want it to, but I expect it will be done in a week or two.
And no actual recorded content...
At least with a standard PVR or digital VCR you've got your shows even if you cancel the service at some point.
(Well, unless you've got a TiVo, where they fraudulently disable the device when you cancel their listings service.)
The main downside is that control is moved out of your home, returning PVR users to the dark ages where they had to watch commercials. Unless, of course, you still have your PVR at home, and use IT to record the video that comes from the upstream PVR. Then, you've got all the features you want. Chances are, that an upstream PVR will be PPV like. If that is the case, I'd still use the downstream PVR in my home for the majority of recording, but only use the upstream PVR for recording conflicts, or niche programming. In any case, the PVR at the home isn't going away.
What are you people crazy? Ads are here to stay. Fact: Television exists because of advertising. There is no way Tivo will be allowed to attain a significant market share without some safe-guards in place to make sure viewers are force-fed their daily dose of advertisements.
VCRs are tolerated by the Television industry because their impact on ad-aversion is thought to be minimal. Face it, most people don't know how to use the timer-record features of their VCRs - the vast majority of television people watch is live-broadcast. Thus, ad-watching remains a huge part of television viewing.
Tivo and similar PVRs can change this - through integrated electronic programme guides, they make it easy for people to record shows regardless of their air-time. Large built-in storage make them even more attractive. Your average Joe Remote can now actually negotiate the smorgasboard of TV in their own time, and therefore easily skip ads. Once these devices become as ubiquitous as the VCR free-to-air networks are in real trouble.
Unless... well, you work it out.
--
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Rare Window - free your photos
Could this sort of thing wipe out the video rental business?
I never watch pay-per-view movies (and I don't know anybody who does), because I like being able to watch a movie at a time that's convinient for me, pause it to go to the bathroom, etc. These outweighs the disadvantages of actually having to go to the rental store.
But, with video on demand, these disadvantages are gone. Bye bye, Blockbuster?
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-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
Eh? A Tivo will let you get a good-quality MPEG2 stream of whatever video you want, and with recent hacks, the files can be backed up as required.
30 hours of MPEG2 stream = $200 worth of hard drive. Equivalent to 20 DVDs' worth of movies. With DVDs costing ~$15-20, it's price-competitive to just buy a new hard drive every time the old one fills up.
2 years from now, $200 worth of hard drive will archive 60 hours of video. Or more. DVDs, of course, will still cost $15-20 apiece.
10 years from now, $50 will buy a magic cube that'll hold your last 8 years' worth of MPEG video. Another $50 will buy you an identical cube that you can stick in a safety deposit box in case your house burns down and destroys the first one.
15 years from now, you'll be watching copies of those MPEGs from your "Tivo emulated on your headband 23-GHz megaputer and projected directly onto your retina", while the NTSC-quality images on your VHS tapes have silently gone the way of magnetic flux loss, oxide-flaking-off, and all the other afflictions that magnetic tapes suffer from. (Or you'll be watching fourth-generation analog copies of your VHS tapes, which will be just as bad.)
I don't own a Tivo, hell, I barely watch TV anymore. But if I were interested in archiving video, I'd take a Tivo over a VCR any day.
True. Your old PVR probably won't record the video-on-demand your cable company offers.
So you hack the ever-lovin' hell out of it until it will. (Or more likely, you wait until someone else does, preferably in a non-DMCA country, and you download the hack yourself ;-)
a) it's not 'personal', in that no content is held by the user. The cable company has total control over what you do and don't watch with this device.
b) it's not a 'recorder', since it doesn't record anything. The servers at the other end of the cable do the actual 'recording'.
i suppose the word 'video' has some relevance in this context.
This is nothing like a TiVO, this is just flexible programming taken to a new level. The bandwidth requirements for this will be astronomical, not to mention the I/O requirements for the video servers themselves.
But why only do this with a set-top box? Why not give cable modem users this capability - i.e. stream MPEG-2 to a window on your Windows/ MacOS/ X desktop? I've often wondered, since i subscribe to both cable TV and cable internet from the same provider, why they can't offer me something like this.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Video on demand was tried and failed in the mid nineties. Rebranding it as some cool Tivo mutation doesn't change what it is, and the reasons it will fail.
What's interesting is that it shows how successful Tivo has become.
Who's ready to propose some Linux-based SAN sales to the cable companies?
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
What amazes me in all this is the completely separate approaches from TV (video/movie) broadcasters and audio (radio/internet/mp3/whatever) broadcasters. While Cable companies are trying to get real stream-on-demand technology in place, the dubious RIAA are trying to stop the exact same technology for music; even for companies that pay broadcasting fees and aren't being accused of copyright infringement... there was a slashdot article that I have in mind, I just can't find it right now...
I'm assuming you're referring to the hack that allowed you to add this capability in pre-2.0 versions of the TiVo software since this capability never officially existed on a TiVo. The newest software version (2.0.1) effectively disabled this hack, and so far no other hacks have been found to reintroduce this capability. I know that there are ways to change the speed of the 3 steps of Fast-Forward, but don't know the particulars.
I don't know why you'd be stocking up on Win2k, unless you're planning on some sort of mass infestation ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H instalation program to get back at the companies.
Actually, the Sluggy Freelance online comic is going this route- donate ten bucks, and you get the daily comic page without any banner ads, for one year.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I'm disappointed that there is only ONE consumer tuner+MPEG encoder card on the market, and none with any hope of BSD drivers.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Sure, it records like a VCR, but the thing that snagged me was the ability to schedule season passes and not using VCR tapes. I did the HD upgrade and I now have 30 hours of "best quality" recording, which would be a mess to work with, if I still had a VCR & 15-30 tapes laying around. So, for me it's been the combination of ease-of-use/convenience and the ability to go in and add capabilities to the base product.
Even the networks will likely accept this fact. However, they'll fight it tooth and nail, even if they might make more money with the switch. Why? Because despite the 200+ channels out there, the networks still dominate TV. If you change the model, you give other companies an opportunity to get a piece of the action.
Historically we've seen many examples of the dominant players in the marketplace holding back technology in order to maintain their stranglehold on the market. (most recently in the U.S. the cellphone and bankcard industries) I doubt this will be any different.
Everybody I know with a TiVo no longer surfs realtime TV. At all.
When you sit down to watch TV, you look at the current list of what's recorded, and select from the list.
You get to see the shows you want, when you want; it's very convienient.
I know a few folks who are very disiplined with there VCR library. They're good at setting the schedules, shuffling the tapes in and out, and labeling them for their library. They don't need a TiVo. I'm not that disciplined. I've got hundreds of tapes, and haven't a clue what's on any of them, and I never watch them.
The TiVo makes it easy for the undisciplined viewer.
When I die, please cast my ashes upon Bill Gates -- for once, make him clean up after me!
Though frankly I don't expect to see them laying the sort of bandwidth to support something like this any time soon here in the UK (hell, BT's still dragging it's heels over DSL while not exactly making it easy for others to compete).
And what's to stop someone downloading a show on demand, then re-broadcasting (time-delayed and advert-less) it themselves for say 5% (per subscriber) of the price it cost them? I know I'd pay for a pirate TV network with no ads that came cheaper that the regular one.
OK, I'm kinda all over the place cos it's past quitting time at work and not thinking too straight, but I'm just trying to provoke some discussion : )
If you have the hardware to do 'video/TV on demand' it is hard to avoid not getting hit by lawyers. This kind of infrastructure costs more than users are willing to pay for every month. Internet access would be a better way to use the bandwidth.
J.
The bandwidth of current cable infrastructures is often limited to the broadcast of about 25 - 40 video channels at the last mile. In the near future I seriously doubt if this sort of infrastructure is capable of competing on cost and service with a $299 Tivo box. Besides Tivo, if you provide users with a 1 Mbps Internet connection it is possible to stream video in real-time, in my opinion users would go for this option.
Who want's inserted adds or other stuff inserted in their video stream? If a company offers hassle free Internet capable of video streaming, a subsription based video server could be more cost effective.
What do users want?
Just my 5 Eurocents Johan.
It's not clear what problem this architecture solves. It's one of those wierd architectural ideas that got run over by faster conventional machines.
Oracle owned nCube for a while, but, I think, sold it off. Larry Ellison was making big streaming media noises about 10 years ago, and nCube was involved in that. In fact, nCube demonstrated something like this about 10 years ago.
The problem with streaming media isn't the servers. It's the "last mile", as usual. This is one of those technologies stuck waiting for high-data-rate consumer broadband. You need about 3 to 5 Mb/s to the home to deliver decent video. It's tough to do that unless you're wiring something new, like a hotel or a condo complex. Juniper Networks was working on faster DSL over existing copper, but they just had a big layoff.
So this isn't going to be deployed in volume for a while.
And a Tivo is a useless piece of junk compared to a VCR, for archiving. Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other.
Until they add a tape drive. 20 gig tapes cost about $30. Sure, it's not random access, but if you're able to plan ahead a little you could preload the show. You could probably even preload it on the fly.
Not only is this good for archival, but also for transportation. I could record something at home, but view it at my friends house. Of course, to be truly universal you'd want to make sure it was an open standard, similar to the way VHS works. Yeah, it's probably a pipe dream in today's monopolistic patent crazy world.
That's my biggest problem with Tivo. Sure, you can hack it to add extra devices, but it would be a lot nicer if the company supported it.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
If I were ever to get back into watching TV, I would want one of the old school Tivos. The replay and recording facility is wonderful. I'm not interested in having them stream it down to me - I like the recording feature.
Anyone at Tivo listening? You just lost a potential customer.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
I disagree about it taking 10 years. I live in Austin, TX and I have video-on-demand now, so each cable subscriber in my neighborhood could be watching something different. I don't know or care how much it cost Time Warner to make that work, but it works.
However, I think the article still sucks, because VOD and PVR are not the same thing, no matter how much nCube tries.
While this may not be a good idea for the non-technical, most of those on this site could make their own.
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Not a typewriter
An executive scratches his chin and ponders, "... Now that control of this content has moved out of the home, I wonder if we could embed SmartTags somehow...". A thin smile cracks on the executive's face as he massages the backside of his hairless kitty.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
So, what happens when the TV-on-demand thing hits? Fees will easily double if it's unlimited viewing. If the entire country went to this model, "Must See TV" could occur at 2am so as to not trip over anything else. Moving new programs to Friday night wouldn't mark their death. Moving NYPD Blue to Wednesdays directly opposite Law & Order for fall 2001 wouldn't cause people like me to hate ABC, because they could put Blue after Letterman instead and I'd watch it the next day... you get my point. Suddenly the words "Prime time" lose their luster.
They'd be smarter with having a few dedicated pay-per-view channels, and charging someone to watch a tape-delayed show. Watching it in real time incurs no extra charge, but there's a $1 dollar charge to watch the newest Friends on Friday night... or something like that.
But you know what? I still like my TiVo. Now if they could just enable that second tuner so I could record Blue as well as L&O on Wednesdays this fall...
What this is is just an enhanced cable box. IMHO it's going to be the Divx to Tivo/ReplayTV/UltimateTV's DVD...
/Brian
I've had this idea floating around for a while, but the level of functionality it provided didn't really measure up to the cost.
First take your basic Linux PC with an S-video capable video card and a DVD-ROM drive. With the right software you have a region-free DVD player, even if it's not quite legal. Slap on audio codecs for Ogg Vorbis (and MP3 and WMA playback if you want) and a CD burner and you also have a very nice digital music station (completely free and clear on top of it). Now all that would probably be worth somewhere in the vicinity of $400 as is, and I couldn't picture a mom-and-pop operator (realistically the only outfits who would be able to get away with selling these things) making enough of a profit off of these boxes to justify it. But... you put in a good-sized hard drive or something of the sort, you've got a PVR. To me, that does justify the likely cost (probably $600-$800US)...
/Brian
Step 2. Hope the broadcasters dont try to sue us out of existance because people suddenly dont HAVE TO watch said commercials.
Step 3. Start working with the cable companies to find a way to take control away from the users again. After all, we the cable broadcasters know what is best for our viewers. Now we can say "hey, if you want to watch teletubbies at 4:17am all you have to do is ask. Oh and we're going to keep track of everything you watch so we can pump in the commercials most likely to suck the money right out of your wallet."
I have to admit, I like the idea of "on-demand" television, the ability to select and view whatever show I want at any time is very appealing (especially since it means I wont miss a show because I forgot to set my VCR before I went out for the night), but the fact that they think they're "helping" by keeping track of what each user watches so they can insert the "right" commercials is REALLY annoying.
Now all I need is a TV that will show me pro-M$ advertising while in the background it can fight with the AOL commercial trying to install "the all-new AOL 27". Why spam your mailbox when we can take over your TV and send it directly into your eyeballs?
For everything I've read about Tivo, there's nothing yet that has convinced me I want one.
I'm not going to repeat the feature list everyone else is posting. But if you are curious about what has people going so crazy, go see a Tivo or ReplayTV somewhere. Find a friend, or a friend's friend. Any PVR owner will be happy to show it off. They really are THAT cool.
Man, you said it.
Recently I have decided I need to create a backup image of my RTV 3030 hard drive. If the drive ever craps out (and that seems the most likely point of failure) I can replace it myself and keep on' truckin. No Panasonic Macrovision hassles, no switching to Tivo and losing 30-second skip...
I think that if PVRs take off the next generations will be saddled with all kinds of restrictions. I can very easily imagine a netowrk paying Tivo/RTV to disallow FF control inputs during their shows, for example... so long as the economics make sense, anyway. For that to be possible a LOT of people would have to be didging ads with PVRs, but things may get to that point. When they do I want to be still using my friendly old technology.
I can't see why this would either be difficult to arrange or be something the provider would not want to do.
Anybody have figures on the total cost of advertising per viewer per half-hour of programming in the US or UK? That's the figure the provider would have to charge us (per half-hour) to watch without the ads. Obviously the current rate varies but it would be interesing to get a feel for what it would cost.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Art level stuff I would probably go out and buy the DVD or something.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
this is some other service, not TiVo. There will still be room for both in the marketplace .. and home-built PVR type devices as well!
sulli
RTFJ.
Some experts have suggested that advertisers will focus increasingly on "imbedding" advertising in the programs, via a split screen, an unobtrusive logo, or product placement as a "prop" in the show.
This sounds morally repugnant. Imagine a TV show where there was little plot and just a whole lot of product placement. I for one hope this never takes off.
--
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
They have been talking about a new version of their InDemand broadcasting (pay-per-view) that will allow people using time warner digital cable to fast-forward/rewind/pause movies that they've ordered via their digital cable boxes from TW. I remember reading about this coming feature about 9 months ago... (this is in Orlando, FL)
"And like that
Actually, it did. The software that drives the nCube PVR is ... Oracle Video Server. Which Oracle tried (and failed) to push for a number of years, before quietly smoking the whole division last fall and pushing it over to nCube and another company whose name escapes me for the moment.
We talked about 2 years ago about using OVS to drive a video jukebox (30 hours? pfui - we were looking at a couple hundred, on hi-capacity IDE-RAID). Part of the idea was that you'd have a thin STB on each TV, and you could stream to each one individually. Never quite got off the ground, though.
They most certainly did, it was just undocumented. You enabled backdoors and used a remote code to reassign one button to be 30 second skip. It only worked with the 1.3 software, it was removed in 2.0 (at least, no one has figured out how to reenable it).
What's wrong with video on demand? That's exactly what I want. That's exactly what PVR provides, in a sort of backwards, silly way. Instead of just broadcasting shows, why can't networks also make them available for download/streaming?
This already exists in radio somewhat. Let me give you a specific example: I like to Listen to Car Talk on NPR. It comes on once a week, but I don't worry about being near my radio to hear it. If I miss it, I can just go to The Car Talk website and listen to the RealAudio version of the show whenever I want. It's great. There aren't even commercials in the web version (not that there are many commercials on NPR anyway).
Translation: We'll make alot of scratch.
But advertisers might actually grow to like nCube's PVR, he said, because the central control over distribution of the product will allow a cable operator to inject "targeted" advertising.
Translation: Viewers will hate it but we'll have money coming out of our hoo-hoos.
Some experts have suggested that advertisers will focus increasingly on "imbedding" advertising in the programs, via a split screen, an unobtrusive logo, or product placement as a "prop" in the show.
Translation: This will be annoying as hell but we'll be rolling in dough.
Executives at networks that rely more heavily on advertising for revenue are far less enthusiastic about the concept of putting the viewer in control.
Translation: They think it sucks the way it is now.
Murphy's Law of Copiers
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
It's really unbelievable. There seem to be two distinct service categories out there. First there are P2P services which strive to drive resources to the network edge, at cost to the consumers. Second, there are ASP type services such as Microsoft HailStorm and this second generation PVR concept, as well as the early 90's implementations of Video On Demand.
That's right. Screw the onsumer by having him/her store data he doesn't want/need as in P2P services and then, don't let joe consumer store the information he/she DOES want. While we're at it, lets do away with video storage completely and make everything pay-per-view...
This stuff is outragous!!!
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Obviously: Free/cheap TV means commercials. Tivo subverts this. Combo PVR/recordable-DVD devices are coming. So the future holds some combination of: (a) higher cable rates, more pay per view (b) centralized control and monitoring of viewing (c) more and harder to avoid adverts (d) cheaper programming (re-runs, reality TV, game shows) I suspect it may settle out as: - Free broadcast TV with cheap content and whatever commercials they want to stuff in any way they can. - Better content you either pay for or get free by interacting with targetted commercials. Captured or downloaded - and once paid for you can capture or download again for a nominal fee.
But don't think that the entertainment industry doesn't get anything in return for allowing you to cut out ads. They, in turn, get to know EXACTLY who watches what, when. They get to store it all in a giant database, and with some decent data mining, they could probably even create a pretty decent psychological profile of each person. This stuff already makes Doubleclick's privacy intrusions look like a joke. Use stuff like TIVO and cable, and you might as well just walk around in the streets handing out your detailed viewing and spending habits to complete strangers, because in essence, that's what you're doing. Me? I'll keep my antenna and I'll sit through the ads (or switch to a PS game while they're on), and maintain my anonimity, thank you.
is this.....is this for REAL?
great comedy company.
The tape transport is more failure-prone. Skipping forward/backward takes longer. There is no intelligence. With Tivo, I can tell it to record every new and/or rerun episode of a show and it finds and records them. If I am on vacation, I can come back to find 30 hours of stuff recorded. Ever try to record 30 hours on a single SVHS tape?
When I go on business trips or vacations.
That's a SPECIALTY task.
I don't know what your employer has been telling you, but vacations are something most people expect to take at least once a year. Business trips are common for many people.
It's already slightly fuzzy coming from the cable company.
Degrading it further is not a good idea and I use DirecTV, which has a stellar picture compared to cable TV.
Do you truly have a cable network that can deliver VOD to everyone at once, or do you have VOD that works as long as just a few people use it? If you really have a network capable of 1 channel per user, you are mighty lucky to be served by one of the few forward-looking companies. Probably you won't know until the system does overload -- unless you can get a few hundred neighbors to cooperate in a test and bring it down NOW. I've heard too many stories of cable executives enthusiastically pushing cable modems while being utterly clueless about the network segmentation ("Huh?") that is needed to make those work for more than a few people. Chances are the same thing will happen with VOD.
VOD and PVR are not the same thing, no matter how much nCube tries. Yep. Well, you could deliver PVR from a server over a VOD-capable network, but you can also crack nuts by setting off a hand grenade near them. That doesn't make the hand grenade a nutcracker... 8-)
"Worst non-technical article about a technical subject", or maybe "Most errors in one page".
The worst error of all: for this to work at all like Tivo, the cable company would have to dedicate one channel to each subscriber. That means cable loops with less than 100 subscribers on each, which will usually require running fiber further into neighborhoods and installing more fiber-to-cable units. Also the fiber-to-cable units have to be upgraded to select the channels instead of just dumping everything they get to the cable, the fiber bandwidth has to be increased to carry thousands of subscriber channels, and the central office needs lots of high-powered servers.
I do expect all those hardware upgrades to happen in about 10 years, but it's not going to happen just for timeshifting -- it will happen because the hardware is necessary for (1) good high-speed internet service to homes, and (2) to enable the cable companies to sell video rentals. It's going to take a long time to work out the details (mainly how the servers and the content providers split up the money), but on-line video rentals are going to be _big_ someday.
As far as scheduled programming goes, everything the article claimed as a reason for consumers to buy the service looks to me like a reason to avoid it: give me targeted advertisements embedded in the program or with fast-forward locked-out, and I'll spend a lot more time reading books!
Finally, "I can scale it, depending on how popular the service is. It's all under my roof. And I don't have to send a truck out to every customer who wants it. It presents great efficiencies for cable operators." WTF? No one had to send out a truck to put in my VCR or my DVD player. No one has to send out a truck to install Tivo boxes with the hard drive. But if they do implement the proposed scheme, they'll have to send out lots of trucks to do the network upgrades.
And a Tivo is a useless piece of junk compared to a VCR, for archiving. Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other.
For everything I've read about Tivo, there's nothing yet that has convinced me I want one. Can it get to the 100+ digital channels I have now? (not that my VCR can, but if the Tivo can't, then it's no better.) Just curious.
Want I rally want is a random access digital recorder with removeable media, mayabe a Sony miniDisk?
"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
If there's no way to fast-forward through the ads, no one will buy it. They'll have to pry my Replay from my cold, dead fingers.
I can see it now...
One of three scenarios:
[1] The network sucks
"Honey, let's watch that episode of the Sopranos we taped last night"
"Ok! Wait a second...you sure you taped the Sopranos?"
"Yeah, why?"
"Nothing, its just been saying 'buffering' for the past twenty minutes!"
[2]All your rights are belong to us
"Honey, let's watch that movie we taped last night off HBO."
"Ok! Wait a second...you sure you taped that movie?"
"Yeah, why?"
"Nothing, its just saying that we're violating section 1201(a) of the DMCA, and the authorities are on their way..."
[3]Streaming media...er...SUCKS
"Honey? Why does Regis look like a bunch of pixels?"