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ReplayTV 4000 Series Shares TV Over Net
REden writes " ReplayTV announces their ReplayTV 4000 Series networkable PVR. Features include video sharing between LAN attached Replays, sending a show to another Replay over the internet, and automatic commercial skip. Prices start at $700 for a 40 hour unit and max out at $2000 for a 320 hour unit. ReplayTV guide service included. Units are scheduled to ship November 14th." 320 hours. I can't imagine holding on to that much TV - but space is cheap, so, eh, why not?
Hmm. "Automatic commercial skip facility." If spammers can sue their ISPs now, how long until some advertiser sues Replay for loss of revenue?
Sean
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Assume I want time-shift ALL my weekly viewing
from night to day or to weekends etc, I'd need
a maximum of 20-30 hours on the laziest weeks.
I have seven four-hour tapes now for this purpose,
and rarely time shift ten hours a week.
I suppose the other 300 hours could be for
archiving, but there isn't that much I'd want.
I'd guestimate 100 hours would satisfy all
but the hard core vegetables.
Esp. since I expect someone to figure out how to send shows to a Linux box rather then another ReplayTV, so you don't need to store everything on the Replay, just whatever you don't have time to transfer.
There is some advantage to having a dedicated device with (I assume) a real OS. Maybe not such an issue if your PC runs Linux, but I'm expecting it will be a while until you can use the NVidia with ease to capture TV shows (including tuning the cable box) under Linux. I have the competing product (TiVo) and it has never ever crashed. It has lost power a few times, but never had some random DLL blow up and cause me to miss a TV show.
I can just see the net admins at colleges trying to deal with this. They've had to deal with napster and the like and all the bandwidth they'd consume on their LAN. Now imagine an entire dorm (or campus!) sending saved shows to each other.
If there's a way to hack the system, I can well imagine folks at the likes of MIT will find a way to do it. The result is that the initial broadcast of a show over the airwaves, cable, satelite, etc. could eventually be dwarfed by the time-delayed transmissions.
The Result? Bypass the current transmission media and get your shows direct from Replay! Sign up for the shows you want and they'd send it to you, over the internet. Then, just add video servers on the internet with pre-compressed movies available on a pay-per-view basis and you've got all you need to bypass the Blockbuster video rental shops -- just watch what you want, when you want it, without having to go out to get / return a video and no worry about late fees. Sure, it'll be free to share between RePlays for now, but I suspect that's just the initial push to build market share, and then there'd be a rollout of central server subscriptions, copy protection, and per-show charges.
This is nothing new. My wife and I have been doing this for awhile with the ATI AIW cards. We have three computers running with the card and their default software (which includes guide and PVR functions) all hooked up over a home network. Movies can be shifted back and forth over the network and viewed from any machine/tv in the house. Additionally they can be DIVX'd and sent to CD, etc. It cost me around $150 for each card (the newer much faster Radeon is $200 and the even faster 8500 is around $500 w/RF remote). 20 gig hard drive is about $69 bucks...so for about 219 you can have most of the functionality that is offered by this set top box plus be able to play your favorite games on the big screen. Or you can overpay, or your can wait for nVidia to play catch up in this area.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
However, I'm assuming that ReplayTV advertises their hours just like TiVo does, which is based on the lowest quality setting. If it's similar to TiVo, here is what it is probably like:
Seriously, since I've had my ReplayTV, I've wished that it could get show listings, etc., over my home network. It was obvious when I first got it that one of the future upgrades should be an ethernet port. But my home network cabling doesn't go near the TV, as I suspect is the case for a lot of people.
On the other hand, I now have an 802.11b base station. Wi-Fi would be perfect in this situation. No need to run cable out to the TV! Hopefully, the ReplayTV people are working on that right now. (Also, Xbox could use an 802.11b option, too. Listening, Xbox designers?)
All that has to be shared is information like station="WMAL" date="2002-06-03" skip-start="08:31:00" skip-end="08:31:30". Every time you push the "30 second skip" button, an entry like that gets created. Entries are distributed over Gnutella or Freenet. When watching a show, your player queries the net for entries with appropriate station, date, and time info. If a few different people have skipped over the same time slot, your player should skip it too.
Great open source project for somebody.