Slashdot Mirror
Time Warner to Allow Digital Recording
platypussrex writes "CNN is reporting that some Time Warner cable customers will be offered the ability to use digital recording. The article says they will not have a commercial zapping feature but even the use of digital recording seems a major turn-around from what the entertainment industry has been saying so far. I wonder if this will help TiVo and ReplyTV gain 'legitimacy'?"
Why get this when you can just buy a Tivo system? Probably less cost in the long run, and a bigger HD...
And when AOL/TW buys the Broadcast Flag from Congress, you may still be able to use their set-top box to record one or two shows a year! Groovy! ;-)
Call me paranoid, but if Time Warner begins taking over a significant portion of the PVR market, then wouldn't they have a means to implement whatever copy "protection" schemes they want? If they're manufacturing the hardware, they could very easily make it implement the whole "broadcast flag" idea, assuming they release a similar product for digital television. Just seems to me like this is an attempt to gain a foothold into a market so that they could further control content/copying later.
Bigger drive, no onerous potential DRM issues, can use it with any channel/cable system, not just locked into a single companys. And of course, runs Linux ;-).
To me, the only advantage that these integrated boxes have is the ability to record digital MPEG-2 directly from the cable/satellite, without converting to and converting it back from analog and the loss. But guess what... the quality of the digital video stream is not all that great to begin with in most cases (the source signal is generally analog, passed through a real-time MPEG-2 encoder at the broadcasting facility, so it's not as good as say DVD) So quality loss is sort of negligle, IMO.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
It sounds great, but some key factors are missing!
First of all, they will NEVER allow you to make digital copies. Tell them you want to burn copies to DVD or a PC hard-drive and see how warm a response you get....there will be none from them!
They are allowing limited saving of shows. The limits are as big as the device's hard disk or maybe they will have other restrictions.
This is not a major victory. AOL/TW is behind Tivo, so it's no shock that they will over some similar features to cable customers.
This is OK, but don't get carried away with happiness. They still are not allowing people to make digital copies on removable media for personal use. Eventhough they save space and DVDs last longer than VCR tapes. Once DVD Burners become more common, they will probably ad some type of protection to prevent digital copies from being made to DVDs.
I think they were basically forced to compete with this feature because most of the satellite companies already offer DVR. It may be that the broadcasting and cinema groups are completely unaware of Time Warner Cable offering this. Kind of how Sony music seems to be trying to kill off the MP3 format and Sony Electronics keeps cranking out devices that can play MP3s. I think it's more likely that this is another case of a large company with a left hand that has no idea what the right hand is doing. Even though they do not offer a commercial skipping feature in their device they have to be aware that customers are going to be using it for such.
Well it puts people in a well defined box so you can't discover new things.
I'm not saying I wouldn't prefer targeted advertisting, but I can see a time in the future when everything is so customized that people don't learn about new things outside their "demographic".
Probably not a NEW idea. The media companies are worried about losing revenue due to fewer people watching commercials. Tell me something, why do people skip through the commercials? Its very simple. THEY DON'T WANT TO WATCH THEM. Yet for some reason, there's a large demographic of people that watch the Superbowl ONLY for the commercials.
What it all rolls down to is this, people watch TV to be entertained. With exception of the Superbowl, commercial breaks are lulls in the entertainment experience. They're a necessary evil, and people are willing to tolerate them as long as they have to, but the second they have an option to skip through them, they don't hesitate.
The secret here, ladies and gentlemen, is to create commercials that are WORTH WATCHING. If your commercial is so entertaining that someone is willing to watch it rather than skip through it, then the entire "PVR commercial theft" issue gets thrown right out the window. If people looked forward to commercials, they would probably also be more interested in the products being advertised.
Seems that this idea might work for other industries as well. Take the music industry for instance. Produce less crap, and more people might buy the music, less money will be wasted on the so called 90% of the content that loses money, and everyone will be happy.
Or maybe I'm just out of my tree.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
... I'll tell you why:
Scientific Atlanta, the company that will be making these PVR's for TW, also makes some of TW's digital cable boxes, including the version I have which decodes the HDTV signals broadcast over their cable network.
I own a TiVo and love it!
However, the thing I am dying for is an integrated TimeWarner digital cable box with TiVo like abilities. Support for HDTV would definitely be a plus, but just having complete integration between my TW digital box and my PVR would be heaven, and the Scientific Atlanta box could make this a reality!
- The digital channels would not ever need to be decoded to analog until it's sent to my TV -- leading to better quality recordings. Right now, anything off a digital channel is being decoded, sent to TiVo in analog format S-Video, then re-encoded in MPEG format by TiVo, and later decoded for my TV.
- I would not need two digital boxes (one for TiVo, one to watch live TV).
- The current TimeWarner digital TV navigation blows away TiVo's live TV navigation system. I'd love to be able to use it again with my PVR!
- They could include two decoders, like in the DirecTiVo box, so that I can record two programs at once... after all, most channels are already encoded digitally, the hard work is done.
- They could integrate HDTV! (A killer app, AFAIAC.)
Since AOL owns a percentage of TiVo, I won't be surprised if Scientific Atlanta licenses TiVo technology for the box (one can hope!).
"And like that