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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'?"
I hope they do a box with DVR and HD. I love my High Def cable box, much easier than an antenna, but I miss not being able to use my TiVo with it.
I can't build a box either. No one makes an HDTV PC card with a component INPUT, they are all Antenna input.
Subject is the message
How long before this becomes a Time Warner targed advertising tool?
The box can easily compile a list of what you're watching, and then pop up advertising based on your viewing demographic.
Soon you'll see targed ads in your schedule gude, on the music channels. And the ultimate: popping up while you're playing back your program.
I wonder if this announcement will offset the news that they've become one of the latest corporations to come under review for shady accounting practices.
Can I bum a sig?
Imagine you just sat down to find your favorite program.
Now imagine you power up your digi-TV-recorder from Time Warner.
You slowly hit the "Guide" button to scan for your favorite program.
All of the sudden, it's there, right in front of you, an AD brought to you by Time Warner!! Sitting right there, next to your channel choices! As you scroll through the list, you can't help but want to run out and buy a Big Mac....large fries.....super-size coke.... They aren't doing this to compete with satellite...they're doing it to integrate advertising into the overlay screens.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
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 am a TW cable employee (don't throw anything I am just an intern), and will be attending a session (4 hours for some reason) on this really soon.
I will say that they do know what the pricing is, and it will be rolled out in Greensboro, NC soon.
In addition, in case anyone cares. The whole system runs off a full rack of about 10 Sun servers... I can find out more info on those if anyone wants...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
No, S-vid doesn't do HD. When I say antenna I mean HD over the air, not normal crappy antenna signal. Most people get HD content via antenna, but Time Warner carries it in some markets via digital cable. It's much easier than dealing with the antenna and I don't need to buy the $500 receiver box to sit between the TV and antenna.
Well, for one thing, you get digital cable without the IR repeater that TiVo has to use. For my setup (digital cable + TiVo), the video signal goes through the digital decoder and then into TiVo. To change channels, the TiVo has little LEDs that you place over the remote sensor for the digital cable box. TiVo emulates the digital cable remote to change the channels, and is successful about 95% of the time. The rest of the time, TiVo almost changes the channel, and you get the wrong thing.
There are ways to lessen the effect, such as building an IR cage around the IR repeater/IR receiver portion. There are other options, such as going satelite (TiVo's ReplayTV box is a satelite decoder as well, so it has no problem changing channels) or basic cable (TiVo works fine as a basic cable box). But, since digital cable decoding is non-standard, the only way is to get the cable provider to offer a PVR box.
They probably won't go the TiVo route - TiVo would rather see a standard digital cable descrambler, usable in many cable systems, then one for each market. If a cable provider wants to make one for each market, TiVo will do it, but expect the cable provider to pay for the work needed to make the box. SonicBlue, who is behind the Time Warner box, is more willing to burnn their own money and work with the cable providers.
The real solution is a single, HD-enable digital cable standard, so that any manufacturer can make a box that works on all the networks, including TiVo. I imagine the cable providers get a bit of revenue renting out the digital cable decoders, so I don't expect this any time soon. Also, I'll have to see the pricing details to determine whether Time Warner is serious about this as a mainstream product, or only selling it to the rich folks that might have gone the SonicBlue route anyway.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
I can find out more info on those if anyone wants...
The following would be truly appreciated:
1. What operating system does it run?
2. What kind of a HD and partition does it use? (Standard or propietary)
3. What other "special" devices are in it?
4. What specifically is propietary and what is standard parts?
5. What DRM management software is in it?
6. Is it automagically updatable?
7. What user usage data does it record?
and any other pertinent info too would be useful, I'm sure.
Actually, if you could just sneak out the information details, and scan them in, or get a monkey to type in, and submit a story to \., that would be truly appreciated.
Of course, I am in no way, shape, or form, encouraging a company IP theft. [Enter further appropriate disclaimer here.]
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
You might want to check to see if your data cable is working and supported now. A nice surprise with version 3.0 was that I now have the serial cable going directly into my digital cable box -- no more ir mistakes! And it's faster too.
... 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
Now we have TW's PVR. It's not actually as useful as Tivo or ReplayTV but it comes with your cable service, it'll no doubt be marketted as a nice and cheap add on, so most people'll go with it rather than Tivo or ReplayTV. It also won't actually allow commercial skipping, or file sharing, or anything else Time Warner didn't like before hand.
So, what we're really seeing is them using their market position to force the suppliers of a product that they don't like out of the market. What are the odds that TW's real plan is that, in another five years, TiVo and ReplayTV will have all but pulled out of the market and the Time Warner PVR will force you to keep watching those ads. Even better, as you have to watch your TV through it, they'll be able to stop you channel surfing too.
Forgive me if I don't see this as an amazing U-turn from Time Warner, nor the beginning of their acceptance of PVRs (as we currently know them).
DSS receiver boxes have been sold with TiVo and UltimateTV hardware for quite some time now.
Once again the cable television industry is doing too little, too late to keep from losing yet more customers to digital satellite...