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AOL will launch TiVo-like Mystro service
Jason1729 writes "According to this article on Yahoo, AOL is launching its on version of a PVR service. The content will be stored at the cable provider and not in the local hardware. That seems to be a huge disadvantage because it will use a lot more cable bandwidth transfering the content for a single viewer. It sounds like they're doing it that way so they can restrict which shows you can use the service with (like lock out new episodes of network shows)."
This will end badly
Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
If AOL truly does it right and makes it 100% server-side, what do they put as a "decoder box" in your living room? Why not offer PC software so that you can access your Mystro account from anywhere, and watch your shows? I'd be all over that - being able to set up my laptop on the road in a hotel with high-speed internet and not have to suffer with the hotel's lousy cable.
What's your damage, Heather?
It's interesting to note that this is where TiVo started out - the original project the TiVo pioneers worked on was the HSN cable network which offered exactly these features.
Meanwhile over in the UK we were promised similar features years ago but because our cable providers are cash strapped at the moment they've not yet appeared.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
Will it have remote control, or artificial intellingence? Is there a development kit available? If not, then I hardly think your story is worthy of slashdot, do you?
Seriously, other than the waste of bandwidth, how is this better than a Tivo?
Just like spam, they only have to hit 1% of they're target audience to call it a success.
And with the # of ma and pa's far outnumbering kiddies and in the know professionals who will avoid this like the plague, they're destined to be a beacon to any large distributor who doesn't want they're movie Tivo'd....err PVR'd.
Distributor: AOL, please don't PVR our show, it's under "special" programming
AOL: That will be 50 Million.
Distributor: That's hiway robbery! Forget it, I'm not paying.
AOL: Fine, we just "automatically" PVR'd it for all our customers and provided live feed for all our Internet Subscribers
Distributor: You Can't do that!
AOL: We can't? Who ya gonna call? SLASHDOT! HAHAHAHAHA!
Distributor: No, they don't have any real power except the occasional network bandwidth block. Here's your money.
AOL: Yeah! We get to show better than expected Earnings!
Bah.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred (AOL FREE) with American Buttering.
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
i realize that disk space is cheap, but this could be interesting! if a user (viewer?) is allowed 6 hours (i say six because you have 6hr miniseries) and this takes (a guess!) 10G and you have 10,000 viewers.... thats's 100TB! damn.
it seems like the tivo model is a wonderful example of distributed computing here!
eric
That seems to be a huge disadvantage because it will use a lot more cable bandwidth transfering the content for a single viewer.
There certainly is a disadvantage in terms of bandwidth, but there is an advantage in terms of storage -- by storing everything centrally, they only need to keep one copy of each program instead of having millions of copies spread around the network. (Ok, they'd actually have more than one copy, but it would still be far less than the millions otherwise needed.)
This also means that people wouldn't need to program in advance what they wanted to record, since AOL could proactively store everything.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
It sounds like they're doing it that way so they can restrict which shows you can use the service with (like lock out new episodes of network shows).
From the article:
The New York Times, which was the first to report the details of AOL's Mystro project, said it would allow networks to determine which shows could be rescheduled and to insert commercials into replays.
There's your answer. They don't want people skipping commercials, and they want full control over rescheduling.
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
They must have gotten a bargain on cd's.
The reason that all the equipment is going to be at the cable provider is because of the fact that with this new service, you will not be able to skip commercials like you are able to with tivo. Most of the same features are there, pausing live tv, skipping shows, etc. But, from what I have heard, you will not be able to skip commercials, and there will be commercial pop-ups when the tivo is in a freeze frame. Companies that advertise don't like tivo for the fact that nobody sees their ads anymore.
Alcohol & calculus don't mix. Never drink & derive.
Comcast already has this too. AOL is playing catchup.
as reported earlier
This sounds like Apple back in the day... "Well were bleeding money as it is, why not start another service." But at least Apple had the sense to try and create new markets (ie. the first PDA and one of the first Digicams) AOL/TW coming out with a PVR box? God there are so many holes in that idea that I don't know where to start.
In any case (heh 'Case' get it?) this is not the Holy Grail that will get AOL/TW out of the red, in fact this is more likely to put them in ReplayTV land (read: bankrupcy court).
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
The reason that all the equipment is going to be at the cable provider is because of the fact that with this new service, you will not be able to skip commercials like you are able to with tivo. Most of the same features are there, pausing live tv, skipping shows, etc. But, from what I have heard, you will not be able to skip commercials, and there will be commercial pop-ups when the tivo is in a freeze frame. Companies that advertise don't like tivo for the fact that nobody sees their ads anymore.
Alcohol & calculus don't mix. Never drink & derive.
...trying to build their own world again... with shit...
You don't need to pay for service. I built a mythtv! And the programing info is generated by
xmltv! For $0.00!
Check out mythtv.org
What, AOL is going to start battling Spider-Man as well now?
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Giving the public more control over content delivery is what makes a successful product. MP3, Tivo, internet, etc. Restricting content delivery is doomed to failure (Divx (not the codec, the DVD replacement)).
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
When a perfectly usable product is crippled and destroyed, and then remarketed as new and improved, don't you?
The only stuff I would want to record is new episodes of network shows. And they expect to sell a service that doesn't do what the consumer wants? These guys haven't finished Economics 101. Send em back to college.
Seriously, why would AOL care anyway? They don't own NBC, CBS or ABC do they? Whatever happened to laisse faire?
I'm told that somewhere between 95% and 93% of the fiber-optic 'net backbone is unused; sounds like AOL is trying to light most of it up!
However, there is the obvious (at least to me) problem of bandwidth to the home. The vast bulk of homes that do have broadband are sharing reasonably limited bandwidth with other homes. Streaming high-quality video to many people at once who are sharing moderate bandwith seems like a no-go. In otherwords, it seems to me that if the service catches on, they're dead; they'll have to strive for mediocrity.
Unless we put fiber into everyone's home. Yeah!
I'll keep my Tivo for now. One of the best things I ever purchased.
Mystro?? It's a mysteron plot! Can't you see! Call Sprectrum and get Captain Scarlet on this one! He's indestructable!
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
They're not putting it at the head-end so they can restrict content, nor is it a bandwidth problem - just the opposite. They're putting it at the head-end so that cable networks can make it a revenue source.
Cable companies are spending their biggest fortunes at the moment installing Video-on-Demand systems, many of which already have PVR functionality built in. Bandwidth is no more of an issue with stopping, starting, and feeding a PVR stream than with a VOD stream. The only difference is disk space and where it gets its content from.
A much more core issue (and one that would be much for fun to stir up /. with, IMO) is that of content rights. Selling a box that allows consumers to record and play shows at home is one thing, but getting large cable companies into the business of caching broadcast content and then essentially 'reselling' that cached content without complex revenue-sharing agreements is a can of worms indeed.
They seem to adress this here:
"For example, if Mystro TV is successfully developed and the appropriate rights secured from owners of video programming, a subscriber could use the Mystro TV service to watch a program that aired the previous day, or to begin watching from the beginning a show already in progress," AOL said.
So to me this sounds like a VOD product that gets its content from broadcast television. iN DEMAND has made a decent business aggregating Hollywood studio content for distribution over VOD and taking a cut. Looks like AOL wants to make a niche out of re-distributing older (or very slightly older) television content. Pretty much what the networks are doing now with things like the re-broadcast of "Late Night w/ Conan O'Brian" on Comedy Central, except they get $x per play over VOD.
Not a bad niche - just might work.
------
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
Storing each TV show on a Tivo for each user who wants to watch it is very inefficient in terms of total storage space used over all the Tivos in the region. By storing each show once, and piping it to users from a central server on demand, the total storage requirement is vastly reduced, and the bandwidth requirement grows possibly linearly with the number of users. Unfortunately this is exactly the opposite of what the world needs right now.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
So let me get this straight...
AOL is planning on sweeping into a market with an obviously inferior product that gives consumers less control than products that are already on the market, they'll probably charge more for it (wild guess there), and they seriously expect this to be a profit-making venture.
AOL is dumber than Enron.
As much as this is enough to make a geek's skin crawl, I think this will likely succeed. It's hard to argue with the success of AOL's internet service, despite the fact that you can grab any random geek who will tell you that it sucks. This is PVR for the masses.
--
There's TONS of bandwidth left on cable. Thanks to digital boxes (which take 1/100th of the spectrum that a broadcast channel does), most cable companies are at a small fraction of their max bandwidth.
Cable's such a great solution...it's big, thick, has high potential and is well insulated. It's got less noise than power lines and better range then telephone while being less expensive than copper.
Of course, there's also the matter of the supply boxes at the head end. VOD suppliers are like massive DVRs that operate in parellel -- and they're not perfect yet. There's still a lot of lag when they get loaded and many companies have yet to scale the number of their VOD boxes to match the number of digital subscribers.
I kind of worry that this is intended to replace the really cool DVR devices TW has been testing. The menu system is great and they go a beyond Tivo and the like by allowing your to record almost all pay channels and PPV material (first run stuff is black of course), and by having simple native support for watching one channel while recording another. Sure, Tivo can do this, but it's complicated as hell...my mom, who never even figured out her VCR, uses the DVR without trouble.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
and their internet business, as I recall, is going down the tubes because fewer people need or will tolerate AOL's hand holding nowadays.
SO in order to increase revenues, they decide to offer a product against an established competitor, except with more restrictions, fewer features, and more ads? And they think this will work?
I wonder what the color of the sky is in AOL's world.... cause they don't seem like they're in this one.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Unfortunately, this is a well thought out strategy that will likely hijack the cool technology of Tivo and ReplayTV and wipe them out. It's typical of the corporate mentality today...if someone comes up with something that impinges on the media, first sue them and then when that fails, take away their toys.
Of course, their implementation is never as good or as free (in the liberated sense) but they've got the muscle to make it happen. Want Tivo? Well, it'll cost you $250 for the iron and $10/month to keep it going. Oh, wait a second, here's this great online service from the cable company...no iron, $5 a month. Yeah, it's not the same thing, and we take control of your viewing habits (forced commercials, can't record certain shows, we keep a record of the crap you're watching and sell it, etc) but come on, it's cheap and easy.
And, sadly, in the America of today, that's likely the product that will succeed.
I'm a 2 1/2 year Tivo user and it's the best thing ever created for television, and I tell anyone who asks that. However, the startup costs were inconsequential for me and I recognize that's not always the case...despite my evangelizing the product, a grand total of zero of my friends have Tivos. But I bet more than a few of them will opt for something like this.
Also, for all of those sooo proud of your homebuilt's: You've reinvented the VCR, just more awkward, more expensive, and without cheap media.
Does your whatever adjust for scheduling changes, support wishlists, do smart scheduling that'll ignore recently recorded programs, re-runs, etc? Does it do this all automagically or do you need to rely on screen-scrapers or poor quality listings?
I don't mean to bust on folks, and all props to homebrew, but don't go calling something TiVo-like unless it really has the TiVo feature-set. If you've just managed to turn your couple-hundred-buck PC into an awkward thirty-buck VCR then call it what it is...
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
...imagine the storage capacity! Seriously, how much can you figure it would take to store all the cable shows that run all the time?
Of course, there are plenty of repeats, but still -- digital access to all the content on
[cheese] And just imagine a Beowulf cluster of those [\cheese]
*rimshot*
-theGreater Nutcase.
... that tivo and others are getting popular. In my area they are pushing their PPV-on-demand services -- as well as HBO/Showtime on demand -- very heavily. I did order a movie using the service and found that I could, indeed, pause it, fast-forward, rewind, etc.. but seeing as I already have those features on Tivo, it's not as much of a draw for me as it might be for a brand-new subscriber.
1) As evidenced by Lotus Notes' "shared message", it'll never go away. SOMEONE will want to keep it, indefinitely. And be ultra-pissed when it vanishes. So you're going to wind up holding a lot of programming forever. What are they going to say? "content only available for 1 year" and you can't tape it on your VCR?
2) I think this may be doomed. I've said in the past that Free as in Beer trumps a lot of things. But if you can't tape tonight's Friends, what's the point? Then Joe Consumer has to say "well, I can't watch that on the cable box, so I have to tape it? Why am I paying the money?". More confusion will trump Free Beer.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
The thought also occurred that perhaps Slashdot saw fit to block a large quantity of its bandwidth-paying-for, advertisement-viewing userbase. In that case, Slashcode is knackered, because I can still post this. Also, if this is the case, Kuro5hin has better stories, smarter posters, and fewer anti-war to correct.
Yeah, it just might work. But you don't want it to. Here's why.
Today, if you want to watch a TV series, or a movie, over and over at your leisure then you can buy the DVD. When you buy the DVD, the publisher makes some money. If we're talking about a $20 movie, then the studio might make $5-$10 from the sale, once the retail markup, distribution, production, royalties, marketing and other costs are considered.
But once you've bought the DVD, the publisher will make no more money out of you for that particular title. Yes, if you've got more money than sense (or if you really, really want it) then they might manage to sell you a director's cut, special edition or whatever but the bottom line is that the publisher will only make a fixed amount from you no matter how often you watch the product.
However, if they could keep the movie, but sell you access to it, at $3 per viewing, then pretty soon they'll have recouped the same amount of money if not more from you. Let's face it, any movie that you like enough to go out and buy on DVD is one that you'll happily sit down and watch at least two or three times, and at $3 a time that's $6-9 already. Then you get your Star Wars devotees and Titanic nuts who'll watch their favourite movie at least once a week. Now your talking about at least $150 per year from just one movie.
Now let's consider how else those customers could be milked/revenue streams maximised. Well, for one thing you could charge different customers different prices. Charge Titanic nuts who'll pay $4 per view that amount while charging those that'll only pay the basic $3 "only" $3. Charge a premium for watching Disney movies on Sunday afternoons, or whatever else you want.
Charging different customers different amounts for the same product is nothing new and it's certainly not something that companies are embarrassed about - Amazon does it, and so do mobile (cell) phone providers. So you can bet that AOL (or whoever) would do it too given the chance.
This isn't going to happen tomorrow, or next year, or in five years but it is coming. It's just to attractive for the publishers and broadcasters to ignore forever.
So, while a broadcast/cable provider-end storage solution Tivo might not sound like a big deal on its own, it does sound like a pretty big when you take it to its obvious conclusion.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I agree that it's crap, but I think it's going to work. If for no other reason than that historically AOL can make their "crap" sell. Look how many people still use AOL for their Internet?? AOL throws billions of marketing dollars at a project, and it works. They know how to make people pay perfectly good money for crap.
Social Engineering Expert: Because there is no patch for stupidity.
This will go the way of UltimateTV and ReplayTV.
Funny how AOL can't seem to find any product lines that are actually *profitable*.
TiVo is an amazing gadget, but even TiVo, Inc. is struggling to find a way to make it a profitable service. Doesn't look like AOL is doing anything unique.
TiVo Upgrades
If AOL can promote this so that everyone knows what a PVR can really do, people will soon realise that a much better alternative exists and Tivo sales could rise a bit. This could be good.
There is an easier way for networks to prevent commercial skipping - the ad crawl. You already see those animated cars promoting some show roaming across the bottom of the screen, or the little show "window" surrounded by sports or stock info. I have no doubt that it will become the standard method of advertising, with 1/4 (or more) of the screen dedicated to advertising constantly. Commercial breaks will disappear. A law could be passed to prevent automated blockage of that part of the screen, and the ads will rotate from the bottom to the top and sides to prevent someone from just taping a piece of cardboard to the bottom of the screen.
Sorry to be so negative, but if I were in charge of a network it would have already been done. And as soon as one does it, the rest will rapidly follow.
Would seem to be pretty simple to block - and how would they know how you are seeing it on your screen without monitoring you in your home?
Um, that was a problem, _not_ a suggestion Big Brother!
Is this going to be offered in a package deal with AOL Broadband?
What you forgot is that AOL is really AOL-Time Warner, and they own most of the content providers!
Time Warner owns The WB, CNN, CNN Headline News, TBS, TNT, TCM, Cartoon Network, but not much else that I surf past on basic cable. Time Warner does not own CBS, UPN, MTV, Nickelodeon (all Viacom), or ABC, ABC Family, ESPN, Disney, Toon Disney (all Disney). None of them owns NBC, MSNBC (Gen Elec Co), A&E, The History Channel, The Biography Channel (A&E TV Nets), Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet (Discovery Comms), BET (BET Nets), E!, style. (E! Ent Nets), Fox, Fox News (News Corp),
Will I retire or break 10K?
...before AOL's ISP pulls the plug b/c of DMCA accusations?
Repeal the DMCA!
I bought a Tivo a couple of months ago when they had refurb units for $150. I'm still undecided if it truly is worth $150 + $12/month.
Most Tivo owners say they watch more TV. I've found the opposite to be true. I guess I was expecting my Tivo to discover lots of hidden gems that I was missing. It turns out that most of TV is crap (IMO). There are maybe 3 tv shows that I regularly watch- Simpsons, Good Eats, and... okay, two tv shows.
But now that I know the Tivo will snag them, I never have to worry about being in front of the tube at a certain time. Consequently I watch far less tv. And now I rarely find myself watching things off of the Tivo. So in a way, Tivo has weaned me from TV.
Now, although obviously I am not every consumer in America, I am unable to see what this service has to offer, and what they honestly believe will make people choose their service over something else the consumer can have much more control over.
I used to think Peter Shipley was cool. Then I aged past 16.
but seeing as I already have those features on Tivo
Not if your digital cable box outputs Macrovision encoding (it already does so for some programs) and your PVR is required to stop recording when it sees Macrovision (not USA law yet, but very soon).
On the other hand, because it's licensed by the owner of copyright in the programming, it's legal in Australia, whose laws consider time-shifting with a VCR or PVR as copyright infringement because of the lack of a Betamax doctrine.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
It'll learn that I like to watch Fox News, and then mysteriously record CNN instead.
Or that I like to record action movies. But ignore any that aren't on AOL/TW-owned channels.
Everyone keeps talking about how this is all about ads, what about users that transfer recorded television from their TiVo to other devices? Wouldn't this render such an act impossible? Or at least incredibly illegal?
Myth 1: Viewers always skip the commercials when watching a record program. This isn't true and anyone with a DVR/PVR can verify this fact. You watch commercials that interest you or perhaps even just plain forget to forward through.
Myth 2: Advertisers automatically hate DVRs/PVRs because of Myth 1. As recently reported on Slashdot, there is at least one study to show that retention levels are just as high for viewers who fast forward through commercials than those who watch them at normal speed. Of course, everyone's gut reaction is that DVRs/PVRs are bad for advertisers because they have the capability to fast forward.
Myth 3: Hot women are great in bed. I'm not suggesting you start sleeping with ugly women, but don't assume anything.
Myth 4: Media companies are smart. Ok, that's not a myth but it is a point I want to make. ReplayTV was sued because it allowed users to email shows and had a "instant" commercial skip function. Besides the fact that emailing the show is no different than recording it on a VCR and giving the tape to a friend (which is completely legal under the fair use doctrine), the media companies just want to treat anything in digital form different because it lets them fight a battle that they already lost 20 years ago. Their argument is essentially that any device which COULD be used for illegal purpose is inherently illegal. Their goal is to continue their business model of reselling content. Take a movie. Pay to see it in a theater. Buy the video or DVD. Purchase it on PPV. This is because they truly feel that the content is licensed and not owned (in a limited fashion) by the consumer. As long as they can resell it, the economics make sense because they get multiple returns for the production. DVRs/PVRs and the change in behavior are one step in the process for destroying that model. Record a digital version of a movie on PPV and then burn it to a consumer DVD burning device. Then loan the copy to a friend. Each step is removing a revenue stream from the media company. And they don't know how to stop this.
It really depends where you're coming from. Obviously you were a channel surfer before the Tivo purchase. Most people who say they watch more TV since they bought Tivo are the crowd of people who REFUSED to watch anything on TV because it was so full of crap (Think: TV rots your mind bumperstickers, etc). Then comes Tivo, a way to record ONLY what you want to see, all those interesting looking shows that somehow are aired at 3am while you're in bed. Or during those long work nights doing server installs. Suddenly, you come home after a week and find you have about 12 hours of TV shows that you REALLY like and would have missed otherwise. Man, Tivo is god.
CmdrTaco on Tuesday March 11, @01:53AM
from the now-here's-where-it-get-interesting dept.
admiral2001 writes "Here is is a NYTimes story about AOL-Time-Warner's plans for a TiVo-killing 'Mystro TV' (nytimes annoying free registration required). They plan to begin rolling this out sometime in the next two years. Their major features are the simple pause, rewind, and fast forward that all PVRs have. However, they've taken the obvious stance to "let[s] networks set the parameters, dictating which shows users can reschedule, and it also creates ways for networks to insert commercials." The article even mentions how they could get an advantage in pushing their product because "viewers could try out Mystro TV by pushing a button on their remote"."
I have a TiVo. I just sold it on ebay. I'm switching to DirecTV because I want to get the integrated DTV receiver w/TiVo builtin. It has a huge number of advantages over a standalone TiVo. But that's not the point.
The point is that it's fully supported by DirecTV. And it's highly unlikely that DirecTV will ever go to some centralized server like the AOL/Mystro solution because Sat TV is (for the most part) one way. So for DirecTV the best solution is a distributed solution like TiVo, rather than a centralized solution like Mystro.
And I know at least one person who, when their DirecTV receiver broke, decided to replace it with a TiVo enabled receiver.
So I don't think TiVo is going away. It may not replace the VCR as a consequence of being effectively locked out of the cable market. But it isn't going away. It'll just be a different upgrade feature for DirecTV. They'll advertise it as Mystro on steroids, and they'll let AOL do 90% of the marketing.
$.02
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
This wasn't designed with your rights in mind. Remember, AOL=Time Warner=Warner Brothers=MPAA and RIAA. Here we have a service provider who is also a content creator, so guess what their service will be like? Crippled, pretty much. They don't want you recording that? Then you can't. They don't want you deleting commercials? Then you can't. They want to promo a show? It's recorded without your consent (anybody smell a more modern payola here?).
Bottom line is they're hoping that they can undercut TiVo and use their broader media power to plug Mystro. I'm guessing they won't even attempt to break even at first, as long as they kill TiVo. Then they can do whatever they want, including more draconian rules for what you can/can't record. And ultimately, because THEY store the content, they can also change their minds. Remember, storing all that will be a pain in the ass - and they're not going to do it unless it benefits them in an extremely tangiable way. Obviously, that will be content control OR profit from selling their control of the content to fellow content creators. Like, say, addition of noise or some sort of nag feature to movies, maybe?
So you ask how this is better....it's a whole lot better for them! But it sucks for you. People, don't let AOL kill TiVo, one of the truly cool gadgets that we have despite the MPAA and cronies.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
"For example, if Mystro TV is successfully developed and the appropriate rights secured from owners of video programming, a subscriber could use the Mystro TV service to watch a program that aired the previous day, or to begin watching from the beginning a show already in progress," AOL said.
If your Tivo does not record a show, its gone - with this it appears that in some cases you can watch the show without waiting for repeats.
...sorry I'll keep my Tivo, and let it reschedule, allow me to skip the commercials I want to, and I dont mind the $12.95 a month.
I might possibly try the www.mythtv.com once it matures, but for now, I enjoy my Tivo. Love the fact I bought a refurbed one for $150 and then stuck two 120Gb drives in there for a nice 300hr recording time, and no one to tell me what I can record or not.
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
Okay.. it should say:
:)
"By skipping commercials, I can watch 2 "1-hour" shows in 1.5 hours. Watching 10 "hours" of TV programming can be done in 7.5 hours with Tivo. I do a lot of things that interest me with an "extra" 2.5 hours of time!"
sorry for the stupid math.
In other words, claiming bandwidth will hold you back is pure fud. You can put 10,000 people on a single line card and get speeds of over 5Mbps per subscriber if you feed that head end with a wide enough pipe. (Multiple GigE interfaces?)
I've been saying that they should throttle at their internet border for a long time (they being cable companies) and give you some more bandwidth to internal content, like NNTP. That would doubtless distract people from using the internet at large quite so much. It would also allow more traffic between subscribers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I figure my time is worth in the order of a year of Tivo's service per hour...
Looking at the install docs for that, I figure I could pay Tivo service from now until the day I die and not have spent more than the value of the time I wasted installing that.
Now, if there was an ISO with all that crap pre-compiled, pre-installed, and pre-configured for a specific set of hardware I could buy and assemble quickly, then maybe it'd be worth it to play around with...
So someone made a crappy version of Tivo? Why is that exciting? I have a crappy "Tivo" on my desk right now. It's called a vcr, and my vcr is still superior to Mystro because I choose what I can put on tape and what to do with the tape once I have it.
Well, I guess I could mail my cassettes to the cable company after recording them. Then I'll have my own Mystro.
There are technical advantages to recording in the head-end. One is that you don't have to program which shows you want ahead of time--- the last N hours are always available. You also don't have to buy a new device and worry about hard-drive crashes: the service can be provided through existing set-top boxes, so installation cost is basically zero.
As I said in the last thread on this exact same issue, this is really more about stopping TiVo from jumping into the mainstream than anything else. Probably not something they actually have to worry about, considering how much difficulty TiVo has had persuading people that they really want one. I mean, once you have one you're hooked, but it's hard to get the initial adoption.
Personally, I really like the theory that what this is about is creating a VOD system for old television content. It's a real step in what I would consider the optimal direction for TV - subscription TV.
Instead of paying an obscene cable bill for access to all channels, I'd really love to pay per show I watch, commercial free. Probably with some kind of preview system where I can watch a show for two weeks with commercials, and then decide if I want to order the whole season. I imagine this would also cause a tendency for special features on TV. "For $3 extra, you can see the special features for this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, including writer's commentary, outtakes, and the script."
I don't even care if the shows Macrovisioned so I can't tape them to my VCR without an added charge (Though at that point, I'd prefer, rather than VCR, if I could just instantly order DVDs of episodes). I suspect this is a model that would be wildly more profitable for everyone involved, but, ultimately, more convenient to the consumer.
Then again, I may be underestimating the power of channel surfing.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
So much negativity in some of the posts.
/. posts just repel people.
This is just another case where new technologies conflict with established business models. I can see that this type of content caching is the wave of the future. There are so many possibilities here.
Mass broadcasting is definitely the old way of doing things but that is the methodology that all of the old business practices are based on.
By far the easiest part of this type of project is to develop the technology. To make it doable from a technical standpoint. The hard part is to work it into our social framework. There are a lot of established business relationships and ways of doing things that are going to be totally turned on their head with this stuff (as with so many new technology products). It is going to take a lot of hard work to establish new business models and relationships and make this all work. I applaud AOL for trying.
I've seen a lot of doom and gloom posts about the job market and things going down hill. If you look at things like this, there are so many opportunities out there but you have to be a little more than the really smart guy/gal in the back room with really good technical skills and bad social skills.
The experimentation and the hacking don't stop when the technical product is developed. There is another level of hacking and experimentation on the social/business level. It is every bit as frustrating/challenging/rewarding as any of the technical challenges if you approach it with the right attitude and realize that we are blazing new ground here. You are bound to meet resistance but it is just another nut to crack.
If you grasp the technology concepts (most people don't) and you have the patience to learn the social/business concepts then you make yourself much more valuable and you have many more opportunities. The negativity and impatience with the social aspects of change that I see represented in so many
Kingston Interactive Television have been doing this for over 3 years in the UK and each development has been submitted to slashdot only to rejected. (I wonder why ?)
Kingston are the world leaders in real Interactive DTV and nobody has come even close to duplicating the same range of services. As well as PVR, it is the only system in the world to offer user directed content, true VOD, DTV, Internet to the TV, Broadband Internet to the PC and webmail, all for ~£30 (50 USD/EURO)pcm.
As for the fact AOL have been developing this system in secret. Well I'll settle to call it an open secret in the DTV Industry. They tried to sell ourselves their system/technology and stated it would be ready for launch within months, however they had no STB, no content and few details; this was two years ago.
We then demonstrated our live system, already superior to what they offered and they went white, literally.
You hit upon the key factor to this service being useful, in noting they could store all programming.
If they really store everything, at least for a previous week, then I could see a lot of people going for it - basically you'd have a week to see your favorite show instead of having to see it at a certain time, and if you really liked it you could see it again.
I think you'd still want some kind of storage device (like a Tivo or VCR) n front of that though, as you can never trust centralized storage for things you want to keep for good.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It worked for DVD "Players" replacing Video Casette "Recorders". The new product is vastly inferior, but selling like hotcakes. I guess "consumers" out-dumb the corporations.
It's not a question of developing the technology, and then trying to work it into the social framework. You need to understand the social framework first, and then develop the technology around that. Easy example: VCRs (at least originally, before Macrovision) gave their purchasers total control. DVD machines and disks should have been designed to offer all of the copying features of the original VCRs. I own 2 VCRS. I buy and rent videotapes. I own zero DVD players. I buy and rent zero DVD disks. Multiply me by x-number of other people. Do the math. Try understanding ME, before you develop the technology. .
It's called NewSpeak -- as in Orwell's 1984.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I guess Hemos didn't catch this typo, "...AOL is launching its on version of a PVR..." should read, "...AOL is launching its own version of a PVR..." And since there is no way of contacting Hemos, so it will live as a thread.
One thing I don't think anybody's brought up yet, and the thing that worries me the most, is that the real potential to kill Tivo (and the entire concept behind it) would be when Mystro eventually and inevitably becomes standard cable. Look at DTV - it's practically a requirement here in NYC now, and if you go to Time Warner's web site, I challenge you to find any information at all on their analog cable offerings. Mystro will eventually become the standard cable service which will render Tivo not just unnecessary, but useless. In order to use the two together you'd have to select a TV show to watch on cable, then manually record it on Tivo - which basically puts Tivo in "boat anchor" mode; the Tivo service itself does nothing.
And of course, along the way you lose any real choice about the TV shows you want to watch or when you want to watch them, since there may only be a certain window of time a show is available, for example (this is true of Tivo by default as well, though you can always tell Tivo to keep a program "until I delete it").
My problem is not with this service being available, as I see no reason to switch from my Tivo. But it's silly to dismiss this as an idea that won't work. All AOL has to do is make it part of the standard cable service and boom - no more Tivo for anyone. It's not as if there's any actual competition among cable providers. (There's satellite, yeah, but as I know first-hand as an unfortunately former DirecTV subsriber, satellite is not always available to apartment dwellers. And this is a city of apartments.)
Surely you jest?
VHS is quite possibly the most inferior video format available. If you actually care about what you're looking at on the screen, VHS is a cruel joke.
This a partially why PVRs are so palatable. People are already used to the legacy format incapable of storing all the data for an NTSC frame.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I suggest you read Cringely's article and draw your own conclusions rather than rely on mine. Having said that... this is what I got from the article...
In the network TV biz, the goal is to be the leader in a targeted time slot. Shere numbers are king. Percentage of a desired demographic (usually 18 - 49) come second. Networks compete viciously for these time slots and often pit shows against each other that could each be successful in their own timeslots, but may die off from the competition.
What Bob doesn't mention is why this competition exists. Why risk so much for an arbitrary block of time? Obviously its got to do with the business of selling commercials. And I suspect a good deal of that is the creating of an artificial scarcity. Designate a slice of time as a prime slot for a prime demographic and sell the airtime for "sponsor messages" to the highest bidder.
If you allow the network's best content to become available arbitrarily, the idea of a scarce slice of time fails. And so does the current business model.
It might be worth mentioning that Cringely mentions HBO and nods to The Sopranos. HBO's business model is supported almost entirely by subscribers; sponsorship directly by the viewer. Consequently, their hit programming is made available at multiple times giving their customers more chances to catch their favorite episode. HBO has no concern for time slot dominance.
Cringely also notes that all this Tivo business will not likely affect how PBS runs.
You say they've reinvented the VCR, but more awkward, more expensive, and without cheap media.
The interesting thing is that 100 hours of video tape would take up an entire shelf, you would have to fast forward and rewind to find the show you want, and you can't randomly insert and delete shows from a single tape. So quite frankly, in many ways, storing digital video is actually less awkward than a VCR. The really interesting thing, however, is that storing digital video is currently competitive with video tape. Last I figured, a 2 hour(6 hour EP) video tape cost about $1. My most recently purchased hard drives cost about $1 per GB. Assume VCD quality is about equivalent to Standard play VHS (argue on this point, but for me it's pretty close). That means a video tape costs you $0.50 per hour, and a hard drive cost you about $0.65 per hour. When I realized this, I said goodbye to video tape forever. I've built a digital VCR, and use it as such. Converting an already existing computer to this task can be done for as little as $150, and I built myself a brand new one for $500. Notice, however, that I agree with you about my system not replacing Tivo. In fact I have two of them. I use them in conjunction with my Tivo, but when I want to store anything long term, my digital VCR is the way to go. (By the way, I know I could just open up my Tivo, hack it, and do this without the digital VCR, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Plus my digital VCR is still useful for converting my VHS tapes to a more portable/durable/easy to access format.)
Mystro had to have come from the brains at Time Warner Cable. Why does AOL waste money on this project when the AOL division owns 13% of TiVo stock? Why does AOL carry out beta tests for AOL subscribers (like myself) who also own TiVos to program them directly from their AOL accounts? Please kill the Mystro system. If you (Time Warner Cable) want to counter the DBS market, then spend the money you are wasting on Mystro and develop0 a TiVo set top box for your digital cable systems. Your inferior Scientific Atlantic based set top box is dual tuner, after all. Why try to put out of business a company that already has the market sewn up and whose name (like Coke and the Fridge) is synamous with the PVR market? And a company that you own a large chunk of stock in??? Stop this before you let Microsoft back into the market based upon your own stupidity. You handed the videogame market to Sony because you failed to properly push a single "next generation" game system years ago when you couldn't decide who to back, 3DO or Atari. Don't let it happen again!
"inefficient use of bandwidth" keeps coming up in the comments I've read, but honestly, which is worse... producing several (hundred/thousand/million) copies of (insert favorite movie here) on Beta... VHS... LaserDisc... DVD... Blu Ray...
or storing it digitally at a central location... "wasting bandwidth? If you can watch a movie through VOD in DVD quality, then why buy the DVD unless you're definitely going to be watching the content more than a few times?
I have a very small DVD collection, with just over a dozen discs. This time around, I'm much more careful about which movies I buy or ask for as gifts because of the huge assortment of VHS tapes I have sitting around the house that were never watched more than two or three times. What can I do with the old VHS tapes? Sooner or later, nobody's going to want them, even if I could manage to shuffle them off to someone on eBay.
Think about it. Obsolete mediums are worse than an old pop can because you really can't recycle an old VHS tape, AFAIK.
I'm not saying that the idea of specialized movie mediums should be killed off, but if the last 20 years are any indication, Blu Ray discs aren't going to be the last stop in terms of movie software sales.
Charles Briscoe-Smith :
:
After all, the gzip package is called `gzip', not `libz-bin'...
James Troup
Uh, probably because the gzip binary doesn't come from the
non-existent libz package or the existent zlib package.
-- debian-bugs-dist
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