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Time Warner Cable NYC Begins DVR Distribution
MikeTRose writes "Today's NYT Circuits section has an article about the proliferation of digital television choices for cable and satellite customers. They mention that Time Warner Cable will be starting to offer DVR cable boxes to New York City subscribers in September 2003. Apparently the time-shifting features of the new Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 (flash demo) set-tops are unusually powerful, as I got mine in Brooklyn this past Tuesday. 80 GB drive, which equals an estimated 50 hours of digital cable programming (no quality controls a la TiVo or ReplayTV, everything is as-broadcast). Programming interface is integrated completely into the slightly-updated channel guide, and you hit one big ol' record button to save a show. The tuner can handle two channels at once, so you can watch one/record one, or record two programs while watching a prerecorded show (similar to the DirecTV TiVo units if I recall correctly). Works great so far, and there's no quality problem with recompressing the digital cable as there is with standalone DVRs, nor is there the annoying 2-3 second channel change lag while it caches video. At less than $10 a month -- no cost to the subscriber for the box -- that money we were saving for a TiVo is up for grabs."
I've had one of these boxes for two or three weeks, in Lincoln, Nebraska. It's great.
It costs an extra $5 a month, on top of the standard digital cable rate, and there were no hardware or installation charges. There's very tight integration with the program guide - when you browse through channels, you can see whatever you're watching (live or recorded) in a small window, and it's easy to program things.
The digital cable channels look fantastic - you can really tell the difference, especially when you pause the picture.
I've never used or even seen a tivo, so I don't know how this box compares to those, or specifically to the feature that lets you skip commercials. This box has a nice fast forward feature, with three different speeds, and when you drop out of it, the box tries to line you up with a scene change - in practice, it's pretty good at letting you hit the end of the commercial exactly.
At first I thought they were offering this because a DVR would make an ideal pay per view platform, but the box doesn't add anything to the PPV functionality of the old digital cable box. Time Warner has a system they call "iControl" that lets you pause, rewind, fast forward, etc., a PPV program, and the new box uses the same system, instead of its own disk.
Apparently they've been sending out a few software updates to these boxes. I was a very early adopter here - I had to keep calling the cable company, to see if they were out yet, to get mine. The installer told me that there were a lot of glitches early on in the roll out, but I haven't had many problems.
It is possible to trigger a reboot in the box by overloading it - I'm not exactly sure what causes it, but if you're doing several things at once with it, you can sink it. This has happened to me two or three times.
The really cool thing about these boxes is that they have USB and Firewire ports on them. But there's no software support for them. If you could extract video from these things, they'd be perfect.
"The whole category has been about the customer being able to get control"
Really, who has control here? Given the fact that it's the cable companies themselves that are distributing the boxes and the software, it's pretty safe to assume that they have complete access to information regarding what shows you've watched, what you're recording, etc. This is just the next step towards the uber-specific TV commercial placement of the future. Buy, my pretties, buy!
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
I was almost salivating when I read the article, until I realised that I live in the Bronx.
We have Cablevision here, and the service just plain sucks. I'm paying sixty doallrs a month for basic cable with no premium channels. They have a monopoly here, I can't switch cable providers, and my building won't let me have a dish.
The only thing I can count on is for their prices to go up. I can't even get 24/7 pay-per-view porn like they do in Manhattan.
It costs twenty dollars a month for basic channels 2-13 recpetion. Twenty bucks! Some people don't pay that for internet access!
When are they going to regulate cable companies who can't regulate themselves.
A year ago the TV people were crying that Tivos and other DVR devices would spell certain doom for free/commercial TV.
Then cable companies started talking seriously about pushing out there own DVR units.
Seemed pretty obvious to me that it had something to do with locking down certain features on the DVR's that the free/commercial TV people didn't like.
Has anyone found a downside yet?
The one reviewer seemed pretty pleased with the fast forward button. I thought for sure that would be one thing. I thought that they would restrict the speed so you were forced to watch commercials. Tivo's FF speed is pretty fast.
How about the ability for the cable companies to keep you from recording a program?
I am almost certain there is a programming flag that they can turn on to keep you from recording programs. It is supposed to be used for pay per view and the like, but tell me it isn't screaming for abuse.
Has anyone found any programs (or entire channels even) that they cannot record or time shift?
With my Tivo I have digital cable, and I have yet to be told I cannot time shift someone. I Tivo HBO all the time.
I've seen Time Warner's digital cable.. yes you dont have to compress it becuase it's already compressed. And it's horrible at that.. Just look into a dark area of a picture and you'll see the compression adjusting and all kinds of artifacts.
DirectDvr for DirectTv is much better becuase the picture quality is higher due to the extra bandwidth the satelite can play with.
I'm in Oshkosh, WI and I've had one for about 4 months now. Overall it's great, but there's little things that I wish they would iron out with a firmware upgrade. When you choose to record all episodes of a show it records all occurances, so you might record the same show 5 times in the same day if it's aired multiple times on multiple channels. It also has a tendency to crash once in a while and need to be factory reset. The AV inputs and the firewire connectors can't be used right now. But overall it's a great box, and well worth the money. I work 2nd shift and it lets me catch all the shows I miss during primetime and the ability to pause live tv is especially useful when my wife (seriously I have mod points and I got a wife) is feeling extra emotional. I work for Charter and I'm still waiting to see the DVR they have rolling out this fall in Minnesota.
If you are contemplating RCN, rub your face with a cheese grater instead, it will be a much more pleasant experience.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
>I thought for sure that would be one thing. I thought that they would restrict the speed so you were forced to watch commercials.
Call me cynical, but it would seen suicidal to wake up the sleeping DRM right now. Wait till Tivo et al are out of business and then push the new licensing agreement on them. I mean, why *wouldn't* they do that. The cable industry isn't exactly really into ethics or competition. They have a history of signing exclusive municipal deals, fighting off shared access, and a few months ago comcast told all its cable modem subscribers that unless they order their video service then the cable modem service will cost 10 dollars more.
Heh, just wait to see what they've got in store for him, especially when HBO, TBS, or whoever says, "We wont do business with you unless you stop skipping our commercials." Tivo and Replay would be immune to that, the cable companies aren't.
You really don't want your content provider to also be your hardware provider.
Under FCC guidelines, a Homeowner's Association or a landlord cannot prevent a homeowner from installing a satellite dish less than one meter in diameter on any property where the owner has both direct or indirect ownership and exclusive control. In some cases, a Homeowner's Association may be able to require the owner to adhere to certain guidelines, such as professional installation and proper screening. Furthermore, there may exist regulations on satellite dishes in historical districts.
In regards to rental property, FCC guidelines permit a leaseholder to install a dish less than one meter in diameter on areas that are under exclusive use of the tenant. Prior consent from the landlord is not required if the leaseholder intends to install the dish on an area where they have exclusive control (i.e. a patio or balcony).
For more information on satellite installation rights and regulations, please see the zoning section of the SBCA Web site at: http://www.sbca.com/government/zoning.htm.
I would have thought the box is recompressing the signal after converting it to analog just like every other DVR on the market.
I don't know where you are getting your information, but while stand alone tivos, replays, and if they exist stand alone ultimate-tvs all do compress the anlaog signal they receive, direcTiVos and DirecTV UltimateTV receivers simply decrypt the digital stream from DirecTV, and re-encrypt it before storing the digital stream onto the hard drives. This is why there is no "compression setting" on these systems. The compressed stream from DirecTV is about as compressed as the high compression setting of a SA Tivo, while being about as high quality as the low compression(high quality) setting.
There is some variability between manufacturers on the playback quality. The only time I have noticed pixilization on my Philips DirecTiVo has been duing bad rains. I have heard people complain about the quality of playback on other units.
Go to Google and look up "Tivo Community DirecTiVo playback quality" and start looking for reports of quality to determine which system may be best for you.
So far as I know no digital broadcast system is streaming Mpeg-4 yet. There may be a couple of Internet based companies trying it out, but it is too cutting edge for most businesses these days. If you want to get the rights to do so, this may be a way to sell cable over DSL. You will want a lot of bandwidth at the head end however, even though you will not have a lot of customers initially. I would also recomend using multi-cast to get around bandwidth issues initially. Figuring out what networks to multi-cast and what to uni-cast will be an ongoing decision making situation.
-Rusty
You never know...
We've had them in Austin, Texas for some time now. In fact, I'm watching a show I "time-shifted" earlier right now. I have to admit the technology is cool, but not as rapid as you might think.
:)
For one thing, if it is recording something, expect the remote to be sluggish. Like 5-10 second response times when it's feeling especially pissy.
I've also had a few cases of corruption a long time ago when I was recording two shows at once (yep, you can do that, but two's the limit) Both shows came out garbled and pretty much unwatchable.
Sometimes it locks up. You'll need to unplug it for a bit and let it think about what it did wrong. Oh, and when they don't turn it on until it gets the clock signal, they mean it. That, and sometimes I've lost everything which was stored after a power outage. Which is strange, cuz you would think the hard-drive would be okay with that...
I realize I've listed a bunch of negatives here. I do like the device, and it's worth the few bucks a month.
Now if I can just continue to resist the urge to explore those USB, FireWire, and other interesting bits, things will be grand.
I haven't used a SA 8000 myself, but I've talked to people who have. I've also played with other "advanced" SA boxes, like the 3100HD. I own a TiVo. Based on all that, I'd recommend anyone considering the SA 8000 take a good look at a TiVo first. The consensus seems to be that the SA 8000 looks good only so long as you don't know what you're missing.
The SA 8000 has these advantages:
However, the TiVo has advantages over the SA 8000:
* Requires Series2 TiVo and Home Media Option (extra cost)
The Season Pass is the key to DVRs. The power of the DVR is the ability to say, "I want you to record every new episode of ER." The DVR then figures out which episodes are new, when they come on, which ones to record, etc. My understanding is that SA's DVR has a fairly rudimentary ability to record shows by name. The Season Pass has an ability to distinguish reruns from new shows, determine when a show is on six times in a week and record it just once, automatically determine which of six showings in a week doesn't conflict with other recordings, and even record shows based on keyword searches of the actors, title, or description. What point is there in owning (or renting) a DVR if it's as cumbersome to use as a VCR?
Some important points about the SA 8000 that aren't immediately obvious from the hype:
In my opinion, SA has work to do on their line of digital boxes. My 3100HD was plagued with issues. It had trouble with digital sound. It would occasionally reset for no apparent reason. It seemed to degrade analog channels quite a bit -- its comb filter was terrible. From all the reports I've read, the 8000 is even worse, suffering from annoying, crippling bugs that haven't been resolved in a year of deployment. I question whether or not SA is dedicated to making these boxes work properly, or if they're "good enough" to generate extra revenue for cable system operators.
The TiVo works great, it's stable, it's the standard to which others are compared, and I own it. I can modify it. I can use it as I see fit -- it doesn't require "authorization" to work.
Don't get taken in by the "invasion of privacy" FUD. Yes, the TiVo will report back on your viewing habits. The data is anonymized. Personally, I like the idea that my viewing habits may be scrutinized by the networks. Too many good shows that I like are taken off the air for "poor ratings." I firmly hope that someday, TiVo data is taken as seriously as Nielsen est
Problems I encountered (in rough order of annoyance):
Frankly, I expect technology to work (and as a software developer myself, I have little patience for products released with OBVIOUS software/firmware bugs). My life with this box was a teeth-grinding experience, and now that I have switched to satellite I will never look back.
I don't really blame Time Warner, per=se, for these problems, but rather their insistence on using Scientific Atlanta equipment. SA's attempts at manufacturing high-tech equipment have been laughable - they should have stopped with good-old analog cable boxes, which they actually knew how to make.
Remember, the equipment you get from the cable company was designed and manufactured to please the cable company (i.e. it's cheap), not you!