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TiVo Will Stream Content From The Web
Patik writes "According to an article at the NY Times, 'new TiVo technology... will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder.' This is TiVo's next big push for subscribers after being dumped by DirecTV Tuesday. Blockbuster, Netflix, and Real are also looking into distributing feature-length movies over the web."
What will the terms of service be? Same rules as using this over satellite, or is the **AA going to have a fit over this (though I think we may already know that answer)?
Seriously I can do all this stuff now. These companies are so far behind the curve technologically one would be forgiven for thinking they don't deserve to make any money out of this. I'm struggling to see where they are adding value to the consumer.
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Now I get to pay $x for a tivo subscription and $y for a broadband connection when rental is $x, which happens to be a lot less than $x or $y.
Still, I can see it working. There are a lot of people (hello, #divx on irchighway) who probably would pay for movies if they could download them easily and at high quality because of the unreasonable exertion that walking to the shops causes and the long queues for new releases on the fservs. These people probably all have fat pipes anyway, so it's not an extra cost.
My only problem is that I would have to buy a TV card as the A/V set up on my computer is far better than that on my TV. Bigger screen, much much better resolution and nicer speakers. Makes renting/borrowing DVDs nicer than a video-output-only device.
Beep beep.
I've never seen a digital video - either a downloaded DVD rip or something more official - which can compare to the quality of rips I do myself. There's no discussion over choice of codecs, nor what kinds of resolution to expect (and does anyone have the patience or room for HDTV-resolution movies?)
Replay allows users to share programs they've already recorded with others via the "Send Show" feature. This transmits up to 15 digital copies of shows over the Internet to other ReplayTV owner.
This also allows people who have not paid for premium channels to watch premium content for free.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
This should be 'redundant', since DirecTivo has long had the ability to record the porn from the On Demand channels (PPV), not to mention that Stand-alone Tivos have always been able to record from the cable boxes that have porn channels...
"Stumble before you crawl"
Tivo should become a cable company...bare with me for a moment. Big hard drive and good compression, fat pipe into the house, customers trained to watch things at odd ball times and not necessairly at the time of broadcast. Get a couple of networks together and will send the favorites to your Tivo box and you can watch them at some other point. Delivered shows without having to have a satelite or cable package! Send my wife House Hunters from HDTV, send me some History channel and I don't have to go spend 50 bucks for cable because I get it sent directly to me.
It would be a very interesting business model to employ something similar to Bit-Torrent for their distribution system. I immediately thought of the same problem, until I realized the incredible transfer rates you'd achieve with thousands of customers using an automated distributed content system.
A caveat would be that they'd have to have a large number of servers to handle the load of "esoteric" titles - that is, movies that only a very few people will download at any given time. Also, the distribution would be much faster for popular movies - Bit-Torrent relies on swarming and things.
But it'd be really interesting to see this kind of an implementation, even if they did rewrite the original.
I was about | | far from ordering a "directivo" as they called it from Directv. (yes i know they are RIAA evil and sue anyone). There just isn't an competition in my market. Charter runs the cable company and they can't keep the cable up without an outage for longer than 24 hours. That left me with a choice between Directv and Dish Network.
Where is Directv going with this? I don't see anything in the article about a directv PVR replacement for the Tivo partnership.
Speaking of partnerships are we now allowing &partner=google on the main page?
-mck
Bandwidth doesn't need to be a problem. In my country the major TV channels make deals with local IPs to mirror their shows, when you download the latest episode of some show you get it directly from your ISPs mirror. This would require alot more deals to be made in big countries like the US, but it's quite possible. I still don't use this service, though, because these services are for WMP only and I'm not switching to windows to be able to pay for content I can get form other sources anyway. My ISP also have a "rental service" for movies that uses a java applet player that doesn't work very well in Linux (and doesn't let you save the file to your harddrive)
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
On the surface this sounds great! I imagine this will be a ligit subscription service with parties lined up to play content provider in order to avoid them being the next Napster.
But how feasible is this?
Licensing media for internet is a complete pyrhia as far as the MPAA/RIAA is concerned -- though they have seemed to be a little less rabid towards those who try to play along and pay up as of late.
Also -- what quality can we be expecting.
People like me are all about HD content and with new services like Voom who focus on HD and are providing their own integerated tuner/DVR hardware (not yet released should be out within the next 2-3 months, how many devices are we expected to purchase?
Sure, if net-ready TiVo comes out, I'll be one of the first to buy -- but what's to keep the others from bullying them out? If DirecTV does kick TiVo to the curb, what's to prevent them from cross-licensing to the content providers themselves? I mean if BlockBuster or others start streaming, why would they limit themselves to TiVo owners only when any DSL/Cable/Satelite carrier can offer up a clone of the hardware/firmware and offer it to their hundreds of thousands of subscribers?
So while this sounds like a great move for TiVo in the short run, I'm not too optimistic about them not getting swallowed up/beaten to death by the big hitters who'll wait to see how it does in the market and then swoop down for hardball when/if it takes off.
I got the wireless network adapter for my TiVo last week and it already streams music from a folder called TiVo Online in the trial subscription of the "home media option." It has about 10 songs from "In Da Club" to "Stupid Girl."
It should be mentioned that DirectTV did not "DUMP" Tivo, they instead dumped the shares of tivo that they owned. They will still be using tivo technology in thier receivers.
Also. the home media option is now available to every Tivo2 owner for free. No more $99. YAYYYY. Also, they have dropped the rates of seperate Tivos. While the first Tivo is still $12.95 per month, each extra Tivo in your house is only $6.95
That's quite simple. If you had read the story, you'd know that they aren't STREAMING anything, despite the
Now, with that said, I would like to deal with the real issue. People are convinced that bandwidth is extremely limited, and expensive, because all services they have experienced have been free services. There, a few cents of bandwidth for each user can really add-up, unless they click on 30 ads every hour to hedge the cost. With a subscription service, you would be paying them perhaps $20/month to download these 700mb files, which would be more than enough to make-up for the bandwidth and server costs.
Consider Netflix... They probably spend about 60 cents just to ship every DVD to/from you. That does not include the cost of replacing all the DVDs that get worn-out/broken quite often. Now, if you are a high-volume download service (as would be the case), your expenses for sending 700MBs over the internet is certainly going to be less than 50 cents. Despite that, they probably won't charge Netflix rates anyhow, they'll probably charge $40+/month, or perhaps significantly more.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I would also add a "hidden" feature, better integration. If you have digital cable and TiVo you are going to have two set top boxes and more remotes, etc. The TiVo box is your DTV box. This may sound like a small issue to the slashdot crowd, but made a huge difference in getting my Mother-in-law set up and comfortable with this idea.
You completely forgot the Aicha video. Now that truly is an internet classic.
Bandwidth is very cheap. The only limitation to video-on-demand is that the public didn't have fast-enough pipes, and nobody ever set-up a subscription service... Free serivces can't afford on-demand, but even inexpensive services could more than cover the costs.
I'd bet it would be quite popular too, since the internet lends itself to ala cart channels, and there could be an infinite number of channels available to choose from.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
TiVo:
$129 after rebates.
XP Media Edition computer:
Starting at $1099.99.
The Norwegian ISP Telenor tried to limit the bandwidth on their ADSL costumers. They initially had a limit of a whole 1 GB pr. month. Imagine, they allowed people to download half a Linux distribution a month! You could still read your mail at ISDN speed if you exceeded your limit, though. They later increased this limit to an incredible 30 GB/mo.
Telenor soon realized even 30 GB/mo wasn't generous enough, they were loosing their marked share to the large number of ISPs with a lower price pr. month and no download limit. They still block port 25 and 80 and have a clause in their terms of use that clearly states that you are not allowed to run any form of server service on your line (people have actually got warnings for running "ssh servers", but atleast they've droppet that redicilous bw limit. So unless ALL the ISPs suddenly start doing this all at once the providers that to try to scam people this way will simply find themselves without any income. (Telenor is what previously was the state phone monopoly "televerket", they own just about all the local fiber and can, because of their position, get away with pretty much everything. Kind of like Microsoft.. ).
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
What % (roughly, back of napkin rules apply) of your customers subscribing to these various TV on demand schemes would it take before you would start to lose money on bandwith increases over what you are facing right now?
Hopefully they could come up with some method to allow the download to start some time before the release date (with agreement from the filmmaker).
They could then take their time dowloading it but keep the files locked to prevent playing until the release date.
Perhaps even encrypt the movies and then just download the decryption key after the release date.
Like others have already said, Tivo announced that they are considering offering on-demand-style programming separate from live broadcast network fare. This is no different from normal on-demand material, except that it is a Linux box smartly going out over your net connection to retrieve the content.
Tivo is struggling, now, to keep their customer base and to get others. They know that any geek with a Linux box and a tuner can pull together a new product that could displace them, so they are trying to keep the value of their product intact.
They have done some incredible things, and created a whole new disruptive technology, which I love. But they are making several mistakes. For one thing, I can't be the only person on the planet who wants separate folders for my search lists and content. I want all the 'Mail Calls' I can get, and my girlfriend wants all the 'SpongeBob' episodes. How about multiple users, Tivo?
Most Tivo hacking has been concerned with getting more disk space into the box. How hard would it be to allow my Tivo to archive or store overflow content on one or more networked shares?
And they are finally getting around to HDTV capability.
It will be interesting to see where Tivo is one year from now.