Slashdot Mirror
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.
----
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?