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SBC Builds A TiVo Rival
ChipGuy writes "With all the hoopla around Tivo To Go, SBC Communications has launched its own PVR-plus-set-top box which integrates SBC DSL with its satellite service. From the looks of it, this could be the trend where phone operators offer their one set-top box/ home media servers. This is not good news for TiVo or Microsoft which harbors living room ambitions. 2Wire might be the dark horse in set-top box sweepstakes."
Fiber To The Home could make this a kickass box. Anything, Anytime...
Could this be a saving grace for Blockbuster to finally get into the fray again with Netflix?
my thoughts exactly!
Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
I live in a very rural part of the South, and my Telco is a Mom and Pop job, I am the Only guy in town, that has a High Speed Line, that is maxed. We are lucky to get Tivo. Seriously.
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
Remember where you are. This is Thunderhome. Death is listening, and will take the first box that screams.
When I moved we received something similar to this. We have the satellite TV with DVR as well as what appears to be plain DSL. Haven't thrown much at the DVR other than some Nova. The search functions took a little getting used to be the quality seemed well enough. Said it holds 100 hours but I haven't had time to take a closer peek to see more specs on it.
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
2 Wire actually has a product other than the bandwidth meter?!
Has moving shows to a PC been unavailable all this time? If so, it'd be yet another reason to go with ReplayTV. I guess this is OT, though...
I also don't see any feature of the SBC/2Wire box that'd out-do a Replay (unless you don't already have a DVD player, that is), so I guess the question is: Does anyone have more info on how much the box/service is going to cost or if the partnership with SBC will bring any new killer features?
Personally, I am amazed, AMAZED at how many new services SBC has started offering in the last few years. My telephone, sat. dish, cell phone, and yellow pages ad are all on the same bill as it is. Strangely enough their customer service hasn't gotten any better... does anybody here think SBC might be getting too big for our own good?
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
Seriously, SBC cant get DSL right (PPPoE, WTF?), I have no confidence in their ability to get TV working as well.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
dang it! Sacreen Shotzl WierdSacreen Shotzl
sig!wind down the juuice, let the tubes roar with the glow of alternative powers, not they that be." me, today...
At least I'll be calling the same company to complain about all of the miss-charges, instead of the myriad I have to now.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
I use to work for SBC back in the day, untill i got fired for hacking the phones and rerouting all my calls back to the call center. When i worked there the mentality was always One stop shopping, They want you to pay them for all services including but limited to..Phone, Cable TV service, Internet, Cell phone, Phone Equipment, Long Distance, web hosting, this would all come on one bill that could be paid monthly to SBC, This is their vision and route they are taking.
Bringing your mosaic ideas to life. Mosaiclegs
Oh...was I snoring?
I'm sorry. I've seen this one before. It's the one where the snotnose brat says he'll be the biggets on the block then disappears when he finds out there's work involved.
Wake me when something new comes on.
I'm not surprised by this. Time Warner is offering Digital Phone service and also has cellphone service planned too.
The days of dedicated services are over. It's all about the network. If you have fiber/copper in the ground, you will be expected to offer phone, TV, Internet, Home security services...etc if you want to survive the market place.
Life is not for the lazy.
I'll avoid this new product unless I know it's not crippled like their gateways. Their gateways/DSL modems don't even let users turn off the router functionality, which is fundamentally important to certain setups. Also, 2Wire devices feel like rentals from the phone company, wholly tied-in for upgrades and configuration. While an unchangable/automatic configuration is good for most users, I'll stick with devices that let me configure them too. Even the parts of their products that allow configuration seem to center around looks and seeming newbie friendly than efficiency. For example, port forwarding doen't even let the user type the back-end IP address. The selection must be by NETBIOS name from a list you have to pray is complete and unambiguous.
One thing I never hear mentioned is the state of play in the UK. Is the TiVo here or coming here at all? What about this one? (Didn't RTFA, getting ready for work...)
How does the TiVo service compare with the Sky+ service we can get over here that appears to allow the same features?
Anyone got up-to-date recommendations on a PC box that won't look like utter crap on the TV cart?
sulli
RTFJ.
Yesterday I had a discussion on set top boxes with a couple of colleagues. It seems to us that the living room of the future will have its own rack full with set top boxes. A set top box for your digital radio, a set top box for digital tv, a set top box for internet/dsl connection, a set top box for video on demand, a set top box for I don't know what else for a kind of DRM protected content.
I can see all these set top boxes actually harming competition. Having to introduce a new set top box for a new service seems like a proper waste of money. The consumer might like a different provider per service but buying a new box just to make it work will be prohibitively expensive
It would be great if we would get systems that are modular, maybe work with a set of chipcards or something along those lines.
Use Adsense for Charity
stop licking those frogs
"The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner."
All this talk about the various telephone, satellite and cable companies coming out with "Tivo-killers" is just talk. Anyone who actually owns a TiVo knows that it's not the hardware, it's the software. They can make all the boxes they want, but without the TiVo software, and the concepts behind it, they'll never reach the same level of functionality. I use a TiVo at home and a ReplayTV when visiting my brother's house. Each has features I desire in the other, but in general, the TiVo has a usability that the Replay can't touch. The Replay has better playback features (like the wonderful commercial skip), but the TiVo blows it away in terms of actually getting the programs in the first place (wishlists, etc).
As the TiVo and ReplayTV were introduced at the same time, at the same Consumer Electronics Show, they've had a lot of time to place catch-up with each other and to come up with a lot of great ideas. I have yet to read about one of these new boxes from one of the giant media companies that had features that got users raving about them. It's possible, but unlikely at this point, that some new box is going to be anything other than a "me-too". They all seem like wishful thinking from entities that wish nothing more than for TiVo and Replay to have never been invented...that they will somehow be able to drive both of them out of business and then to start limiting features more and more to help "maintain control of copyright".
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
With many telcos offering this type of service the set top boxes often have very much more limited features than the ones that you can buy after market. This is where TiVo still have their strengths and I would be more than suprised if there would be any change with SBC. Telcos buy thousands of boxes at a cheap price to make it attractive for them to use that service. Buying it at a cheaper price will normally make the feature set drop. This can give all those sbc set top box hackers build some more/new software ;)
Got a question about UNIX ask it here : Unix/xBSD Forum
TV is dying, folks. While the symptoms may not be outwardly apparent yet, the insides are rotting away like so much necrotic carcinoma. How much longer can TV keep going while a greater and greater (what is it now, over half?) part of the US (and world) establishes broadband connectivity?
Do you think people can split themselves in two?
TV already shot itself in the foot when it spawned 400-channel versions of itself and divided up the interest by its newfound extra channels. All that's left now is to watch as the shows go to crap, the heads roll and the whole burgeoning monstrosity becomes cannibalized by BigBand.
Seriously.. After using a Moxi for a week after all the hype, it came nowhere near what a Tivo can do. I've seen and used so many Tivo clones now it isn't funny. Not a single one comes close to the features. And it's not just features, it's also program guide data; everyone else has simple one or two sentence descriptions, where Tivo has an entire paragraph, adult rating symbols ( NC/V/N/AC/AL/etc ), director, actor, how many stars it got, what type of show it is (horror/anime/scifi/etc), if the show is a repeat or a first run .. And on top of that, the guide data is CURRENT AND CORRECT. I don't know how many times I saw how horribly incorrect other peoples guide data is.. Sometimes shows change timeslots because of a football game or something, Tivo updates the data a day later, their competition doesnt!
...since it's using WM9 DRM. I think it could be a MS based set up box.
When I worked for AT&T, we were told that customers didn't like "bundling" and having all of the stuff on one big bill.
Fast forward only 5 years and guess what? Bundling is once again alive & well at SBC!
Give it a few years, people will be sick of SuperBigCorp again.. heh
SBC contracts through Hughes Communications (a.k.a Dish Network) which has offered a DVR set top box for some time now. I know. I own one.
I wonder if they will start making shows that go straight to DVD. :-P
As the TelCo's start rolling out TV service it's no real surprise to me that they want to get into the PVR game too. And not because they think it's going to earn them money directly, no rather it's once again about control.
PVR boxes like TiVo, as I'm sure we all know, can be hacked up to all sorts of neat things that have been driving the content providers nuts. So it's only logical that Cable/TelCo providers start offering their own PVR boxes that are firmly locked down to prevent those nasty hackers from doing anything that they don't want with them.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
What OS does this thing run? Windows with IIS? If so, great, I can see the latest worm eating up all these poor peoples boxes and having random porn displayed or worse, being used as spam drones. I really hope they chose this carefully and then made sure the source is available..
Anyway, my current home router is a 2Wire I got from that era. It has built-in a DSL modem, 802.11b, USB and Ethernet connects, a packet-inspecting firewall, content and application mangement (parental administrative controls...I could for example, turn off all instant messaging after 9PM)and others, and has all this in an intiutive and easy to access/modify/manage format, which can get as detailed as one wants it to be.
It's worked without fail for several years now, I can't be happy enough with it.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way.
My friend runs his satellite TV connection through his computer and uses BeyondTV 3 to stream TV over networks. You can record and playback shows, watch live tv, change the channel from anywhere that has internet. It's awesome, just goes to show how much Tivo and SBC are behind in the game.
Ucentric has also been quietly trudging away in this space from the old DEC headquarters in Maynard, MA. (http://www.ucentric.com)
They did trials of their product with Comcast and AT&T (before it was bought by Comcast), and now have a rollout with Voom (the also-ran HD sat company).
It's a good, stable, platform, but never seems to get any press (or customers). Linux based (Debian) with some fancy bits globbed on.
The real sweet spot is in their thin clients and distribution technologies. Imagine having ALL of your PVR's content available simultaneously from every TV (or PC) in the house, from a client a little bigger than a pack of smokes. And, you don't need to run a bunch of Cat5 to get the signal to the other TV's, an old piece of coax will do just fine.
-This sig intentionally left blank
How do I get the video to my other TVs?
I work at sbc and we might as well be call MS-SBC because everything we do internally is centered around microsoft.
This is not good news for TiVo or Microsoft which harbors living room ambitions.
Comcast is in a beta right now rolling out a Motorola DVR running Windows CE. Its available to MS and Comcast employees only at the momement because Motorola apparently can't pump out the hardware quickly enough. While it has a couple minor quirks and with network lag time using On Demand, it is a fairly solid device. Comcast is charging $9.95/mo to lease the device. I will never miss an episode of Stargate SG-1 ever again.
I got to spend a few weeks with this at my parents house over the holidays. They signed up for DISH through SBC in KS over DirecTV with TiVo.
They hate it, despise it, and think it's the most clunky hard to use thing ever - but are stuck for a year.
TiVo just works better (tm). Easier to schedule things, easier to fast forward through (you never think you'd miss it but their little backstep they do when you hit stop/play while FF is a godsend) and you end up watching commercials 4x their speed because anything else you're halfway into the program before you get it stopped.
Scheduling was a nightmare, though as I was leaving a new software update got downloaded that was supposed to 'improve' this but TiVo's season pass/suggestions were done 100x better than that.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Yes because lord knows the worlds first worm was not written for daemons that were open sourced...
What a freaking karma troll you are.
I'm not sure what SBC and 2wire are doing, but just looking at the SBC/Dish Network/2wire box on their mainpage (www.2wire.com) makes me afraid.
It has 2 separate 4-way toggle switches, 3 random buttons on the left side, and then SIX rainbow-colored buttons in the middle. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. ROYGBIV...pretty much.
Tivo...well...Tivo doesn't have any buttons. You just plug it in. That's it.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
There is no way the people in charge of keeping DirecTV customers from getting TiVo functionality will let something like this come through to their customers until at least 2009. By then others will be watching holographic images projected by their off the shelf units while we finally can network and display jpegs on ours.
[insert sig file here]
While it's true that the MOXI box can't predict what you want to watch but what your missing with the MOXI is it's goal is to be an entire home entertainment system. It's got games, news updates, some models have a DVD player, wired and wireless internet access through the box and the most important thing about it is that it has dual tuners so you can watch and record at the same time. You also don't need to run ethernet or a phone line over to your MOXI and you don't need to slap down a big chunk of money for it. Yes you pay for a monthly rental but if anything happens to your box you get it replaced for free or when they start giving out updated ones you get that too.
Think "cell phones."
I certainly do think of cell phones and then more in particular the GSM, which does make it possible to switch providers. Actually I wouldn't mind a concerted effort by the industry/governments to come to a standard, like we now have with GSM. There have been many bad standards, but I think GSM is one of those examples where the cooperation among industry and the sanctioning of the standard by government has benefited everybody. Might be something for the EU to look into.
Use Adsense for Charity
When SBC rolled out DSL in my little town, they offered a rebate or a "free" wireless AP / firewall. 2Wire's press release at the time pointed out that these says these home APs are up to 400 mW each, and that one of their exclusive distributors was SBC. These were the 2Wire HomePortal HW1000, a 400 mW firewall / access point / DSL modem.
It's SBC's right to sell DSL, of course, and WiFi is an unlicensed, contentious spectrum, but now their choice of AP has blanketed neighborhoods with excessive 2.4 Ghz noise. These home APs were lighting up the neighborhood with more power than any CPE or APs of the WISPs in town (like me.)
A year ago, a new tenant moved into a building two doors down from my office. He was having other computer troubles, so I helped him out. He has SBC DSL. I asked him if he took them up on their "get a free wireless AP" sign-up offer; he said "no". In fact, because they'd sent the wrong equipment the first time, he'd talked to customer support at least once to get a new modem, and they'd asked him if he wanted wireless and again he said "no". He's a mortgage company so he wanted to avoid wireless for security reasons.
A few days before, I had started having trouble with a wireless network in my office. A walk around the block with MiniStumbler found a strong WEP'd "2WIRE734" source on channel 6 outside his office. Later in the day his office was open. Sure enough, inside, MiniStumbler says SNR 83, -28. I jump into the web interface of the modem and dig around until I find the wireless interface's "disable" button. It was also quite convenient that SBC preconfigured it with a password composed of his office's street address, minus the spaces.
It's a good thing there's a disable button. He explicitly didn't want wireless, yet they shipped it to him and he didn't know he had wireless turned on. It made for a crappy day of debugging for me, as it swamped my lower-power 100 mW APs and CPEs.
Earlier, these 2Wire devices wreaked havoc with a Cisco AP-352. It was incapacitated by deauthentication messages: the log showed "2004/01/19 09:37:10 (Info): Deauthentication from 00:d0:9e:f8:8f:b1, reason "Not Associated", many times per second. The wired side is flooded with LLC packets from the AP with a destination of 01:40:96:ff:ff:00. The AP is dropping 30% of ping packets sent to it.
That mystery MAC isn't any of mine. Sniffing around the neighborhood, I find the mystery MAC. Lookup says it's a 2Wire device. Sure enough, I find not one but four APs in the neighborhood "2WIRE268" "2WIRE837" "2WIRE870" "2WIRE877", all on default channel 6, where none were a few months ago.
I never solved the problem. I had to turn off the logging to avoid the trouble. I described it on the BAWUG list, and to their credit, a 2Wire developer contacted me to attempt to debug it. No solution.
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
Time Warner Cable offers a PVR.
--
make install -not war
Sorry, but with all the interoperability features that TiVo has added to their player, these guys are a couple of generations behind in PVR and just not good enough. Besides, what makes you think these guys aren't going to implement the Broadcast Flag for which everyone here seems to have turned their back on TiVo? Suddenly TiVo's happy little logo dude is a bad guy?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Tivo already lets you share video files between Tivos on the same home network. And now they've got that TiVO-to-go thing where you can watch them on your computer, which is a heck of a lot more than these TiVO knock-offs support.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
The multiple tuners in the box absolutely destroyed the non-digital channels. It was like watching snow, and this is a common complaint across the board for this unit. The actual response from the company was "That wont change in the future.". If non-digital channels are unwatchable, is it really worth it? Is it worth giving up excellent guide data just to play some games or look at the weather? You mention you dont have to slap a big chunk of money down, last I checked a Tivo was $99 with the same price per month service. The only thing the Moxi had going for it was that it could record HDTV shows, but at what cost? Tivo will have to come out with a component input version of their recorder sooner or later and then it wont even matter.
While I agree with out that SBC/2WIRE is a security nightmare, I don't understand why you have interference problems. As you said, they are always on channel 6. Don't use channels 4-8 and you'll be fine.
2wire's box doesn't appear to be HDTV, so it won't be in my home. I have a DirecTV HR10-250 and it's an awesome piece of work. Even runs Linux! Direct digital signal off the satellite to disk, 2 satellite receivers and 2 Over the Air receivers, all HDTV, can record 2 signals and play back one all at the same time, this thing rocks. Oh, 32 hours HDTV and 200+ SD hours of record time. I slapped in a second 250 gig SATA disk for a couple hundred bucks and it's 64 hours HDTV and 400+ SD hours now! Only downside is the cost, it's about $800 on the street right now.
Forget it, never again will my house have SBC anything in it. Contracts, high prices, horrible customer support, and incompetant employees.
In the process of finally purging the last piece of SBC from my life by moving to Vonage for my phone.
Pricing means something. I can get an HD DVR from Time-Warner for something like $10 a month -- HD, multiple-channel recording, total digital cable integration (no IR blaster hackery), and NO CASH INVESTMENT UP FRONT.
To many people this means something, and it should -- a Tivo + Lifetime will take YEARS to return its investment relative to the cable DVR, and that's IF it doesn't break. A cable DVR when it breaks or becomes out-dated goes back to the cable company for free replacement the same day. A Tivo box when it breaks goes back to god knows where for a $99 repair, for about two weeks.
To the vast majority of households the cable provided DVR is "perfect" -- easy to install, HD compatible if you want it, and not a financial commitment. They could give a shit about software and other Tivo advantages (what you've never had, you don't miss).
Speaking as a 2.5 year Series 2 Tivo owner, Tivo needs to get on the stick and KEEP their software AND hardware ahead of the game. CableCard (digital cable on private devices) has been out for months, where's the HD CableCard capable Tivo? Why does Tivo insist on wading into the PC space with HMO and Tivo2Go when there's a ton of features that would improve Tivo they're not adding? Where are other hardware advancements?
My overall concern is that Tivo is wasting too much effort trying to expand outside their area of expertise at the expense of improving it, while cable is quickly honing their products to match Tivo with the only "missing" element being the investment and lame "extras" like HMO.
Because changing the channel for an access point for a WISP will affect all the customers. Sure, it's possible to change channels on all customer premise equiment, then change the AP and hope it all comes back up, but I don't like those sorts of days. If it fails, it means customer visits.
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
I was looking at the pictures here and here, and it looks strikingly similar to MythTV screenshots. Being the owner of a 2wire DSL router, I know they use linux and ipfw, so I think I am correct in assuming they're also using MythTV for its UI.
Let's hope they give back to the community. This could be a great thing (or a bad thing) for MythTV
Signatures are supposed to be funny?
Adelphia cable has their own DVR product which is both your digital cable box and a DVR. Doesn't sound like they are groundbreaking or anything. I can see how the DSL feature is useful for satelite though -- I remember when i had satelite, the horrible latency between changing channels, loading the guide list, I can only imagine how bad the whole thing would be if that pain was involved with the recording scheduling process as well. I like my digital cable/DVR box much better than I ever liked my sat.
Speak for yourself.
The older 2Wire hardware run VxWorks or some other Wind River product (on somewhat bizarre Phillips VLIW 'media processors,' no less -- I assume 2Wire had a big stock of those, or at least familiarity-with, after they failed to really crack the VoIP market). I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same OS on the new stuff, but with Windows Media licensed, same as you'd see on a DVD player or MP3 player.
SBC's TV-over-IP venture will be using (ecch) Microsoft encoding -- should we thank Yahoo for that, since they've settled on the same for their existing crappy pay-to-watch-trailers service? -- and it's seriously making me think twice about respecting their benevolent monopoly in my area. I'm sure Microsoft is pleased as punch *someone* gave in and partnered with them, since it finally gets their foot in the market, and, should the service prove popular, gives them more leverage over the content providers, more revenue, more Windows licenses if you want to watch the content on your home PC, yadda yadda.
Of course, this article is more about SBC offering a PVR for whichever DBS satellite network they ended up acquiring, which has nothing to do with Windows Media or Microsoft, yet. Meanwhile, the basic 2Wire boxes are honestly the best solution for Average Humans who need a home router/firewall I've ever seen (first vendor I saw doing port forwarding by offering a menu of games and applications, etc), but I haven't fiddled with any of their wireless models.
i think that the cable tv model (and subsequently the video over broadband model like tivo/netflix, movielink, etc.) is actually the worst technical design for tv/movie distribution. i think that the satellite/dvr combo is by far the best design for home video delivery.
assume you could broadcast 1000 channels of video per satellite. assume that a feature film is 100 minutes. you could deliver netflix's entire dvd catalog to the whole hemisphere in two days from one satellite. then you could program your directv tivo to record the movies you want to see. video-on-demand for everyone with virtually no infrastructure cost. do not waste ip bandwidth for video, no matter how cheap it is!
as far as scalability goes, just add more satellites as you add content or adjust the delivery windows.
the hardest part of this implementation would be getting the broadcast licenses from the intellectual property owners. but technically, it is a snap!
For Example, you Could Sell Off some of that Surplus of Capital Letters you Seem to Have.
Dish Network is horrible. I had Dish network for a little over a year. The signal scrambled regularly, despite having them adjust the dish on 3 occasions. The content was lacking as well. I switched to DirecTV, great signal, and I get NFL Sunday Ticket.... something Dish Network does not have.
Those who can do... Those who can't get a certification from Cisco or Microsoft.
Unfortunatly, Moxi's picture quality seems to be very "user-specific". By that, I mean that there are two things that must be considered when connecting a Moxi box. First off, you need a strong cable signal--stronger than required by many cable boxes and DVR's. If you have a weak signal, you are bound to have PQ problems. Your cable provider can help with this.
Second, the other problem lies in Moxi's Analog to Digital conversion. All digital and HD cable channels are already compressed and digital, so that data simply gets written to the hard disk. But analog channels are handled differently. Like all "standalone" TiVo or ReplayTV DVR's, Moxi must first convert the analog cable signals to digital and then write it to disk. This process introduces artifacts and degrades picture quality. My assumption is that the picture quality Digeo have chosen for Moxi (it's not user-definable) is a compromise between picture quality and file size. Further, if you are using a larger-screen TV, you will more likely get degraded picture quality regardless of the DVR you have. My ReplayTV box looks great on my 27" TV, but on my boss's 50" wide-screen, it looks horrible. Simply put, you are correct, Moxi's PQ on analog channels is poor, and their recommendation of waiting "until all the channels go digital" is a lame answer.
I've been using Moxi through Charter Cable for a couple months now, and I am personally enamored with it. As a very long-time ReplayTV user, I really can't see much that makes me want to keep using my ReplayTV box. For me, Moxi wins hands-down for four main reasons:
1. Dual Tuner
This eliminates almost 100% of my scheduling conflicts. And being able to watch one channel live while another is recording is very nice.
2. Integrated in Cable Box
My ReplayTV had horrible problems controlling our old DCT-1000 Digital Cable box using an IR blaster. Unfortunatly, Cable and Satellite compaines are no longer offering serial cable control on their boxes, so the unreliable IR blaster is the only option. Integrating the DVR and the Cable box really makes things easier to use--improves the "wife factor" significantly.
3. HD viewing and recording
There is simply no other solution for the price that offers HD viewing and recording. Moxi has this one nailed.
4. Low cost
At under $10.00 per month, it will be upwards of three years before I "break even" with TiVo or ReplayTV up-front and subscription costs. This is a big up-front cost savings, and if a new model comes out, I just ask the Cable company for a new box. No selling and re-purchasing of equipment.
That said, I do have two complaints:
1. Charter Cable (in Anderson, SC) does not yet have Video-On-Demand enabled on Moxi. Once this is enabled, it'll be a very solid and complete solution.
2. I miss ReplayTV's "networkability" being able to offload shows to my PC for editing and archival to DVD.
-Jim
MoxiTips.com
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I'm still waiting for Tivo to offer the ability to connect through my broadband wired/wireless house. I have no landline phone - only cell phones for the wife and me. But my house has wired ethernet to the entertainment center and WiFi everywhere else.
How hard is it for Tivo to catch up to ReplayTV in this regard? I thought landline phones were going *away*. Did I miss the memo on that one?
I recently set up a Time Warner PVR. It has two good features--like the DirecTV TiVo PVRs, it has dual tuners, so you can record two shows at once (or record one and watch another in real time), and it gets the channel guide up much faster than TiVo. In every other respect it pretty much sucks. No real prioritizing of scheduled shows, the guide only shows 1 week of shows, no way to search by name (you can create an alphabetized list of all shows on a particular day, but you can't filter it), director, keyword, or actor. And a really poorly designed remote that uses a whole bunch of buttons to accomplish less than what TiVo does with just a few.
heh, not two hours ago I posted a blog entry in my investing blog about TiVo and cable companies in general.
Overall, I see that TiVo is consistently first in marketing a particular DVR feature, but since it's commodity software running on commodity hardware, the cable companies can quickly replicate any good ideas. TiVo does all the hard work, but the cable companies are the ones who will reap the benefits long-term.
Since TiVo's subscription service isn't 100% integrated with your cable service, it will always be inferior to what your cable service will give you with the basic package. The "box" is the interesting part of what TiVo produces, but not interesting and innovative enough to pull many customers away from just-use-the-cable-box.
I have a directivo. I love it, especially the two tuner business.
:(
But the software isn't *that* great.
I pay an extra $5/month for the tivo service, on top of the $5 for it as a reciever. It's worth it.
That $5 covers every directivo on your account (at $99, or even $49 sometimes, they're cheap to add to your other rooms and toss your regular receivers).
I'd choke on the $13/month for the regular tivo service though.
For that matter, I'm choking on the the regular directv fees, and the cable costs before that (at least directv doesn't go out as often as cable), but we have *no* reception here--the engineers for the two stations that didn't qualify automatically didn't even ask questions before signing waivers when I told them my city). Unfortunately, my wife doesn't see not havving television as an option
When I move next summer, if I land somewhere with broadcast signals, my temptation will be to build my own box (mythtv?) to attach to an antenna.
hawk, who doesn't see $30+/month for televison reception as worth it
with all the other things starting to come out with wifi, and everyone and their brother defaulting to WiFi channel 6, it'd probably be a better idea to just change the channel. i've got an HG homeportal, turned up to 400 milliwatts, and i changed it to channel 11, as several of my neighbors have linksys and netgear units, and they can fight all they want over channel 6, i'll take the higher road (frequency, whatever...)
"Snoochie-Boochies? Who talks like that? That is babytalk!"-Jay, Chasing Amy
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