Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?!
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.
With so many users still forced into dial-up access, it makes you wonder where the priorities are. For these companies to already be talking about FTTH while my parents still chug along at 56k seems as if the two are living in different worlds. So many peripherals are arriving to take advantage of services that are still largely unavailable to the common man. Lay down the framework first, then build upon that. The company that extends itself into getting more users off the narrowband will be reaping the spoils of a large and loyal piece of the marketshare.
Oh, and by "new killer features" I meant something like:
:)
You're on your lunch break at work with a high speed 'net connection and have nothing else to do, so you log into your SBC/2Wire box via a password protected web browser and see, basically, a java version of the PVR's menu. You pick one of your favorite shows and hit Play and the 2Wire box transcodes the video in realtime to a streaming format so you can watch the recorded show (or live tv, even) right there in your browser while you're away from home as it pipes the stream out the integrated SBC 'net connection.
Yeah, I know there's no way they could do that with the quality of most SBC 'net connectivity, but you know...
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
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?
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
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
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!
I'm sad to say that I can't think of what I'd use fibre to the home for over and above what I've already got. My whole city's got fibre to the curb, cat 5 to the stb and computer - 2mb/s for home users (plus additional bandwidth set aside for the cable TV and re-broadcast free to air TV channels they provide and video on demand), or up to 10mb/s for business. Now only wish that the provider would build some functionality like SBC's into the set top box.
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!
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.
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
As the other poster has said, capitalism allows them to do as they please. Last I check SBC, Verizon, et al were not charity organizations concerned with spreading good will and broadband. ;) They will go where they can make money. It simply may not be a cost effective move to put broadband in certain places.
Also, with many people reluctant to change or just generally happy with status quo, you can't worry about things like that. While it would be nice to say every person in [insert country] has broadband, everyone doesn't need it.
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.
Actually, I was referring to non-GSM cell phones (AFAIK, only 1 carrier supports GSM in the US, though I could be wrong. Pretty much cancels out the provider-switching capabilities).
The current "trick" is that cell phone prices are seriously, obscenely, horrendously inflated ($300 for a cell phone worth, at most, $50) so that you have to be loaded in order to buy the phone outright. But...! Here come the providers to save the day (*stroke stroke*) by knocking off 50-90% (sometimes 100% for the REALLY crap phones) of the cell phone price as long as you sign up for a 2 year contract... If you paid $400 (AFTER 2-year contract rebate. WTF?!) for a fancy treo, if it's a non-GSM phone, after that contract is up and you realize that your provider sucks, you can just throw the phone away, since you can't bring it to your new provider. Since you're not likely to do that, you stay with the sucky provider.
Yeah, I see the providers just crawling all over themselves trying to do away with this. At this point I think it's safe to say cell providers are one of the top 3 scummiest industries, alongside "Law" and "Insurance"