TiVo Moves to Bypass Cable

Thomas Hawk writes "TiVo is throwing in the towel on cable. According to CEO Mike Ramsay, 'offering service through one of the primary cable platforms is not the best way to grow our business at this time, because the economics are not very attractive, instead, we have decided to embrace the PC as our friend.' This may add to the complexity of an already convoluted message that TiVo has been criticized for being unable to articulate to the masses. In the same article TiVo says it plans to introduce a new line of recorders that will accept CableCards. The company has declined to say when new machines will be introduced or how much they will cost. Most significantly, there is still no elaboration as to whether this new standalone box will be able to record cable or satellite HDTV."

Comments

Re:huh

[plilja]

A cable card is a hardware card, issued by your cable provider, that allows the decoding of cable channels that are broadcast with encryption. I don't believe any of the large cable companies are currently issuing cable cards, but they are supposed to start issuing them by the end of 2006. Cable cards are required for any third party hardware to decode encrypted channels on third party hardware. Pretty much all extra content (HBO, Pay-Per-View, etc.) is encrypted, and most of the cable companies are concidering, or already have, started to encrypt non-extra content as well (that is any content above "basic-cable" level).

I think Tivo is going to die soon...

[doormat]

Last year, Tivo announced TivoToGo at CES 2004. They annouced availablity this past Monday (Jan 3, 2005), and a very few people have got the new 7.1 software required for TivoToGo at the moment (check out the Tivo Community).

Tivo showed a demo of a CableCard 1.0 demo at CES today. They plan to offer a CC HD Tivo in 2006. They needed to get this cable card Tivo out in APRIL 2005, not 2006!!! CableCard is an open standard anyone can implement, Tivo or anyone else doesnt need permission from the cable companies.

There is only one caveat with their 2006 annoucement - there are a few limitations that Tivo might be waiting for CC 2.0 to come about for. The first big thing is that now CableCard 1.0 is unidirectional (from the cable co to your box). CC 1.0 is also limited to one tuner (analog or digital channel) per physical cable card. CableCard 2.0 is bidirection (so the Tivo box can talk to the cable company, allows PPV-on-demand, interactive guide data, etc), and CC2.0 provides up to 5 tuners per physical cable card.

I would bet that if Tivo is waiting until 2006 to release their CableCard HiDef-capable Tivo, it damn well better be CableCard 2.0. Tivo can provide splitters inside the box to allow for anywhere from 2, 3, up to 5 tuners. I doubt most people have a practical need for 5 tuners UNLESS... (this is my wish) Tivo enhances their Home Media Option to allow smart scheduling, so that you can have one SuperTivo and several client Tivos (pass through tuner, no Hard disk) that just stream content from the SuperTivo over a home network.

RIGHT HEADLINE - WRONG CONCLUSION

[pikapp767]

I've researched this issue and the headline of the article is correct. TiVo is moving to bypass cable but not by throwing the whole system away and not allowing you to record cable BUT by integrating a cable card into a standalone TiVo box. This eliminates the need for a cable decoder. Their intent is to differentiate themselves further from the cheap knockoff PVRs that the cable companies are deploying. As an avid TiVo user myself I assure you that TiVo will not be dropping the capability to record cable programming.

Here is an article that better describes what TiVo is doing: http://olympics.reuters.com/audi/newsArticle.jhtml ?type=technologyNews&storyID=7252458/


More information and analysis will most likely be available at my source for TiVo information http://www.tivoblog.com/ tomorrow.

Cablecard deployment

[AlphaWolf_HK]

All cable companies do it right now, every single one of them. They probably don't advertise it because they'd rather you not use cablecard (they make a killing off of you leasing or buying the digital cable box off of them.) They were federally mandated to carry the cablecards by June 1st 2004. I already know for certain cox is doing it, and they don't advertise it at all. The only way you can find out about it is if you dig around their website.

Re:First Post!

[chrispitude]

Yeah, this is my first post.

Folks seem a bit confused here. Tivo aren't talking about dropping support for recording programs off cable.

Find someone who has digital cable *and* Tivo. The only way to decode digital cable is through the cable company's crappy set-top box. This means you are also stuck with their crappy program guide, poor MPEG decoding, and sub-par signal quality. To make things even more fun, the Tivo must resort to things like IR blasters to change the channel. When you tell Tivo to change the channel, it has to send fake button presses to the digital cable set-top box to change channels.

Go find someone with this setup. Try it. It sucks.

When Tivo talk about breaking their dependence on the cable company, what they mean is to break this dependence on cable company set-top boxes to decode digital cable. The way to do this is with CableCard, which provides all of the decryption needed to decrypt and decode digital cable signals. This *includes* pay channels as well. In other words, you'd be able to use the Tivo *as* your digital cable box, in addition to getting the nice Tivo program guide and DVR capabilities.

It's definitely a very good thing.

Oh yeah, and I got a chuckle out of all those posts saying that the free PC linux/windows DVR programs are going to take over the market. Yeah, I can't wait to see my dad install linux on a PC, install a PVR card and appropriate drivers, and get it all working. In fact, I bet he's thrilled about the idea of having a PC on all the time in the living room. Geez, he can barely find the play button to get a DVD going, folks. If you don't sell my dad and tens of millions like him, you don't get the market.

- Chris

Unannounced new TiVo features

[maggard]

Aside from all of the wailing (what, TiVo has replaced Apple a the new "beleaguered" company?) it turns out TiVo has slipped in some goodies along with the announced feature set of their new v.7.1 software.

Among the goodies folks are finding is an undocumented one: A built in web server.

No, apparently not Apache but something else, what counts is it's there, it works, and it allows download of XML files containing show listings and the shows themselves. To get to it follow these steps:

1. Sign up for an early download of TiVo 7.1. Must have a Series 2, no DVD burner built-in (player is ok), DirecTV models aren't handled by TiVo. Basically TiVo Service Numbers beginning with 110, 130, 140, 230, 240, 264, 540, & 590.

2. While on TiVo's web site note your password and the "Media Access Key" (MAK) for your TiVo. You'll need these later.

3. Wait for 7.1 to be downloaded and installed on your machine. Continually forcing reconnects will not hurry this, indeed the cumulative server load by that sort of thing will only delay the rollout.

4. Once you've got 7.1 (it's downloaded, installed, you've rebooted) point a web browser at https://your.tivo's.ip.address/nowplaying/index.ht ml . For user supply tivo and the password is your "MAK".

5. Go wild.

What, big deal? OK, how about pulling your video off your TiVo, the much-feared video extraction ?

Turns out you need to have TiVo's DirectShow decryption filter installed, and that only comes with their TiVo Desktop v.2 which is, for now, Windows 2K/XP only. You also need a decent mpeg2 codec, which MS doesn't include in Windows. TiVo recommends a couple of commercial ones but there are also free ones out there too. Or, you might have one that came with DVD software.

However, contrary to TiVo's marketing, once a .tivo file is pulled through this it can be edited, saved, even burned to DVD, with nothing more special needed. That's right, no waiting for Sonic's soon-to-be-shipped software, no magic mojo involved, trusty ole TMPGEnc and Nero and all the rest are perfectly fine. Indeed once passed through the magic DirectShow filter (and your password supplied) the .tivo files are free to be rendered into a more normal mpeg2 files.

Sure the $50 "custom" software will probably do more with automation, labeling, and such, but I'm betting nothing that can't be whipped up in a few days by TiVo's customers, likely beating the Sonic software to the punch.

Pretty Kewl, eh?