Slashdot Mirror
Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV
Thomas Hawk writes "Cory Doctorow is posting over at Boing Boing about some technology that he apparently saw this weekend at London's Open Tech conference. According to Cory, this new technology from Promise TV takes the form of a home-built PVR with lots of high-capacity hard drives and claims to be able to record every show on every channel being recorded in the UK for an entire month. 'Why program a TiVo to get certain shows for you when you can record every single show on the air, all at once, and then use recommendations, search, a grid, or any other means you care to name to figure out which of those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of programming you want to watch.' The company seems somewhat cryptic with a simple website that appears to be collecting your email addresses for an announcement in August. "
I won't buy it until it can record...
ONE
MILLION
HOURS!
MWHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!
Where are the frickin sharks with laser beams?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
and there is still nothing to watch on TV!
Before you trot out all your legal objections, just let me say that you now have a legitimate reason to talk with the cute girl three doors over you've never met.
Agile Artisans
If they're going to be making an announcement in August, then why not wait until August to post the article?! There is no product and no information. It doesn't even say whether it records only the UK terrestrial TV channels (just 5) or the UK digitial ("Freeview") channels (MUCH more than 5).
I can understand how you could feasibly mock up a machine that recorded the 5 main channels to a RAID array or something, but I fail to belive that you can actually record "the entire UK channel multiplex" of ~30 digital channels in anything of a sensible size or price. It would have to save out 30 high quality(ish) feeds to very very large hard drives permanently. I can't see how you could do that with less than a few thousand pounds of disks and capture cards.
"...use recommendations, search, a grid, or any other means you care to name to figure out which of those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of programming you want to watch..."
Those poor channel-hoppers, who can't watch a programme for more than 10 minutes without wondering what else might be on, will now have all the material from the past to choose from aswell. Lucky them!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The summary is nearly as long as the actual article, and contains practically all the information. It can't get any better for /. readers - even those that don't RTFA have all the information available.
/. ads were for products. Wake me when there's news. And when DirecTV supports this.
That said, this is about as useful as,well, nothing. A spam collector ad? At least the previous
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Their next product: a home-built device that downloads the entire Internet for you to browse at your leisure...
30 actually:
http://freeview.co.uk/whatson/index.html
I doubt you'd bother making something that recorded from an analogue source - too much CPU power.
The UK has hundreds of channels, so I don't know where you get your dumb ideas from.
There are about 300 digital satellite channels in the UK, maybe 250 digital cable channels and about 30 digital free to air broadcast channels (Freeview). There are 5 analogue terrestrial channels - and I'm assuming this is what they're talking about when they say the can record every single show on the air. It all just seems a bit pointless.
Or maybe some script which prevents it from downloading the stuff you already know is rubbish (I hate soap operas and daytime TV generally - why waste bandwidth). Or maybe, just maybe, a script which only downloads things you've specifically asked for.... hang on this is starting to sound like another product....
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
OpenTech 2005 was featured in a Slashdot article a few minutes ago here
Did anyone go to OpenTech and see this thing?
Although... it says there that it will record an entire week, not a month. So maybe that was this one's baby brother.
I seriously doubt they'd be able to record everything out there.
I mean, just look at a standard Tivo box. 40G hard drive gives you about 35 hours of recording time. And that is just one or two shows at a time.
A month's programming on 200 channels simultaneously?
c'mon.
This is utter bunkum because there are hundreds and hundreds of UK channels - 5 analogue terrestrial, about another 25 on digital terrestrial and about another 300 (!!) on digital satellite. Yes, with 5 analogue or digital tuners, they could record BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5, but let's face it, most of that's now rubbish and the better stuff is on digital satellite (which they will *not* be able to record massively in parallel - Sky who run it currently only have a twin tuner for example and that needs a dual LNB on your dish too !).
I'd rather see some effort made to allow broadband users to download TV shows (even a small fee for this would be acceptable - a few pounds a month) from the time they are aired on normal TV for, say, up to 2 months afterwards. Now this would be *far* more useful, especially now that 2Mbit/s is starting to become the normal for UK broadband.
Let's make some calculations assuming that they're going to record all the DVB-T ("Freeview") content in the UK. I watch DVB-T in Spain using a MythTV box but the numbers should be roughly the same as for the UK.
45 mins recording of one channel = 1401390703 bytes
=> 1 hour = 1868520937 bytes
=> x 24 hours/day x 30.5 days/month = 1.37 TB per month per channel
Now there are about 30 freeview channels so we would need 41 TB of storage .... that's 82 500GB hard disks in RAID0! Which would occupy something like half a rack and use about 1kW of power ...
Even to record the 5 main channels would be nearly 7 TB - still a lot of noisy spinning hard disks to stick under the TV. This doesn't sound like a feasible idea with the size of today's hard disks.
As this sounds like pure marketing, we can make some assumptions:
a) Number of channels included will be the minimum available to all.
b) It'll be "VHS quality" recording.
There are 5 terrestial TV channels in UK:
BBC1
BBC2
ITV (commercial)
Channel 4 (commercial)
Channel 5 (commercial)
We've about 50 via digital TV, and loads more via cable or satellite.
However there are only 5 available right now.
So, that's 5 channels * 24hrs * 28 days = 3360 hours of recording.
Lets assume a VCD bitrate of 1300kbit/s video 128kbit/s. Total 1428kbit/s.
Number of seconds in 3360 hours
= (3360*60)*60
= 12,096,000
So, for all that video we'll need
= 1428 * 12,096,000
= 17,273,088,000 kbit
= 17,687,642,112,000 bits
= 2,210,955,264,000 bytes
= 2,159,136,000 kilobyte
= 2,108,531 megabytes
= 2,059 gigabytes
So that's like 4 * 500gb drives plus 1 * 120gb drive to correct for the drive maker's marketing departments.
I'm using VCD/MPEG as a basis for this, they'll invariably be using a better codec, probably with far stronger compression.
Web site source code says 'Promise.tv Ltd'
Companies house gives
http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/b09fe60fa8e4ad5
A quick search on the registered address gives
http://www.touchslough.com/business/list/bid/9156
A TV repair centre in Ascot. At least these people will be able to repair the thing when it goes wrong
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
> > Unless you count freeview we have 5 channels. Yep, 5.
> And if you only count 60% of those 5 you end up with 3. Sure, just 3. That's 40% down on your bizarre subset of the channels available for free.
And if you don't count those 3, we have no TV.
MY GOD, WE HAVE NO TV! Who will watch the tellytubbies now?
Just having the disk isn't enough. You need a multi tuner to be able to break the spectrum in to n streams and you need enough processing power to be able to encode all of those streams at once.
Although, in theory I suppose it is possible that you could compress the entire spectrum in one block, but I think that the channels that have nothing but static would kill your compression ratio.
It also might work for satelite where you are getting all the channels already compressed. Then it might just be a simple matter of saving them all.
Some digital cable works by only sending you one stream at any given time (and when you switch channels the office starts sending you a different stream). With that kind of setup, you can only save what you can get.
Currency convertor where you can type "US dollars to rupees" and it knows what you mean
Because the amount of overhead involved is ludicrous?
Downloading every show broadcast in a month would be like downloading the entire internet and then running searches on your local server for the information that interests you.
Imagine duplicating this in EVERY household in the country. The impact to our energy grid would be sickening. We should be looking to lessen the amount of power we are sucking down, not increase it.
Moreover, there's no need -- TV listings are announced, you know what's going to be on, you can narrow down significantly what you know is highly unlikely to be of any interest to you. You don't want to capture something and then have to sift through it all. Finding that one good show or moment in a month of crap content will be like finding a needle in a haystack, unless you can find a way to dope the captured video stream with some metadata that you can use to aid your search.
There might be the occasional oddball thing that no one predicted would happen on TV that you might miss, but (and this is the true beauty of the internet) if that happens, there's sure to be SOMEONE who captured it, and it will be hosted on the internet somewhere (copyright laws be damned). It's just a matter of finding it. Google can make that reasonably easy. Friends and family forwarding links that they found interesting to your email can take up any slack.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Lots of 'it can't be done' posts, but a simple solution occurs to me - a pvr with a hard wired torrent application, which will record a random channel. Sell a few thousand of them, all the channels get covered/seeded, and although what you want may not be *immediately* available, with a broadband connection it can be had reasonably soon.
"'Why program a TiVo to get certain shows for you when you can record every single show on the air, all at once, and then use recommendations, search, a grid, or any other means you care to name to figure out which of those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of programming you want to watch.' The company seems somewhat cryptic with a simple website that appears to be collecting your email addresses for an announcement in August."
That's why.
I was at the Open Tech conference and also saw this PVR box. Actually there wasn't much box to it. It consisted of several large capacity hard drives (maybe about five SATAs) and a few DVB PCI cards, connected to a motherboard on a wooden base, no case.
It recorded one WEEK's worth of video from, as far as I could tell, only the BBC's Freeview channels (BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, News24, CBeebies, CBBC). The quality seemed fine judging from an episode of Doctor Who which went out on BBC3 the previous Thursday being projected behind the presenter.
I'd be more impressed if it could record all the "TV" broadcast over the net.
Seriously. They think we want their channels of media?
Keep your "TV"
Keep your "Blockbusters"
Keep your "Idols"
You had control in the past, but now its shifted and not even Boxes capable of holding a *million* hours of reality TV and home renovation or "Trusted Computing" or DRM or "The next big Justin Timberlake" will bring us back.
RIP centralised media
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
It seems to me that the best way to have a featureset such as the one they are boasting, is to have a distributed system. What I mean by this is that each customer would automatically download and hold several television shows at a time.
:|
Using a buffer, shows could be streamed to customers from other customers as they select it from the menu. Granted this wouldnt work for areas where there is a limited amount of bandwith per month, but I cant think of anything better right now. It is too early in the morning
"If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate." -Zapp Brannigan
What about all the material that they're going to miss NOW, while they're watching their pre-recorded shows? Who's going to record the shows they miss because they're watching pre-recorded shows? And when are those going to be watched? And isn't this going to lead to people just watching older and older stuff?
Sooner or later people will be going backwards in time, talkin' 'bout Threes Company!
40GB x 100 = 3500 hrs of recording 24hrs day * 30 days = 720 hours you can record for a straight month 4.8 channels non-stop
...are you going to get a proc capable of encoding 30 divx streams simultaneously?
I am NaN
Then he spent 24 hours camping outside.
He wrote it up in 'The Age of Missing Information'. (Amazon link provided for the reviews, no sales connection.)
Great book, I recommend it.
Now excuse me, I need to get back to /. before I miss something.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Roger Waters said it best:
Got thirteen channels of shit on the T.V. to choose from
"I'm not ashamed I can't function in society like I'm supposed to." - Paul Westerberg
According to http://erg.abdn.ac.uk/research/future-net/digital- video/dvb-trans.html each DVB multiplex runs at 24Mb/s.
So, storing one multiplex for a month needs
(24/8)*60*60*24*31 Mbytes of storage = 8 Terra Bytes
So 8TB per multiplex per month just about doable at the state of the art, but not very likely.
I haven't checked how many muxes in use for different channels. I think it's about 3, so say 24TB all in. That's a lot of disks!
I think the entertainment industry should take this as a strong indication of things to come. They have an extraordinary opportunity to give people what they want - access to the entertainment whenever (and wherever) the viewer wants. The extent to which time-shifting has becoming commonplace (everyone knows what tivo'ing a show means) should be viewed as the start of, not the end of, the revolution in entertainment. The archives of home users will only continue to grow. I'd prefer to see the entertainment industry realize the demand is for the ability to view any program, any time and just archive their collections. Revenue could still be made by including advertising, or by charging per-download for advert-free content.
Of all the amazing and wonderful things I saw this weekend at London's OpenTech conference, none came close to the stupendous Promise TV box.
Of all the amazing and wonderful things I see while visiting London, none come close to sucking as bad as British TV. Why would I want to record an entire month of that garbage? *ducks*