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Can Google Fix the Cable Box?
theodp writes "In purchasing Motorola Mobility, Slate's Farhad Manjoo reports that Google will also come into possession of one the nation's biggest suppliers of set-top boxes. So, can Google work some of its do-no-evil magic on the loathsome cable box? Don't bet on it, says Manjoo. For one thing, there's no evidence that Google would be very good at remaking the set-top box (Google TV, anyone?). But even if Google managed to dramatically improve set-top boxes, it's doubtful that cable and satellite companies would buy in. First, they'd lose all those ridiculously lucrative cable-box rental fees. More importantly, they'd have to give up control of the main entertainment device in most homes, and with it the opportunity to slow or stymie competing sources for entertainment. After the merger, notes Manjoo, Google could get several billion dollars by selling off Motorola Mobility's set-top-box division — a much surer payday than taking on Big Cable."
But there is a lot of viewership demographic data to gather, and no one harvests ad data better than Google. They'll be able to offer an online ad that matches one that the view didn't switch away from last night while watching TV.
I never knew it was broken. It sounds like people are trying to make a problem to fix.
Can I have an HD version of my old ReplayTV? Fantastic interface, incredibly easy to use. Just add room-to-room streaming to make up for the loss of transferring every recording. (And I didn't even have the one that did automatic commercial skipping.)
People still watch cable? I mean I have it but I don't think Ive watched anything in at least a month. I mean with Netflix and bit torrent who needs cable as long as I got my fast internet connection. Now, if the cable company would let me order there high speed internet without getting basic cable that would be an improvement.
In Canada you can buy the same boxes or rent them. Some cable / satellite systems even have rent to own.
And when you buy them there is no per box outlet / mirroring fees.
But over hear in comcast land new software like tivo on the Motorola cable box does not make it out of the testing area.
Stuff like E-sata is locked out (a few other cable systems have it turned on)
Other cable systems have auto HD where they can tune to the hd channel when you enter the old SD number. Comcast has the half backed pop up the ask you to hit a button to go the HD channels (does not show up all the time)
The new Xfinity Spectrum box with 4 tuners is in testing but right now in test you have 2 and half tuners working and no AnyRoom DVR right now.
Motorola Mobility includes cable boxes.
You come home, turn on the TV, and it'll ask you for your Gmail account.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Why MSWIndows with a cable card?
Why not Apple TV with a USB tuner? Makes about as much sense.
I'll just buy a tuner card or USB box for the Fedora box I use here. Or not. We've done fine without TV for about seven years now.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I made my own. http://cetoncorp.com/
I don't know how the Cable Companies do things, but one of the things I looked into after becoming a DirecTV subscriber was getting boxes that I owned outright instead of boxes I leased. What I discovered is that even if you own the box, they still charge you 5 or 6 bucks a month to use it with their system by calling it a "mirroring" fee.
Considering that everything I've read about IPTV boxes suggests that they have to actively request the content from a central line, and the more advanced cable boxes all need to interface with the central system for the purposes of knowing what channels are and aren't allowed, PPV ordering, and on-demand access, I can safely assume that there is no way you could slip some kind of box on to the system and have it just magically work in some kind of passive mode the way you could just hook up your old cable ready TV to the old analog systems. The companies are gonna know its there, and they're gonna charge you a fee to use it, regardless of if you own it or they do.
More importantly, they'd have to give up control of the main entertainment device in most homes
Interesting if true. I would have thought with Hulu and tons of other entertainment that cable's glory days were behind. I'd really like to know the % of homes that still have cable as I'm sure with the economy, many are considering other, cheaper alternatives.I know many that have ditched it in the past couple years and those that do have it, it's mainly b/c of ESPN/sports. At least around here, it is a non-trivial amount to add basic cable to your internet service, let alone any premium packages.
They recently bought sage.tv, I suspect what they come up with will look a lot like that.
The naming is slightly misleading: "Motorola Mobility" encompasses their cellphone line; but also a bunch of STB, cable modems, and other consumer electronics widgets. "Motorola Solutions" is their government and enterprise customer brand(which includes a bunch of mobile RF stuff, just not the consumer focused gear).
There could certainly be some re-shuffling that happens during the merger; but "Mobility" presently includes a variety of hardwired consumer products.
Google is deploying fiber to the home. I'm sure there will be a video offering, what else are they going to do with that bandwidth? So, why does google care what Comcast or Direct TV thinks? If they make a better box they can use it for themselves. If they find a better way to generate revenue with it, then maybe the other operators my take a look at it.
Your right, Google gets the whole cable division. What used to be GI. Set top boxed, MPEG Encoders, Sat receivers, conditional access systems, all the outside plant equipment. Absolutely everything one would need to deploy a cable system. A shitty cable system, but a cable system non the less.
Google could do some real evil and start adding onscreen ads, or just make ads clickable to go to an informational website while buffering the remainder of the show. If Google splits the click revenue with the cable cos, they would almost certainly go along.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Motorola Mobility is comprised of the Mobile Devices business which produces smartphones and the Home business which produces set-top boxes and end-to-end video solutions.
So called 'big cable' only has a future as internet providers. Broadcast media, the already anachronistic channel paradigm, and tiered services are all as doomed as Blockbuster.
I recently dumped the TV portion of Verizon. It was costing me around $100 a month for JUST TV, and that was with what I would consider a small setup. The misses was all for it, EXCEPT for the need for a DVR that was simple for her and my son to use. Not really for them to program, but for them to get at shows that are programmed. We live in area with TONS of channels OTA with an antenna. I ended up getting the Channel Master CM-7000PAL. That and netflix streaming, and I'm paying a fraction of what I used to, and I'm only really missing out on Pawn Stars and Storage Wars - which were both rotting my brain anyway.
I know it's not the wiz-bang solution others would recommend, but for non-tech folks, it's a pretty good alternative, provided you can get OTA channels.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
My understanding is that, if you wish to use any encrypted cable service, you either suck it up and rent the company's cable box, or you enter the delightsome world of cablecard 'compatibility' with so-called "host" devices. At present, because of the somewhat onerous(incidentally the 'open' in "opencable" appears to be a piece of gallows humor, not an actual description) certification requirements, specific Wintel hardware configurations are the only ones DRMy enough for the purpose, along with a number of STBs and TVs and similar appliances.
Apple's continued lack of enthusiasm for DRM systems other than their own makes adoption of Cable Card on any of their platforms less than entirely likely, and I'm pretty sure that there is a standing order at Cable Labs HQ that any Linux system not thoroughly Tivoized is to be stopped at the door and ejected by security.
If you are dealing with OTA signals, or snarfing analog feeds from STBs, or using non/weakly DRMed digital media, you have options; but if you want to talk to a commercial cable network, not so much...
Story submitter really doesn't have a good idea how the cable industry works. Not that I do, but I at least know that Google would not be selling the boxes directly to the end consumers. They sell the boxes to the cable companies, who then turn around and sell/lease them to subscribers. Google is in a much better position to write improved software for the boxes.
I'm really a low 5-digit Slashdotter, but this ID is where I am now.
It's called TiVo.
I'm not sure Google can pull it off. They have the engineering talent, but I don't think they would be able to negotiate with the content creators or put an elegant face on their software and hardware.
There are persistent rumors of Apple being interested in making a television and I think they could pull it off. They already have a bunch of deals with content people in place. They also have the ability to look at a market and see what could be rather than what is. They reshaped the music industry and cell phone industry and I think they could do the same for televisions, amplifiers, and all the other boxes surrounding my television. I would love it if they could do something about the mess of wires and confusing remotes that I have lying around. I bought a Logitech Harmony 1100 because I thought that might make things simpler, but it is a deeply flawed device and now I have another remote sitting beside my television.
I will also point out that even if you hate everything Apple with an irrational hatred of a thousand burning suns, an aTV makes a sweet XBMC box, then you really can be in ultimate control of the software on the box.
CableCard devices requires your PC software to follow DRM restrictions (copy once, copy never). So far only Windows Media Server have them implemented, any other OS/software such as MythTv will only receive the cable channels marked "copy freely" from the CableCard device (no premium channels, PPV, etc)
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
That is something I miss about Adelphia - they had the e-sata ports enabled. When I call Comcast about it the answer is invariably "it's in beta" - riiight. In other words, it's enbled in the Adelphia markets they acquired, but not on the the nodes running off the heads Comcast deployed.
You would think they would enable it - instead of customers breaking DVRs to get upgrades, they can enable the e-sata ports and let the customer plug in larger hard drives. When I lived in an Adelphia town, I had a 1GB HDD attached to the DVR, which gave me five times the capacity the cable company delivers. It might sound like a ridiculous amount but when you consider how much disk space HD recordings take up, it really is not all that much space.
IMHO retaining SD channels is a good thing; you can stretch out capacity by recording SD rather than HD. Is there a difference in quality? There sure is. But honestly, I still think native HD is overrated. I'm still happy with upscaled DVD most of the time. I do buy Blu-Ray discs from time to time but even though the video quality is amazing, it does not impress me nearly as much as the upgrade from VHS (240-line-at-best-but-usually-smeared-and-bloomed resolution plus poorly-encoded Dolby Pro Logic) to DVD (480 lines of resolution with perfect color all the time plus Dolby Digital Surround, Dolby Digital Surround EX or DTS). Cable HD is generally over-compressed so you get MPEG blocking and color smearing, which decreases the apparent resolution, plus many cable providers only give you 720p, so you're looking at over-compressed 720p which may not look as good as DVD (480p) viewed at 1080p courtesy a high quality video scaler.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Tivo will be a target for Google. This will happen within a year. Mark my words.
I think you need to ask yourself a more general question. What can Google do to maximize their ad revenue per person per hour spent in the living room? Well, obviously all the ads that the user sees should be personally tailored Google ads. How do you achieve that? Now keep in mind that you have the R&D muscle to design the innards of a TV from scratch and give away the blueprints to Sony et al. Okay, so let's design a TV...
1. The TV shall have an active internet connection. The obvious answer is to ship every TV with a built-in WiFi chip.
2. The TV shall be running Google software or Google web apps. The answer seems to be to put a version of Android or Chrome OS on every TV.
3. There needs to be a fun and simple way for the user to control the TV. This is probably the most part difficult part to get right. Perhaps it should be something like the Wiimote, or something like Kinect. Perhaps it should be a traditional button remote and on-screen menu system. Lots of work needs to be put into this.
4. There needs to be a huge amount of content available through Google-affiliated content providers that operate through the web so that Google can control the flow of ads that the user sees. These providers would be direct competitors to the cable companies...
So in other words it doesn't seem like there is much opportunity for cooperation between Google and TV cable providers, except for the fact that Google needs the cable providers to stay alive, because a lot of users connect to the internet through cable. The cable companies will probably want a cut of Google's ad revenue. Google will probably try to outmaneuver the cable companies by some form of mobile internet connection scheme and that is where it gets interesting from a nerd perspective. Is it possible to have everyone in a city watch HDTV (including live broadcasts) over some form of radio connection? What kind of technology could achieve that?
Perhaps it is possible to get the cable companies to morph into internet-based Google-affiliated content providers and avoid the conflict altogether.
Let's be really clear here for a moment that the cable companies are NEVER going to let Google implement what's possible or what the consumer desires in the way of a proper set top box. Don't you just implicitly expect things like Slingbox to just, y'know, work? Nope...impacts revenue. How about HBO GO? Hmm...no again, that's a problem from a demand forecasting perspective. The cable companies win today by limiting choices (options, bandwidth consumption, etc) and Google would invariably want to uncork that. Not going to happen. Oh, here's my other favorite: what happens when someone tricks out the API and gives the entire customer base free access to everything?
The cable companies are the RIAA of the airwaves and will never tolerate this happen. Expect more of the same...unless Google intends to start laying their own fiber, too. Oh, wait...
---- Please be nice in case my Slashdot karma ~= my real life karma.
I had a 1GB HDD attached to the DVR /s/1GB/1TB/
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Build a Windows Media Center PC, add a CetonTV card, and rent a CableCard from your cable company for around ~$3 a month.
I can record four shows at one time, have a much better guide and interface, save a lot of power (because cable boxes don't give a damn about power usage, and you'd know that if you plugged in a Kill-A-Watt into it), and just in rental fees, I save over $400 a year for two cable boxes. I use my WMC PC in one room (and it's whisper quiet), and an Xbox to extend the DVR to another room.
If I want to extend it again, I just buy an XBox on ebay for ~$100 or so. Nicest thing is that regardless of what cable company I have, I will always have a good DVR.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Oh yeah like Scientific Atlanta is any better. they all are shitty. Absolutely no CableTV equipment vendor for headend or STB is "non-shitty" they all pile on heaps of "shitty" as a selling feature.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The FCC already has a ruling on this:
http://www.fcc.gov/guides/digital-cable-compatibility-cablecard-ready-devices
It's kinda like the way it was with telephones. People could own their own but it took literally over a decade before it really caught on. I know you could buy your own phone back in the late 1970's. However, the telcos were making pretty good money off rentals until at least the early 1990's. Lots of people just kept renting.
On the other hand, those old phones were very well engineered and were meant to last decades. You could bludgeon someone with an old bell telephone and then use it to call an ambulance.
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
Google bought a small company called SageTV a few months back. They were one of the only companies offering a "whole house" PVR solution via tiny thin-client media extenders running on multiple TVs, and PVR software running on PCs. They had an extensible UI, as well as a number of features (like local media file management) that cable company DVRs either don't do, or do very poorly.
My guess is that they intend to apply the SageTV team to making cable boxes suck less; especially whole house solutions. Obviously they won't be using clients PCs as the server any longer, but a lot of the technology is applicable.
We dropped our cable subscription a few months ago when they forced set-top boxes on us. We were already paying for something we hardly used, and the idea of adding even more electronics to our setup was distasteful. Our main home theater unit already has too many devices to list here, and two of the three other TV's are wall-mount with no reasonable place for a set-top box. I actually shopped around for satellite before realizing that every one of those providers force you to use their equipment as well. So now we have just basic OTA HDTV, yet get a lot of video from Netflix and a lot of other online sources.
My only regret is live sports. I'm a fan of one particular sport that is carried on a cable sports channel, and has virtually no online availability.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
I mean with Netflix and bit torrent who needs cable
You need cable Internet or fiber Internet for Netflix, and you need cable TV or satellite TV for anything Netflix doesn't carry. See archived pros and cons. As for BitTorrent, which owners of copyright in video make their videos lawfully available over that?
and you give up VOD and have to use add on SDV tuners in SDV cable systems.
Also can you get out of market sports packs on cable card? Event PPV?
$3 month ok but some systems hit you with a outlet fee and maybe even a cable card HD fee.
There is lots of Free VOD and cable systems like comcast are cutting down on HBO, SHOW, MAX and STARZ HD and they say that alot of that in on VOD in HD.
The cable set top box wouldn't really stay in Google's control. The cable companies themselves have to drive them.
Do you think they want Netflix running on your cable box that they subsidize?
If Google can get some kind of profit sharing model with the cable companies when it comes to advertising then they will get some traction.
Google also got into the whole ad scheduling space as well. This might give google the ability to insert local ads into youtube streams, which could be a decent revenue stream and really start getting way more customized ads into the streams.
Cisco is the other big holder by buying scientific atlanta a while ago.If google started doing dumb things cable providers could plop back to their products.
Can google fix the cable box? No.
They're already in my phone, PIM, and POOM data, I don't need them harvesting my viewing habits for the Feds and advertisers as well.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
the system with auto HD moved the SD channels to new numbers IO cable moved some of them to 1000's and rogers did this http://www.rogersautohd.com/
You can't fix cable without fixing the cable companies, not the box.
I8-D
"Do-no-evil magic"? Citation bloody needed. Those days are past. Look at the Google+ names fuckery - stuff like blocking Hong Kong users from their email because they don't think their names sound American enough. Even their own employees!
You are not the customer, you are the product. Eric Schmidt stated it clearly last year. Make no mistake: Google has decided it's finally time to cash in.
This has abolished their goodwill in an instant. I'm seeing people seriously question Google for collaborative documents, for email, even for search. How much bad will do you have to be running up for people to think Bing might be a better idea?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Build a Windows Media Center PC
Not many end users are willing to take hours of time of work to learn how to build a PC. What brand of off-the-shelf Windows Media Center PC is worth the money?
On 8/8/11 the new FCC rules on cable cards went into effect.
See http://www.fcc.gov/guides/cablecard-know-your-rights for more information
Open cable cards will hopefully set us free. If not, sic the bureaucrats on your cable company.
if you enable USB Mass Storage then sure you can connect your camcorder, but you can *also* connect a hard drive or USB stick and save/view recordings you have made on the box itself.
That'd be an argument for read-only Mass Storage, not for no Mass Storage at all.
There's a reason that the storage on the DVR itself is limited when it would be trivial to enable the box to save out to an external disk or array, networked or otherwise. They don't want you recording and keeping shows - they want you to buy the DVDs.
So in other words, they want camcorder owners to buy a computer with a BD-R drive on which to edit video and author BDAV discs. Do I misunderstand you? Or are you saying the networks want people watching their DVDs instead of home movies so much that they're willing to force the issue on cable TV system operators?
Farhad completely misses the opportunity. He sees only two worlds...a world where Google completely tries to change the whole paradigm of how cable service is provisioned and delivered, or just selling off the set-top division of Motorola Mobility. I agree with him that for Google to attempt to make the cable companies let people buy their own boxes is madness. I also think, however, that Google realizes this. Not only is there the history of the CableCard, but also the problems with support, the fact that cable companies would need to come up with a way to provision boxes not under their direct control, and so on. Competitors to Motorola in the space would have Google's lunch; Motorola's division is a major player, but if the cable companies no longer wish to buy their products or support them, that will disappear instantly.
What is possible, however, is for Google to infuse their expertise into the box. To improve the user experience, to potentially make the boxes more interactive by leveraging Android as a set-top OS, to make them more green so that they not only use less power, but don't heat up the inside of our entertainment centers do damned much. Farhad starts out describing a plethora of shortcomings these devices have, but then fails to make the leap of realizing just how easy it would be to fix almost all of them, without having to replumb an entire industry. And even more to the point...if Google can make a much better cable box, they will get even more market share in the space.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Forget about what the cable companies want. If Google produces a device everyone wants they'll have no choice. They didn't want TiVo or any DVRs at first, or multiple TVs connected, or IPTV or any kind. Popularity will force their hand.
Imagine if a $200 box made it realistic/simple/practical to make video phone calls, and the same box could surf the web, play games, show and record TV. Good hardware isn't the issue, it's good software with open and free SDKs. As long as they don't "beta" it to premature death (like Google TV) I don't see how Google could lose.
The key for Google is ensuring open standards because they don't control the platform. With hardware in every home they could guarantee the long term viability of WebM, OpenGL ES, NaCl, HTML5 (esp. offline storage and 2D rendering).
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
My Motorola cable box died recently and the new one that Comcast supplied did NOT have the Motorola name brand on it. In fact it only has the name Xfinity on it. I wonder If Comcast has designed their own box and contracted to have it made for them. (but by WHO?)
The cable box is here to stay. Well at least for a while and Google should really be into that anyway. The Google tv was their attempt to get Google on tv's everywhere. If they have cable boxes too, that is another way to get that access to the tv. If we are lucky they will make smaller boxes and hopefully better. Who knows, maybe they will integrate it with the "cloud" somehow. Maybe integrate it with the cable internet and if you have cable internet and cable tv you can watch your cable shows anywhere on any device. Lots of speculation here, but Motorola was just sitting on its past success and the only thing good to come from Motorola has been some of it's upper end phones. It really needs someone to fix that company.
Only 'flamers' flame!
cuase dingbat, google just bought out the motorola division that makes the cable boxes for every cable service on this side of the globe and probably more
does windows media center or apple TV have their boxes as OEM products for big cable?
[Based on a post I made in another forum yesterday].
In terms of the Google TV proposition it will be very interesting to see how that goes. I don't have any inside information but I would expect that there will continue to be a considerablely more expensive hardware platform than a typical TV or STB although I wonder if some of that premium will move to the controller. Google TV does need fundamental product improvement as the initial products were both awful user experiences, Google does know this and has been working on this.
From a cable operators perspective I would be expecting one of two things:
1) A very substantial discount on hardware.
Or
2) Advertising revenue share.
This doesn't fit with the way Google has so far worked with Android and GTV manufacturers where nothing I have heard has indicated that Google makes any payments to anyone in their ecosystem.
From my experience working with cable operators I dont think that the larger ones would be prepared to give up as much control as they would need to and allow another company a revenue stream (advertising/UI/link space) without a very good reason (probably cash). Most cable operators are sufficiently close to being monopolies or have a stable satellite competitor and maybe an upstart IPTV provider burning cash to get customers but they don't feel the need for a rapid change or improvement in the user experience that they want to control.
I don't know if Google will be more flexible either on product than with Google TV for manufacturers or revenue shares than in other Andoid uses but to crack the cable TV Market. If you look at the limited differences between the Logitech and the Sony Google TVs you can draw some conclusions about permitted customisations in the last generation (I'm not expecting much more this time).
Google probably has a somewhat better chance with new more aggressive providers (mostly IPTV) but they will still need to convince them that they will drive viewers to their value added services rather than competing over the top services, which is slightly contrary to the concept of the Google TV.
When I had a digital cable box I just plugged a Firewire cable from my Mac Mini into it and wrote a dozen lines of Python code to control the thing. Video popped up in VLC and dumped into an MPEG2 file on the hard drive.
Oh right, they disable the firewire port in the US don't they?
Cord Cutting has become fairly mainstream lately, probably more due to the economy than anything else but the trend started with people just tired if paying insanely high bills. Cable companies have enjoyed monopolies on internet in many areas since driving out local ISP's. Prices here were actually reasonable when there was competition but as speeds increased smaller companies didn't have any ability to compete. Prices in my area have gone up over 100% since I first had it installed 8 years ago. What was $69 for the deluxe package then is now almost $200. I dropped it down to internet and basic cable only, but their recent trick has been to raise the price of internet only so now I'm saving a whopping $18 over the "bundle" cost and yesterday it was announced that they are planning to drop "basic cable" within 5 years meaning everyone has to rent a box or cable card. IMHO this is desperation...they realize many people simply dont need cable tv anymore.
In convincing my family to cut the cord I tracked channels watched for 3 months...out of the 400+ channels available we watched a grand total of 16 and none of those channels were in the top ten as far as per subscriber costs go. Cable wont adapt to ala carte programming willingly so the only way to convince them is to let them bleed customers...perhaps then they will realize that some money is better than no money. Being simply an internet conduit scares the crap out of the fat cats in the cable industry for too long they have been able to sponge money from pay per view, premium channels, forced bundles, etc and now that those are becoming unneeded there only recourse in their eyes is to go to extreme measures to make having "internet only" a bad deal. Luckily Google is moving here with their fiber network...once that happens I have vowed to never give my cable company another dime.
...it's about access. Expect Google to leverage their new position to expand and improve broadband.
S&P dropped their rating on Google stock from "buy" to "sell" after the Motorola acquisition, and knocked $200 off their one-year predicted price for Google stock. That's very unusual.
Google's track record with hardware is not good. They were in the direct sales phone handset business for only a few months before they had to exit it. Customers insisted that the hardware work, and wanted customer service when it didn't. Google couldn't handle that. Their approach to the "Google Search Appliance" (Mini size) is weird. There's no phone support for this rack-mounted enterprise device. If it breaks, they FedEx you a new one. After three years, the Google Search Appliance stops working and you have to buy a new one. Really. That's Google's approach to enterprise support. That won't fly with Motorola's customer base.
"Open" in "Open Cable" essentially means "open to more companies than just the two that dominated set top boxes when the standard was developed" (Scientific Atlanta and one other, I think Motorola); it has nothing to do with openness in the sense we understand it, alas.
Google doesn't need to get into bed with cable companies. Not when they can slip in between the cable box and the TV (Logitech Revue) or directly into the the TV (Sony). I think about the only thing you can expect to see from this acquisition is a new Google TV device from Motorola. GoogleTV may not have taken off yet but I believe it is only a matter of time.
....and after all this trouble, what would the content be?
Reply to That ||
Build a Windows Media Center PC, add a CetonTV card
In Requirements, Ceton wrote:
PCI Express Low Profile [...] 1 PCIe slot
jedidiah wrote:
Just buy a Mac Mini or any ION machine on Amazon.
I've seen Mac mini and ION nettops, and they don't have a PCIe slot. They'd need something that plugs into USB or Ethernet.
Some cable set top boxes use as much energy as your refrigerator. I would dearly love for google to fix this issue.
pending committee review
I would have thought with Hulu and tons of other entertainment that cable's glory days were behind.
As long as they own the wire coming into your house they are going to have a LOT of influence. Hulu is only as good as the internet connection it is attached to and only a relatively small percentage of the population has what I would consider enough bandwidth to really make it work. Furthermore they have lots of legal agreements with the various networks (content providers) as well as owning some networks of their own (Comcast) and have the ability (the legal right is still up in the air) to block or slow data coming down their pipes. There is no fundamental reason they can't have their own competing services to things like Hulu and Netflix.
I think cable companies are going to have to actively respond to new technology developments but they aren't going anywhere for a long time to come. I know people who would sooner cut off their heat than stop paying for overpriced cable TV. I exaggerate slightly but only slightly...
If I recall correctly, the FCC requires that the firewire port be active; but nothing precludes its output being encrypted...
But you have theme packs and the better WGN (if you are a sports fan)
Considering that TiVO sues just about everything in the set-top box area, that raises its own patent problems.
1TB is fairly standard now in the UK - sky 1TB boxes are £50 to own it and virgin 1tb tivo is £100
If freedom really matters, it should matter more than the high definition or the premium content, etc.
"cuase dingbat" it's time to boycott.
Are we willing to take a few years of limitations on high-def and premium content to take a stand here?
I wasn't signed in - jimcaruso