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Stephen Colbert and the Monster Truck of Tivos
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Lee Hutchinson writes at Ars Technica that when you're picking out a DVR for your home, there's a pretty short list of candidates — TiVo has its new 6-tuner DVRs, or you can get something from your cable provider, or you can roll your own. But SnapStream makes a line of 30+ channel DVRs that can record dozens of TV shows simultaneously. Its products are the monster trucks of the DVR world, used by popular shows like The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and The Soup. A SnapStream cluster can repackage, transcode, and distribute content for re-use — functionality you won't find on a consumer-grade DVR. 'Being able to record, say, all of the news channels was something companies were interested in,' says Aaron Thompson, SnapStream's president. 'The Daily Show, Colbert Report, and so on all use it to record a bunch of stuff, find what they want to make fun of, and quickly get it into their editing bays to get it on air.' Prior to SnapStream, the big media companies were using isolated DVRs to record all the different television channels and shows like The Colbert Report had armies of interns to watch and catalog all the recorded TV, but SnapStream can search the entire recorded library for video based on keywords in the closed captions. 'We bring some of the power of 'new media,' the ability to search, copy and paste, and e-mail clips, to the old media of television for organizations,' says Rakesh Agrawal . 'You weren't able to search television before, but now you can. Now you can pinpoint stuff and you can hold people accountable and move at the same speed at which media works in the online world.'"
That will set you back to the tune of about $223,500 (enter some fake info for the details). Or it looks like you can lease 30 tuners for about $5,000/month.
Think I'll be sticking with my Moxi.
On the cable side, a CableCard and Ceton InfiniTV 4. Ceton has a 6 tuner card.
As for IPTV, MythTV cannot decode the signal alone however, they can be used with IR blaster connected to a set-top box and MythTV can grab the stream from box sometimes.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's not the DVR's fault per se, it's a combination of the DVR and the broadcasters not using technology that permits the DVR to stop recording only when the program is finished. In some parts of the world the broadcaster embeds a signal that tells the DVR what program is on. That way if the game goes into overtime, the DVR knows that it's still going and you don't miss the extra action.
I believe in parts of Europe they have it figured out so that you don't have to worry about missing the end of the football match.