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83 Comments
- cpirate, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19Almost? Are you going to break into the cable company facilities and add a bigger disk to their server?
- jzollo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15I don't like this one bit, this gives the cable company too much control over recorded content! For example, what if another one of Janet Jackson's wardrobes malfunctions, can the cable companies (probably being instructed by the FCC) go in and remove the scene?
I wasn't sure if I was going to buy a new HD TiVo but now i'm almost certain I will. - samesong, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14Maybe I'm strapping on my tinfoil hat too tightly, but I don't like the idea of the programs that I record being monitored and controlled by someone else. Not only does this raise privacy concerns, but what stops them from simply blocking access to all of your recorded programs if you're late on a bill? This also gives them complete control of how long your content can be stored, but also how much. You might end up having to pay a lot more for storage than you would if you bought your own DVR.
- rebrad, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11If anything this move by the cable companies would only increase the sales of Tivo and other DVR's, at least on Time Warner. I think if Remote DVR is no better than their On-Demand channels customers would drop Remote DVR like a hot potato. The reason is simple; the resolution sucks and simple controls like play, pause, FF, RR or stop is extremely sluggish to the point of unsuitability. That and the bandwidth wastes would drive me to satellite and a hardware DVR in a heartbeat.
- jeolmeun, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9The most the cable company would need is one recording of every channel and serve everyone from that one recording. They would have a database of pointers to data instead of multiple redundant copies. Pretty much like on demand channels, but for every channel. This might mess with networks trying to sell episodes.
- notkevin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9I can understand where they are coming from, it will be cheaper for them to maintain. However, I would not expect them to pass the savings on to the consumers.
- doit3d, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Good point. I wouldn't want to miss out on some HD nip slips either.
- perkelation, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9They probably won't allow you to skip the ads.
- smolek5228, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7"Not only does this raise privacy concerns, but what stops them from simply blocking access to all of your recorded programs if you're late on a bill?"
Comcast already does that. If your bill isn't paid on time they not only cut off your signal through the box, they prevent you from watching recorded programs stored on the DVR. - OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Isn't it great to have to pay $60 a month for cable and STILL have to watch advertizing?
- psyiode, on 10/12/2007, -6/+12People will just have to start using MythTV more.
www.mythtv.org - darkmane, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4-----
Cablevision argues nothing will be recorded on its network unless the viewer orders it from the remote control--an important difference from other failed experiments.
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Based off of that quote, I see no backing up because the cat knocked over something and you missed a crucial line, just tha ability to pause. Not to mention the bandwidth that will be soaked up because it has now gone from a broad cast to a lot of narrow casts.
If the Comcast DVR is an example of what I can expect, I'll stick with my TiVo. - GreenSlabOfClay, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4This is big news, but it certainly won't do away with DVRs.
On the contrary, it may spawn a whole new market.
Cable companies will of course CHARGE for this luxury.
Be it hidden in rate increases or as an option on your bill.
A part of me is surprised it took this long for them to wake up and smell the coffee.
The other is not, given the size of these ships.
They have so much trouble maneuvering with our rush past technilogical singularity. - QuickHonda, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Do the cable companies really have the bandwidth available to start streaming this many feeds at once? Digital cable is already compressed to barely tolerable levels, I can only see things going downhill when they start streaming a seperate feed for each person.
- nxusername, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Hooray for anti-consumer technology!
I'm sure they would use this for no good. I just canceled my DVR service because my cable company was crippling the box by not allowing me to use any of the RCA inputs. The resaon say they did this is because "MPAA feared that people would use it to transfer DVDs to DVR."
How lame is that? - tjl2015, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4How much storage space would this take? Compressed would be what, 3 megabits per second? That's 1.35 gigabytes per hour. Two hundred channels is 270 gigs. So a hard drive every hour. They would probably use magnetic tape or something. I guess it ultimately depends on how long they plan on retaining the stuff. Which creates real problems for the end user. Great, now "my" recordings will get deleted at the whim of the cable company, even if I pay for the service. Now if a disk drive/magnetic tape drive fails, it will affect thousands, rather than just the one person. Are they gonna back this stuff up? The whole thing sounds like a giant electronic boondoggle. Would be kinda fun to try to create the thing, though
- tjl2015, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4What, did they not design it to accept Macrovision or something, I doubt that. Two possibilities. One, the cable company is lying, trying to avoid calls from grandma asking how to hook up her video camera to the thing. Or, the MPAA gave them some ***** legal thing about piracy, trying to decrease the number of people recording broadcasted movies.
- smkelly, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5If I were a cable company, I'd implement this system by recording every channel all the time as a timestamped stream. For example, the cable company shouldn't classify a recording as "Family Guy" at the lowest level. Then, provide users with a guide interface like DVRs have now, and the guide interface merely tells the cable company servers that the customer needs access to a specific timecode range, based on the start/end time of the program.
If Family Guy was on from 2100-2130 on 4/2/2006, the guide would merely provide me a link to the cable company's saved stream range from (040220062100-040220062130).
This would also give customers the flexibility to record any time range they wanted even if it wasn't associated with a show, say 8:05pm-8:25pm. None of this stops the cable companies from running reports to see how many people were interested in a specific show, as they can merely look up who was interested in media from channel N between two given timecodes.
And now I shall go patent this. Good day. - MickeysHouse, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I dunno what to make of this since my Motorolla DVR totally sucks! I can foresee waiting countless minutes and dealing with lag times during/before watching a movie/show. Im happy to see the ***** worthless piece of crap Moto DVR boxes, which Comcast has already switched 6 times in the last 2 years. But then it again, it would really suck monkey balls if the appropriate bandwidth isn't alloted and we're waiting for ***** to download and hope it won't choke mid-way.
Overall, ***** Comcast and Motorola; I sure do hope Time Warner does some good in my area. - sevenminustwo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Not only does it give the company more control over your content but it also gives them the ability to "package" content into your recorded programs i.e. advertisements, commercials, etc. One of the biggest challenges broadcasters face is how to control advertising revenue streams when someone can just blow through the commercials. Just like on DVDs now, you get stuck watching previews, sometimes unable to FF through them. They could do the same thing by "owning" your recorded programs & running commercials or ads before you start your show which cannot be bypassed. It would certainly put them in the driver seat for being able to command more advertising dollars.
I think it sucks for the consumer. - ryank808, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Just think of the lag.
My cable company rented (SA 8000) DVR is already too slow as it is. - terafunker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3This makes me wonder what the blokes at Directv and Dish network might offer against this. They're now working on decent on-demand options and experimenting with dish-based internet connections, but they'll not be able to offer anything like this.
well, nuts to it anyway. My Dish net. 600 series DVR is excellent; dare I say better than my old TiVo series II for which I paid $10 more each month. - rlutterb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I consider myself relatively well-compensated, but $100/mo for my Comcast "Silver" (lowest digital package of 3), with its one movie channel, the surcharge for the HD PVR box, and the surchage for the HDTV signal. Thats really godd*mn expensive. All it'll take is one more price bump for a service like this, and I'm out... I'll go OTA for my HD networks, and BitTorrent for everything else.
- suMMx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3seems like a lot of storage considering a lot of people record a ton of shows and a ton of HD content which is ginormous in size.
- Black0ps, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If this goes through I'm canceling my cable and setting up satellites for all the FTA TV I can get.
who is with me? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The big cable companies best start investing heavily in their backends. I know Time Warner has an enormous problem with insufficient capacity as it is... every friday night their Video On Demand bites the dust due to the large number of subscribers trying to access shows in Houston. Yet they don't fix it.. they just tell people to try again some other time. Glad I don't work there anymore..
- tjl2015, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Exactly, a tivo box might only be able to record a hundred hours. The thing comes with what, two tuners max? See how many tivos would you need to record every chanel simultaneously? It's a massive amount of data. With 270 GB per hour, that's 6.5 terabytes per day. That's 1700 petabytes in a year! They might be able to reduce that by an order or two of magnitude, depending on the compression used and whether people literally select to record everything. What does that actually mean? According to this estimate, the ENTIRE INTERNET, as of 2005, was about 500 petabytes:
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu:8000/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm.
Even if they decrease the storage, you're still talking about a collosal amount of data. The ONLY way they could do this would be to limit the time data was retained or put limits on the number of shows people could record or have access to. - Kuipo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3EXACTLY what I was thinking. If they don't allow you to skip the ad's... forget it.
- Kitsune818, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'd be happy if my digital cable didn't drop out and pixelize every 45 seconds. I don't actually get half the channels I'm supposed to. They've come out 4 times now to fix it and every time they say it's something else that's causing it. All new coax right out to the pole. Morons. The last thing I want is to not have local access to my recorder and instead have it in those people's hands. Their support line once told me that my DVR unit (A motorola) was a "supercomputer" and that the fact that I have to play two to three minutes of recorded material before it will start decoding live material is part of the "boot up sequence for the processors." I think the guy actually believed himself, too. Also, no matter how hard I try to explain the fact that the thing locks up, they always say "No, it's just paused." Paused? With the front display showing random LED segments, the screen looking like a screen cap from some deranged digital kaleidescope, the HD making a loud buzzing noise, and no keys responding at all until I unplug the thing and plug it back in? That's one hell of a pause!
- GoombaZ, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This could be pretty cool, especially if you can have their servers record multiple programs at the same time. Although, I bet this will be prone to service outages due to server loads reaching the maximum number of simultaneous users or whatever it is that cause the communications errors I get when trying to use Comcast's on demand service at certain times of the night.
- JuliusErving, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Well, you won't have a DVR technically, so there will be nothing to mod. I second cpirate. However, that's not to say that you won't be allowed to have your own DVR or something. Cablevision isn't forcing this service on you.
- foxhoundadmin, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6don't you get it!? the mpaa's planning a full-on macrovision attack! recording tv with anything BUT a dvr offering remote storage is dead. DEAD i tell you!
we need to make armies of video filters to counter the macrovision attacks! then, we can hack the ***** outta our tivos to allow them to record locally; because the mpaa will have gotten to them, too. tivos will soon follow the horrendous ways of our cable companies! no more local storage... no more... none. :'(
we need to prepare! - doit3d, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Wouldn't it be wiser for them to update their network infrastructure first?
I can see this leading to bandwidth issue (which some cable companies have already in many areas) for their internet customers seeing how they would be streaming the recorded shows to a persons house. It will consume alot of bandwidth I would think. - lipinski, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2mythtv here i come.
- Karyyk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Just another way for the cable companies to control how the consumer views content. This is the next step past crippled DVR boxes. Goodie...
No digg. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3There's no reason your RCA inputs shouldn't work unless the dvr was manufactured that way... Time Warner did carry some dvr boxes (scientific atlanta) with quite a few features that were not actually implemented, but the jacks were still there. The reply to your comment is most insightful. We often made ***** up to customers just to get them off the phone so we could get to the other 150 people waiting in queue (no lie). In the end it didn't help because they'd just call back, but at least it looked good on our personal call stats.
- forgetfulca, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I would be willing to bet it's got zero to do with "savings" for them, and a whole lot to do with 'closing the analog hole'.
Keep in mind (the link to the article escapes me at the moment) that the content companies own a staggering percentage of the entire pipline from creation to transmission to your house. They want to wring money from you each and every possible opportunity. If you don't physically own the dvr, you cannot watch it when you feel like it, or archive it. Lack of these choices for you equals more dinero's for them. (For slower & crappier service, as someone else has postulated above) - Kitsune818, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yes, but you'd only have to keep one copy and link everyone to that.
- Tezkah, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Agreed, I'm really happy to get my already huge Comcast bill of $120 a month raised (cable internet + 2 TVs with basic packages -- no HBO or Showtime) for this new service. I doubt T-W will be any different."
Internet with cable is a max of $42.95
Basic TV is anywhere from $10-20
You're paying for a lot more than just basic TV if you're paying $120 a month... - forgetfulca, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What unused spectrum? My regular cable channels are ALREADY filled with mpeg jaggies from lost signal, I'm told as a result of the data compression they are already doing to squeeze in the channels currently being offered. Where is the room going to come from to offer Xfinity MORE streams to serve up this on demand, per household pause and replay?
- nxusername, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The ports are there, and they defiantly do not work. Crippled!
- frankie9999, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1n e one else worried about all the legislation looking into how to ban fast forwarding thorugh commericials. If they push this through it will become very easy to remove the fast forward option. I realize that this doesn't exist now with the on demand stuff, but it is coming
- loker269, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1it is funny....they have been talking about this for years and now its all the sudden a new service lol
- xxsiriusxburnxx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1now I didnt read all the comments above, but how is this any different from them still streaming it from their servers, its just like another form of (VOD) Video On Demand, just more less customizable, and as well I dont think it matters too much but doesn't that put more stress on the cabling system streaming more, when they could use that for other reasons perhaps added internet bandwidth, either way im not for or against this, no need to hack dvr its already there, if y ou want the video for other reasons but a tv tuner card and your set.
- haqattaq, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Still going to need a box next to the tube for my Music and Photos...... and with this system, forget about taking videos on the go.
This could definitely increase sales for independent DVRs (tivo)... - thirdtenor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1if I had space for BUD i would have one already
- TheWriteGuy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It sounds like what they're doing is caching on their servers recordings of popular shows and then serving them to subscribers who set their cable box to "record" said show. For example, when you set your account to record LOST, you're not actually recording the show onto their servers. The cable company would just serve you and everybody else the same recording of the show.
But if you program your account to record an obscure show, then your actions will probably activate the cable company's server to record it.
Otherwise, it doesn't sound like an efficient use of resources from the cable company's server's side. - XTrek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The cable co's envision all content being digital and encrypted soon. Only local channels will remain clear. So we will ONLY be able to use our own DVRs for locals. And this will require a separate box from their decoder box.
Problem is for me, I demand more freedom than the cable co's envision giving us. This reduces the value of their product. They are constantly trying to increase their income but they are evolving into a product that is worth less to me. When will technology drive prices down? I guess when the current cable co's get pushed aside. - rlutterb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You don't think Comcast or TiVo or whoever can monitor which shows you are recording right now, with a DVR in your home? How do you think TiVo was able to say that the Janet Jackson nipple-slip was the most rewatched bit ever? You've got no privacy from the provider in what you watch, record, and instant replay a 100 times.
- DCstewieG, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That was my plan (especially with my new TV with built-in digital tuner). Too bad the girlfriend needs her TBS reruns etc. Cable prices are re-frickin'-diculous. Luckily we'll make do with non-digital cable...until they force that on us. Networks in OTA HD are all I need.
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