New HD TiVo and Cable Incompatibilities

Lauren Weinstein writes "The rapid deployment of Switched Digital Video (SDV) by cable companies can cause major problems for buyers of the new HD TiVo, preventing any access to some channels."

More background from TivoCommunity

here.... seems like there's still a transition period where channels are being offered in both SDV and analog

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.ph p?t=357703 [tivocommunity.com]

Re:

Huh?

Most of these 3rd party digital tuning solutions suck, quiet frankly. Anything that is sold as an add-on for the PS3 is not going to have much market uptake.

The real "long-term" solution to this stuff is IP video, not switched. Content providers *shoul

Oh no

But the porn channels... why!?

if we had a tough FCC,

they'd stick to guns on the CableCARD mandate and shut down cable systems that were not compatible with 3rd party devices. With a credible shutdown threat looming, this problem would get fixed in less than a month. I know it will never happen due to the huge campaign contributions politicians get from cable companies.

I'm not convinced the cable companies are doing themselves an favors. I'm unlikely to upgrade from my old analog cable if can't have an HD Tivo. Cable companies seem to think HD is a form of crack people cann't live without but I'm doing just fine on analog.

Re:if we had a tough FCC,

Come on you know you NEED cable and HD and everything else they sell. I've come to the realization that nothing on TV is worth what is being charged. I just dropped all my HBOs, Showtimes, digital cable, boxes, etc. for plain old standard cable (76 channels at a rip off price of $50).

The funny thing is the lady on the phone kept saying she didn't understand why I didn't want all this great stuff.

Re:

Yeah, when I had cable I watched five different programs. Good Eats, Iron Chef, Stargate. Right now it would be nice to get Dr Who, Good Eats, Iron Chef, Feasting on Asphalt, Mythbusters, and reruns of some old shows every now and again would be cool. Q

Re:if we had a tough FCC,

Try over the air HDTV. Antennas still work and work great with HDTV. www.antennanweb.org will tell you what stations you can get. I didn't upgrade cable to HD when I got an HD TV, but I got an antenna and its working out great for network HDTV content. With an HD Tivo box I would have plenty of content at hand, so I wouldn't need cable's 100 stations. My kids don't want me to cancel their Nick and Disney channel, but if Comcast jacks their rates up after my 1 year trial is over cable is gone. Ralph

Re:If we had a smart government

It's not a public utility, it's not using public property like the phone company

Really? Do you have some sort of fancy cable-less cable company that doesn't rely on public rights-of-way and utility easements to get its product to its customers?

Re:You know what works almost as well as Cable? OT

Agreed. All you need to recieve over the air HD is a UHF antenna and a digital tuner.

I bought a device called an HDHomerun just for this purpose. It's an inexpensive dual tuner reciever for unencrypted digital content; streams content over ethernet to any

Preemptive Counter Flame

No doubt there will be countless "TiVo Sucks" comments. Usually by people who believe that building their own MythTV box (costing more than the price of an HD TiVo and 3 years of service) is better than paying a monthly or annual subscription to TiVo.

Here's the rub. TiVo is powered by Linux. Every time you tell someone to build a MythTV instead of buying a TiVo, you're re-enforcing the argument that companies cannot be successful and use open source software. That's right. You always sit there as armchair CEO's and wax poetic about how running or selling open source software can be profitable... that companies can have a successful business model by selling services (i.e. Redhat). And yet when a company comes along with a service plan, using Linux as their OS, and selling an awesome product... you say that only a fool would pay subscription fees and try to spin your own.

Thanks a lot folks.

Re:

Ok, but here's the counter argument; MythTV and TiVo are two completely different products, each serving different needs. So while yes, myth does end up more expensive, you get far more for your money.

In my specific case, I couldn't live without MythVide

Re:

Actually, you can with a Series 2 TiVo. You have to have a Windows based computer to run the TiVo Desktop software (the Mac version won't stream, yet) and you dump your video files to a specific folder in mpeg2 format. Then, on the Tivo you can browse the

Reason: Cable Card 2.0 standards dispute

This has been well known in the Tivo/Windows MCE/Non-Locked-in Cable-Box community for some time, and was blogged on engadget, which has a fantastic summary at Engadget: Cablecard 2.0 is ready [engadgethd.com] . However, knowing most of you won't RTFA:

At this point you should be asking, what is stopping TiVo or Microsoft from creating two-way, multi-stream CableCARD devices? The answer is, some CE companies are not happy with the certification specification that CableLabs has decided on. As we previously discussed, the point of contention is the OCAP requirement...

...to put it in layman's terms, this would cut out the middle man, -- where the middle man is your cable company. With OCAP, TiVo couldn't deploy their software on a two-way host device without the cable company's approval, so the concept of going to the store and buying a TiVo that works anywhere wouldn't exist unless every cable company agreed to distribute and support TiVo's OCAP software -- this is how the long-awaited Comcast and TiVo agreement is going to work. The same might also be said for Vista Media Center, Microsoft would have to develop an OCAP VM in Vista Media Center and then work with each cable company to get them to deploy their user interface...

...In the end, we hope that the FCC steps in and requires CableLabs to certify two-way devices that do not require OCAP.

Charles doublerebel.com

aim at foot, pull trigger

You'd think that with downloadable TV (appleTV, revision3, democracy, youtube, etc, etc) becoming a real threat, cable companies would actually want to embrace products people love. I have DirecTV and am stuck with the HR20 for HD. It is awful. I'm thin

And how do to you propose to get that content?

Who's network will be distributing that content? Hint, for a lot of broadband users, it's their cable company.

With net neutrality in contention and backbone infrastructure reaching capacity, how far is it of a stretch to assume that you won't see some kin

CableCards

Even when cablecards follow the standard it's a botched job 90% of the time. Here, read this article on OCUR. http://www.maximumpc.com/article/ocur [maximumpc.com] Microsofts own lead for the program couldn't assist in getting the cablecards working. Shipped by two of the best PC manufacturers in the business, and due to the backwards ass way it's setup, completely unusable on arrival, or with aide from the cable company / microsoft / whomever wants to try. If that's the future of Media Center PC's, I'd rather just get downloadable content.

cablecards and company-provided STBs

Weren't all the cable companies supposed to be using CableCards in their own new set top boxes by now? How are they handling this problem with those units?

Re:cablecards and company-provided STBs

They use custom pre-release versions which work with their boxes. Just because TiVo won't make 100 custom boxes that only work with specific systems isnt' their fault, right? And deploying switched digital before the offical spec is complete is no big deal, right?

If you want my opinion, the FCC should forbid any content provider from selling or leasing end-user equipment, and requiring that all providers use a common specification (we do it for OTA, why not cable?). As for my OTA comment - the FCC fucked that up, too. We should be watching 720p, period. If it weren't for all those mama's boy TV manufacturers who were so damned afraid of losing their interlaced teddy bears, we'd have been much better off.

To the Early Adapters...

Thanks to all of you who are cutting edge, purchasing all these incompatible devices under the spectre of still-evolving standards. When I, and the rest of the world, follow in your footsteps three years from now, the process will be smooth and error-free because of your trials and tribulations.

Seriously, I'm grateful for you guys. You take it on the chin so we don't have to.

Nothing New

Nothing new to see here. SDV has been a problem for 3rd party cable hardware from the get-go. Tivo owners have been in this mess since the Series 3 was released A YEAR AGO. The only thing that's changed is the price for the Tivo HD... it's now cheap enough for some of the village idiots to aford one.

As for the BS comments w.r.t. cablecard requirements... SDV isn't part of those requirements. And wouldn't matter if it did. All the products on the market (and there are things other than tivo's that cannot support SDV, btw) are UNIDIRECTIONAL devices. There are no certification paths for bidirectional devices. (partly because there's no set standard because the cable companies keep changing their mind.) SDV is 100% unnecessary. Cable companies have plenty of capacity if they drop analog cable entirely or even start using the parts that no longer carry stations. (TW/Raleigh has room for ~40 HD stations above the analog broadcasts. That number goes up every year as they reduce the analog tier.)

The reason SDV exists -- and, btw, it was created by Time Warner and Scientific Atlanta -- is to subvert the cablecard mandate and attempt to push back the "integration ban" that took effect (finally) July 1. It's the difference between "spirit" and "letter". However, as SDV is linked in the UDCP license, there may yet be a loophole to their loophole. But I'm pretty sure no cableco will go along with it -- they're doing a bang up job keeping cablecards from working properly in the first place.

Re:

Huh?

Re:Control

This actually isn't due to the cable companies' greed. There are several layers of software on a cable box. There's the firmware, Guide programming (ie TV Guide), and any additional software features like VOD software on top of that. The cable company doesn't write any of it. It's the incompatibility of the software that's the issue. For things like VOD and PPV and now SDV, third party companies provide video servers, the servers that interact directly with the set-top boxes and software that is on each set-top box that does all of the communication back and forth. CableCard 2 is a mandated standard on how this communication must take place so that other cable boxes with the cards can be used in lieu of the cable companies boxes. CableCard 2 covers VOD and PPV but SDV is new and so it doesn't cover it.

Cable companies aren't implementing SDV just to make it difficult for companies like TIVO. SDV is a tremendous way to better utilize the available bandwidth. SDV allows a cable channel in a network segment that isn't getting watched to not be broadcast until someone tunes into the channel. This makes channels completely dynamic instead of being associated with a specific frequency. This will allow cable companies to use a fraction of the bandwidth to provide channels than they use now. They can then use that extra bandwidth for additional channels or broadband.

I was a set-top box developer for one of these third party VOD companies and I was associated with the SDV demo we put together to pitch to some cable companies. Since there is no standard, we do it the best way we know how that works with our system. So there really isn't a conspiracy here. Just companies trying to do business as cost-effective as possible with standards and governmental organizations just trying to keep up.

Re:That's not the only problem...

The artifacts are a known HD TiVo problem that should be sorted out with the next upgrade. Series 3 TiVos (which are also HD) do not exhibit this.

Re:When will people ever learn?

Yeah, I hear some people are using this new Linux thing, but Windows 3.1 works just fine!

Seriously, there's a substantial gap between features between the two devices, including:

* Ability to record high definition on the TiVo (VCRs are very poor quality, which is easily noticeable, especially on modern televisions). Ability to record good quality of non-high def shows as well. The new boxes even record 5.1 sound.
* Ease of repeated recording of favorite shows
* Ability for device to know the difference between first run and rerun
* Ease of delete without subsequent quality loss
* Not taking up valuable space with stacks of videotapes
* Ability to auto-record based on keywords (Particularly nice for sports fans), directors, actors, and such.
* Auto-fill of space with shows you like. Seems small, but I _always_ have two or three Simpsons and Buffys sitting around, so I don't end up watching Home Improvement on a slow Sunday when I want to veg.
* Ability to record two things at once.
* Ability to watch something recorded while recording up to two live shows.
* Ability to pause, rewind, and fast forward 'live' tv. Very nice if the phone rings, or if nature calls!
* Ability to auto correct for schedule changes. No more losing track of a show when Fox moves it to Saturdays, or miss the last 10 minutes of Lost because it's a 70 minute episode! This is not a small feature. Tivo has an excellent track record at being on top of this kind of thing.

Now, there are downsides, mostly in the cost department, but if you consider television to be a hobby, I highly recommend tivo. (If you think TV is a waste of time, and are reading this thread, well, is trolling really a better use of time than tv? Honestly.) Other DVRs provide most of these features, and are better than a VCR, but Tivo still has the best featureset. Hopefully, they'll work out these cutting-edge-technology stumbles in a way that's good for current consumers. (But I've had the original HD box for almost a year and never had any problems.)

Re:

(as usual, in a cable discussion, I put my flame proof underwear on....)

Its a little more interesting than that. I am actually a Cable guy who does design for products in MSO (cable company) networks. You are essentially facing two folks who hold the keys