Voom zooming forward with digital video recorder
By Peter Rojas 
posted Sep 14th 2004 1:48PM
posted Sep 14th 2004 1:48PM
Voom hasn't exactly been vooming or booming since its launch about a year ago—at one point the satellite HDTV service was signing up an average of ten customers a day—but that isn't stopping them from moving forward and teaming up with OpenTV and Ucentric Systems on plans to offer a digital video recorder that'll have built-in networking capabilitites so you can stream media around the house. Not sure if it'll make all that huge of a difference since DirecTV already offers a TiVo that can record HDTV (they also don't mention when it'll be available), guess we'll have to wait and see on this one.
I saw the Ucentric streaming media solution from Voom's booth at a home theater expo in NYC. It looks very nice, and seemed to work quite well. You can stream a few HD signals, or a lot or SD signals (how many depends on your bandwidth). It's a nicer solution that shelling out for a whole new sat box!
It'd be nice if cablevision actually released a DVR. They'll do anything with their ultra-premium satellite brand name, but it takes cablevision forever to update anything.
Dish had a HD PVR first - the 921.
While Dish had a HD DVR first it didn't work. Fact is, it is still plagued with bugs.
Anyone that owns one is merely a beta tester.