Cablevision to rollout remote-storage DVR service

Think DVR's disruptive? What happens when your cable company starts in with hosted VOD of your DVR? Sure, cable companies already have VOD for a lot of programming, but it's typically premium content like HBO, and doesn't have commercials anyway. Well, not anymore; Cablevision's apparently testing a time-shifted "remote-storage" DVR service so you can get the TiVo-effect without the TiVo, so to speak -- no one would have to touch their cable box or equipment to use a DVR, and it would cost less, they claim, than the current $9.95 they charge for DVR box rental. We don't know if it supports HD, but what strikes us as odd is that each subscriber gets 80 hours of storage on their RS DVR -- surely everyone will record everything, and that'll result in massive dupes and a less useful service than just keeping a single central recording of every channel's video feed, and allowing all customers to browse through a completely 100% time-shifted television experience (like what Time Warner was planning with Mystro). This is going to ruffle some feathers though, content providers are having a hard enough time smiling through their teeth at DVR-wielding cable companies. But now making it that much easier and taking the box out of the equation is sure to revive some of the old ire and arguments.

[Chris @ Mar 27th 2006 9:43AM]

They're not actaully going to record anything for anybody though. They will record everything once and give subscribers the illusion of scheduling their own recordings, when actually all they've really got is 80 hours worth of program pointers.

[Dan @ Mar 27th 2006 9:51AM]

How do I get one to test???

[PanMan @ Mar 27th 2006 10:01AM]

I don't know about you Yankees, but here in the Netherlands, such a service would not be legal, if you don't own the rights to the content. It is legal to record something yourself, and I think it's also legal to tape something for someone else. But your not allowed to ask money for such a service, rendering it kind of useless as a bussinessmodel. Also it's not legal to just tape everything, and use it as a VoD service: your only allowd to tape segments that the customer specifficaly asked to be recorded.
Otherwise, offcource, one central system taping everything would be quite economical: The diskspace required to store a month of, say, 20 channels is quite modest, comparing to giving out 200Gb harddrives to all your customers.

[David @ Mar 27th 2006 10:07AM]

This concept works for the cable company so long as: cost of bandwidth to serve content < cost/subsidy of a physical DVR (and costs associated with managing the procurement, inventory, fixing) physical DVR boxes.

I'm sure that everyone doesn't actually GET 80 real hours of recording space. Maybe starting out, when the user group is small and many disparate shows are being recorded (no dupes by any of the users), sure everyone has their own partition, but eventually, as the user base grows, while any single user has "access to" or a hypothetical 80 hour storage limit, what would likely be going on behind the scenes is stored show sharing. So for wildly popular DVR'd shows -- 24, Sopranos, etc. -- the cable company only actually stores enough copies to simultaneously serve up the maximum # of people who would want to watch it at a given moment in time (assuming that they can serve multiple users from a single stored copy), in effect allowing the cable company to charge for storage space that doesn't physically exist. Great business model, akin to syndicated equity in real estate.

[Chris @ Mar 27th 2006 10:10AM]

Content provider complaints are precisely the reason behind the redundant storage. The cable companies would have to alter their existing license agreements in order to store a single instance of a program and redistribute it for a virtual DVR service. However, if they are simply "renting storage space" to the consumer who decides what to record and view, then the cable company is only broadcasting the content once and does not need adjust its license agreement.

[TeleCustom @ Mar 27th 2006 10:16AM]

So does anyone want to figure out how to hack this so I can get access to people's recordings of the Sopranos so I don't need to pay for HBO?

[xzavier @ Mar 27th 2006 10:38AM]

Boy I cant even believe this BS Who in there RIGHT FINANCIAL MIND would want to do such a thing? You end up owning NOTHING You rent the box, rent the VoD, rent the DVR services, rent for the Cable services= cant get VoD without getting cable services first. The only and last thing that these corporations don�t have us �renting/leasing= YOU DON'T OWN JACK BUT KEEP PAYING THROUGH THE WAZU� is the TV that you watch. You might have the LUXTRY of not getting off your ass to go and rent a movie or BUY a DVR unit BUT corporations are going to make you PAY LITERALLY for every single thing they can breakdown into little itty bitty miniscule services and it will only be 9.95 a month... you can afford that cant you? Of course you can! Until you add up all of the prices the Corporations services and then you come to the conclusion that within a year or 2 what you are paying for all of those so called great services and you don�t own ANYTHING! Welcome to communist AMERICA! Who think of this stuff???

[DW @ Mar 27th 2006 10:45AM]

#5 You can do this already. BitTorrent.

[Dustin Tarditi @ Mar 27th 2006 11:00AM]

Using Time Warner and being a digital cable & DVR subscriber, I will say that the quality of the hardware recorded media is superior to the streaming "on demand" content which often has very spotty, pixelated video, and poor sound.

I think the streams have throttled bandwidth or something, since they are a poorer quality than the regular viewed channels.

When there is a storm, the on-demand streams suffer the same plight as what they use to fight satelite-based services - do you really think the *entire* network is actually on cable ;-)

[Eric @ Mar 27th 2006 11:21AM]

RE:#3

If they're using the SeaChange system the server automatically recognizes duplicate programming based on available metadata and deletes any duplicate files. For all intents and purposes one file can stream out to an unlimited number of subscribers with a couple different variables, downstream combining of nodes, overall server capacity, etc.

cableric

[grafxkid @ Mar 27th 2006 1:52PM]

#7 you couldn't be more right! I live on Long Island and have Cablevision as my cable company. They are a monopoly taking advantage of the working man! They have to offer these BS add-ons to pay for the Knicks and the Rangers high-based salaries. They ARE the highest paid teams in all of the NBA and NHL respectively. I hate Cablevision. But thanks to the Hot-Box, I get it all for free while subscribing to basic cable...yeah, hot boxes still exist!!

[NukeAssault @ Mar 27th 2006 1:58PM]

I own one of these.Theyre not so bad. I dont have much use for one though but my parents use it alot. As it says above its about $10 for the service(enabling the DVR) plus what ever your already paying. I beleive it support HD but dont quote me on it. =)

[Xer0 @ Mar 27th 2006 2:38PM]

Cablevision is a garbage company.
I use their HD-DVR now and i'm quite unpleased with it in more than a few ways.

but then again, its also time for Mike Dolan to bend over and take it from verizon FIOS on long island.

[Ross @ Mar 27th 2006 4:08PM]

Isn't this what is on iO chan. 1000 - iODVR?

[Ryan Green @ Mar 27th 2006 10:08PM]

13: 1000 is just the channel you tune to if you have a DVR.
12: My uncle has the HD-DVR. Its worse than my regular box.

BTW, i'm never going to use this, simply because of the fact that all of cablevisions equipment is utter crap. If I have to reboot my digital cable box, it literally takes 5 minutes. If you mash the wrong button, you can get to the guide, which can sometimes choke the box forcing a restart. The channel-changing lag is horrid beyond belief. I can't wait for the HD Tivo so I can just cablecard my way around channels.

[Amit @ Mar 27th 2006 10:17PM]

What they are planning on doing is recording the 80hrs video and then allowing subscribers to create their own schedules.

The encryption/decryption keys are downloaded to your settop box to decrypt the channel that you would get the stream on..

Boy they are going to consume the channels... I wonder how they would broadcast a certain program at time T1 for subscriber S1 and then for subscriber S2 at time T2... would end up either scheduling broadcast starts every minute or every 5 minutes. If they have broadcast start every minute it would mean a LOT of channels used.

I would b very interested in knowing how they are solving this problem meanwhile maintaining their sanity :)

[Lou @ Mar 28th 2006 8:20AM]

On the Scientific Atlanta 8300 channel 1000 is used for playback from the DVR.
I beleive this all falls under the United States Fair Use of copyrighted material. If so that would mean 1,000 copies of Fox's 24 stored at the Headend for each home if the 1,000 homes that are testing this chose to record Fox's 24 in order to fall under Fair Use. Does Cablevision have enough bandwidth for this to be rolled out to 4 million+ cable boxes they have?
That size limit will not allow much HD recording, does that mean no new 8300HD's and no HD recording will be available?

[Eric @ Mar 28th 2006 11:22AM]

#15

It's narrowcasted to each individual serving group which is composed of 3 or 4 nodes each(think of a node as a neighborhood). So if a program is streaming out to a subscriber on channel 78-10 in one serving group, a different program can stream out on 78-10 to another serving group. In our small system we have about 40 serving groups streaming to 12,000 digital subscribers (30,000 analog). We have 8 channels allocated for VOD and can stream 10 streams per EIA (6MHz) channel at about 3.5Mbps. 80 streams per serving group x 40 serving groups = 3200 simultanious streams for 12,000 subscribers. At this time we're only seeing 5-7% of our digital subscribers streaming at any given time. Roughly 800 simultanious streams. This is on par with the industry average.

cableric

[Mike Ward @ Mar 31st 2006 3:43PM]

I am not sure why some people are even making a comparison between a new "service" offered by the cable company (with absolutely no proven marketability), to a product that has been around for years and is loved by everyone who owns it.

Who says customers will even want this service? It is quite an assumption to make that cable customers will flock to this, and Tivo owners will throw away their boxes, and jump on another cable company add-on service.

Subscription fee is not an issue; the RS-DVR service will cost about $10/month; the only difference is who gets the money. So the real question becomes "Which is a better product?"

Is everyone really THAT happy with the added-cost services the cable company is currently offering? Is everyone thrilled with the quality of service from their cable company?

I, for one, do not want my media library stored at the cable company. When I sit down to watch a program, I want that content in my house. Think about it, in order to access YOUR recorded shows, you need to be physically connected to the cable company. Of course we all know that connection is 100% reliable. Further, I want to be in control of my own content. The company even stated "Cablevision sees the obvious advantage of having a personal video recorder that it can control from within its network..."

Now wait a minute, with TIVO I have all my recorded shows in my house and I control them. I can watch anything I want without being wired. Now, how can your service be better and worth the same price?

Of course, we all know how "feature-packed" the current on-demand services are. Actually, they are slow, awkward and I often find myself wishing I could do something that I cannot. I can imagine a similar experience trying to control your �virtual DVR� using your cable remote.

Let's face it, the TIVO features blow away anything else available, and anyone who has used one will not give it up. TIVO's patents protect many of these features so the cable company cannot copy them, or risk paying TIVO millions for infringement down the road.

Comcast backs RS-DVR, of course. That way they can keep the whole $10 instead of splitting with TIVO. The problem is that the (client side) TIVO is a much better solution that the server based RS-DVR, so there will be little market for the latter. Comcast will also be releasing their set-top DVR box with TIVO licensed software later this year, well before any possible RS-DVR solution. I don't think any TIVO user will be convinced to convert.

I called Comcast and asked when the Tivo box would be out, and they could not give me and answer other than later this year. I asked how many other people were asking about this and she said "I get this question every day". So the demand is there.

Of course Comcast does already have their own DVR box out there but I have seen it and it is no TIVO. I don't know if they were just lazy or were worried about stepping on TIVO's patents when they designed this box.

The more cable company DVR boxes out there the better for TIVO. They do not look at these as lost customers; they are actually all future customers. The TIVO/Comcast license is for the TIVO software only, and can be offered as a software "upgrade" to all existing cable DVR subscribers. This is a best case scenario for TIVO as licensing revenue is all profit, no overhead. They will be collecting monthly fees for the customers the cable company sells, and with no hardware costs. What a great model.

The final problem with RS-DVR is the, still unaddressed, potential copyright issues. The entertainment industry is holding off for now but if you recall, they came down hard on Time Warner two years ago when they launched the "Mystro" service, which was the same as Cablevision's solution with the exception that the cable company was the one instigating the recording instead of the end consumer. As a result of the legal pressure, the Mystro service was abandoned.

Although Cablevision assumes they are covered under the same rulings that protect end users from "time-shifting" their programming, it is far more likely the entertainment industry will take this up (legally) with cable companies because it is much easier to go after one "distributor" of copied content than it is to go after the millions of end users doing the copying (e.g. Napster).

Cablevision plans to protect itself from this legal action in two main ways; User controls recording through remote control from user's location; and restrictions are placed on the amount of storage so users cannot just record everything.

Additionally, they may need to encrypt the content or embed digital rights protection so that they are not seen as "broadcasting" the programming, which would present a huge legal problem.

Well, here are two more reasons I do not want this service. By controlling my own media library on my device, I say what and how much I can record, and my storage is only limited to by the size hard drive(s) I want to buy.

... Oh and what if the hard drive on the cable company's server crashes? Are we going to count on some cable employee schmuck to have backed up all our shows and movies?

I don't know about you, but I don't want this service... at the same price or any price.