New DVR coming from Comcast and Panasonic
Your old Moto 6412 DVR from Comcast might soon be replaced with state of the art HD set-top boxes from Panasonic. The new cable boxes will encode in both MPEG-2 and H.264. It has USB 2.0 for connecting digital cameras and MP3 players. Best of all though, these boxes comply to the OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP). This is the most important feature, even more then the 250 GB hard drive, as it allows people to interact with their HDTVs a bit more then ever before including using a single remote for a Comcast box and Panasonic home theater equipment.
Think of OCAP as an operating system that interacts between the devices on the cable network: video on demand and a variety of interactive services. This system has been in test markets (New York; Milwaukee and Green Bay, Wis.; Lincoln, Neb.; and Waco, Texas later this year) for some time now and it seems to be going well.
Note to developers of OCAP: we would like RSS feeds on our widescreen TVs. This cannot be that hard to do. Eventually we would except to see teleconferencing like in the current season of 24; work on the RSS feeds first though.
If you could add features or benefits to your cable system, what would they be?
