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Olympics 2004 on Usenet

A couple weeks back I predicted that Bittorrent would be a big way to share coverage of the Olympic games when fans felt their local TV coverage fell short, and I admit I don't see much in the way of bittorrent sites listing olympics videos at this time. But I did notice some action on Usenet, especially the newly formed alt.binaries.olympics. Just a couple days into this year's games, a rip of the BBC's opening ceremonies was floating around along with a few basketball games.

Andy Baio has the full scoop with a link to a sample of Brazillian TV coverage from last night's coverage, along with a full listing of what the usenet group currently has posted.

I knew the demand of fans for their favorite sports would take the Olympics online this year, whether or not the IOC wanted it. But I guessed wrong on Bittorrent being the place to be, it turns out the old school Usenet network is where the action's at this time around.

Personally, with a two-tuner DirecTiVo and season passes with the highest priority set to record any and all Olympics coverage, I'm getting way more coverage than I expected. I've been able to see just about every sport in the games and aside from the same old "triumph over adversity" montages before every event an American is going to win, the NBC coverage has been great.

August 24, 2004 in News | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack

HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future

Mark Cuban, owner of HDnet, the Dallas Mavericks, and the guy behind The Benefactor reality show, has a great post over at his site about HDTV, DVD, Hard Drives and the future. Mark brings up a lot of good points about how hard drive space is constantly moving up while price per byte falls, while upcoming DVD formats will be limited in storage capacity and technological improvement over the years. He mentions recent experiments with various video formats and storage devices:

On the plane, I popped the first keychain drive into the USB Port. Got the ready signal, got prompted to open my video player, and watched a nice movie right from the keychain drive. On the way home, did the same thing with the other movie. I loved it. Far less space than DVDs. Could put them in my pocket instead of filling up my briefcase. I immediately went out and bought a 1gb keychain drive so I could hold 2 movies on 1 drive, in addition to my first 2 drives.

He goes on to describe various HD formats and how someday Netflix could send you a hard drive instead of a disc. I doubt anyone behind emerging DVD formats would embrace this kind of cutting edge technology, but it's great to hear someone in the industry willing to share these ideas. [thanks Olivier!]

August 22, 2004 in News | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Frauenfelder on S-A Explorer 8000

Mark Frauenfelder, founder and contributor to the weblog BoingBoing.net does not like the Scientific-Atlanta 8000.

So many other things suck about the user interface that I can't list them all. But the main UI problems include lack of keyword scheduling, way-too-slow fast-forwarding, no alpha character entry, and the inability to see how many hours of programming are available on the hard drive.

This last flaw hit home when the machine suddenly stopped recording shows. I tried everything I could to get it to work, including rebooting the system and calling Time Warner Cable customer service. They told me that they'd have to replace the unit, which would take five days.

Five days later a service technician came with a new box. I asked him if this problem was common, because Google returns a lot of pages from people who think the Explorer 8000 is a piece of junk. He said the system is fine as long as you didn't store too many shows on it. If you fill up the hard drive, the system freezes up, and there's no way a user can undo it. But how do you know when the disk is close to being full if there's no gage to tell you? The service tech's answer: "don't keep very many shows on the hard drive." That pretty much defeats the purpose of a DVR, doesn't it?

He also warned me not to put anything on top of it, as it was notorious for overheating and seizing up. I told him I was considering TiVo, but he insisted the Explorer 8000 was better than TiVo. How so, I asked? "We will give you a new one if it breaks," he said.

Anyone else have any stories, good or bad, about their S-A 8000?

Boing Boing: I hate this digital video recorder: Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 8000

August 16, 2004 in Product Reviews | Permalink | Comments (58) | TrackBack

Saving TiVo through Strangeberry

This new Business 2.0 article (unfortunately, the full text is only available to subscribers or AOL users) describes that while much talk about TiVo has been grim this year, they may be on an upswing, thanks in part to new features developed from their acquisition of the startup Strangeberry.

So far, not much has been said about the Strangeberry-TiVo connection, but this article goes into some of the features the combo will bring to our favorite PVR:

The Wonderful World of Strangeberry

1 Strangeberry software does all the work. It recognizes the format of the content flowing in via TV cable or broadband Internet connection. Designed for easy tweaking, the software will be able to deal with formats that haven't yet been created.

2 The system is TV-centric, rather than PC-centric. A simple graphical interface is displayed on the TV, allowing the user to find what he wants and play it. The huge volume of content can be navigated with a single remote control device.

3 Strangeberry also recognizes where the user wants the content played. It routes the MP3 files to the stereo, but could simultaneously display album covers and music notes on the TV or a laptop.

It sounds great, having a system that builds upon the Home Media Option greatly to turn TiVo into a central entertainment hub that can send stuff from any of your computers to any of your stereo and TVs and vice versa (including sending video to and from your TiVo and PCs!). They also touch on a possible API that will let content companies build apps that can be accessed through TiVo, like voting for American Idol with your remote. If the entertainment companies can put their copyright sledgehammer aside and let TiVo do even half of what they describe, Strangeberry + TiVo could be a whole new revolution in home entertainment. I for one, can't wait to see what they do with it.

The article also paints a pretty rosy financial picture for TiVo, as they near profitability for the first time, which is also good news.

August 12, 2004 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack

TiVo Rewards program launches.

About four years late, TiVo has launched a new rewards program. So far TiVo has relied on users as evangelists, but it looks like they've finally taken a lesson from Amazon.com and instituted a program to encourage folks to insert affiliate codes for free prizes.

I just signed up and it appears they're doing everything they can to keep the program from becoming an affiliate marketing spam hell that many other programs are. There's no cash involved for prizes and they don't provide HTML snippets of code that could someday show up on zillions of link-farmed search engine spam sites. You simply plop someone's email (like mine, at matt@haughey.com) into the signup process, and I collect points.

Looks like a nice simple system, a lot like Vonage's, but hopefully without all the Vonage spam sites lingering behind every Google search for Vonage [thanks George].

August 12, 2004 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack

BitTorrent and RSS

Salon has an interesting article by Farjad Manjoo, Must-download TV [salon.com], looking at the emerging marriage between BitTorrent for media downloads and RSS for notification. While not directly addressing PVRs, it does speak to potential futures of media distribution, which is an area near and dear to PVR users.

In recent months, a host of developers and TV enthusiasts have been working on ways to improve online trading -- they're building sophisticated networks to record and encode and distribute shows, and they're improving peer-to-peer transfer systems to make downloading easier. The hottest new improvement is made possible by the merging of two Internet innovations, the peer-to-peer protocol BitTorrent and RSS, the popular Web syndication standard. Together, these systems enable a computer to automatically find and download a user's favorite shows -- something like having a TV station designed just for you.

The main Buttress site seems to be down at the moment but other similar apps mentioned are TV RSS (a Linux-based RSS-linked downloader).

This reminds me of the fansubbing culture associated with anime where Japanese and Western fans work together to translate Japanese anime shows for a global niche audience often within hours of the shows being broadcast on terrestrial Japanese TV.

Media demand is global but the content providers have yet to develop a business model to effectively provide that media to a global audience, and thus the lovers of the content have to "break laws" to watch their favorite shows. It is, as the hackneyed phrase goes, "a lose-lose" (in the sense that the content providers perceive that demand as theft and the content viewers often cannot get what they want when they want it legally.)

Salon.com | Must-download TV

August 12, 2004 in News | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack

The Tivo LCD Project

The Tivo LCD Project is a cool hack, plugging a small LCD to the front of your TiVo to show current status. Along with the basic computer info like uptime, time of day, and temp inside the box, it also displays info about the current show, channel, and how much space is left on your TiVo.

The site features a step-by-step guide with photos and necessary tcl scrips so you can do it for your own series 1 standalone or DirecTiVo device. [via waxy]

August 11, 2004 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Ten things that Microsoft and TiVo must each do to win the living room

Thomas Hawk, the guy that wrote the in-depth test between his Windows Media Center box vs. his new HD TiVo has published a great article on engadget today called Ten things that Microsoft and TiVo must each do to win the living room.

In it are his ten biggest gripes with both Media Center and TiVo, and what they can do to produce the ultimate device. After reading about his struggles with a Media Center unit, his ten suggestions sound great, though some are certainly difficult (he calls for the creation of a TiVo-for-radio feature) and others are bordering on the impossible ("Media Center should be as stable and error-free as TiVo’s Linux-based system" heh).

On the TiVo wishlist, two gripes are about the discontinuity between DirecTV's TiVo unit features and TiVo's own featureset, which I wholeheartedly agree with. The "DVD in every TiVo" would be a nice addition as well, though I suspect content companies will never let it happen in the HD model.

I hope engineers from both companies are listening, as well as management. Thomas is an early adopter that spends thousands of dollars on these products and before you know it, his views will be the same as the mainstream as they get increasingly used to these products.

August 11, 2004 in News | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

The Polyphonic Spree gives TiVo the triple thumbs up

Amusing news today about a member of the band Polyphonic Spree, coming home from a gig with a microphone in his bag that was mistaken for a pipe bomb that shut down an entire terminal of the Dallas Fort Worth airport (completely unbeknownst to him). When he arrived home, he was surrounded by armed agents ready to take him into custody, but his TiVo saved the day.

Teasley explained that the item in question was not a pipe bomb, but a microphone.

"I told them we had just used it when we were on Craig Kilborn's show," he said. "I still had it on my TiVo, so I was like, `Come watch it with me.' After they figured out I was telling the truth, they were pretty cool. I was talking to them about music. But thank God for TiVo."

August 9, 2004 in News | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Like Apple, TiVo Faces a Struggle in a Market It Helped Create

The New York Times published an article today comparing TiVo's financial pickle with Apple's in the dawn of the PC revolution. I came to the same conclusions a year ago when I published TiVo's Apple Problem.

August 9, 2004 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Thomas Hawk: HD Tivo vs. Microsoft's Media Center Edition Review

Thomas Hawk has a lengthy review of a new HD Tivo vs. Windows MCE. He's been a TiVo user early on, then used a Media Center PC hooked to a plasma for a couple years before upgrading recently to a Hughes HR10-250.

He compares and contrasts all the little differences between what you can do with an MCE box vs. what you can do with an HD TiVo box and in the end the TiVo wins hands down for the incredible picture quality:

I pushed play on my forgotten old friend that wacky peanut shaped Tivo remote. This was something. And right there at 9:12 p.m. in my living room was the most beautiful picture with the best sound I had ever experienced in my life.

August 5, 2004 in News | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack

AP radio on TiVo To Go

The Associated Press has a radio arm as I found out yesterday when I did a short interview with a reporter. He was filing a report on TiVoToGo, and I explained why the features were welcome in TiVo units, why it was a pain that they had to go to the FCC, and why I think customers would like it. The reporter then tried to play up the MPAA/NFL angle and asked how the ToGo features were any different from Napster. I explained that no, this TiVo feature had plenty of protections in place, and that TV shows are already being traded using other hardware. The reporter asked me to elaborate on that, so I did, and unfortunately, that's the only quote he used in the quick report.

Here it is: 444kb mp3

All the helpful stuff I said explaining the exciting new features was gone, and I come out sounding like a l33t script kiddie encouraging the world to steal shows. Oh well.

August 5, 2004 in News | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Philips Streamium

While not directly PVR-related, I think this may be of interest.

Philips has launched their new entertainment platform, Streamium (cheesy name!)

Streamium currently consists of 4 products - a wireless music jukebox, a wireless multimedia box (essentially using your TV as a monitor for your digital media), a wireless media platform (sort of like aspects of Tivo's Home Media Option, but you still need a PC) and the Philips Media Manager (Windows only) software. It is an impressive debut and I look forward to reviews.

That said, there are a lot of little "features" that I worry about.

- You must share your photos online with Yahoo! Photos. However, that feature should be configurable to a few different photo sharing platforms, not locked to just one.

- Why are they pushing Music Match? Does their software not handle the music management functionality?

- There is the "My.Philips account" which enables the user to manage/organize your media via a browser.

- Can you configure the unit to go to non-sanctioned Internet radio or Internet film sites? Customers want that kind of flexibility.

With respect to DRM, Streamium supports MPEG4 and DiVX, but it isn't clear what DRM they may or may not have and what other formats it supports. Suffice it to say that there are many other formats that would be required for the average user.

If anyone has seen/used this hardware or the Philips Media Manager software, please let us know your thoughts.

August 5, 2004 in Products | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Extremely out of style?

In other sports-on-TV news, I noticed that the tenth X games starts tomorrow, but strangely enough, the entirety of programming will be confined to three nights on ESPN this week. After a decade of these games aimed squarely at the coveted teen demographic, I think it's serious when it gets reduced to just three nights of programming, considering just a few years ago it would unfold over the course of a week, with preview events and post wrapups going on for weeks around the actual dates. I'm curious if ESPN didn't want to upstage the Olympics or felt the summer schedule was already packed with other large events -- they put a lot of money into the X games so I'm confused why they wouldn't capitalize on it with expanded coverage.

The other major alternative sports event, the Gravity Games, had a "coming soon in 2004" message on their site up until Monday of this week. The Outdoor Life Network picked up their programming and announced a late September date for those events. But just two years ago, I bought a pay-per-view version of the live Gravity Games (it would take two months for the games to show on NBC sports in a heavily edited version) which showed for a week and cost me almost 40 bucks to watch (it was worth it, being the year backflips came to motocross), and now the event will be a few nights of recaps on a smaller network, OLN.

I thought with the advent of a whole network dedicated to skating, surfing, and bmx that extreme sports were here to stay, but it's starting to seem like they're on the way out.

213.149.188.121

August 4, 2004 in News | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Tivo Gets Nod for Users to Share Digital Shows

Great news! TiVo got FCC approval for the TiVo ToGo feature. See the "you can only innovate if the FCC, NFL, and MPAA say so" post from last week for background on this landmark decision.

August 4, 2004 in TiVo | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

The Olympics are almost here (tips and thoughts)

I don't watch a lot of regular sports or network TV so I was shocked to find out that the Olympics in Athens (that everyone is predicting may be a disaster due to poor planning) starts in just one week from today.

In the states, NBC is using their stable of stations: network NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, Telemundo, and their new NBC HDTV channel to show what they say is their most complete TV coverage of the events to date. I can still remember watching the Red channel, White channel, and Blue channel 24 hour coverage back in 1992 on my parents' giant old satellite dish, which seemed to show even the most obscure sports, but maybe NBC is telling the truth that 2004 will even outdo 1992.

When it comes to recording this stuff on a PVR, your best friend will be NBC's TV listing page here. If you just want results, as soon as they happen, NBC has a nice results page as well.

Personally, I'm interested in cycling and soccer, which rarely get any play among the countless hours and hours of gymnastics and diving coverage (both sports which, in my opinion, are judged merely on how you negatively deviate in the slightest from perfection, which I think a lot of people enjoy doing to others :). Unfortunately, NBC isn't listing their TV schedules by sports, so you'll have to hunt around to find your favorites (the first cycling event will be on Saturday, the 14th, Soccer starts a week from today on Wednesday).

What's amusing to me is that NBC will do the same dumb thing they've done in the past, which gets dumber every passing year: tape delay events. Americans are big people, not children, and if an event happens at 4:30am, true fans will do their best to catch it (either live, on tape, or TiVo). But NBC can't sell ad slots, so they'll hold stuff off until 8pm when they can get the big bucks and edit events into a blur of biographies featuring sunsets, struggles, and plenty of violin soundtracks. But in the age of the internet, you'll know results as they happen, hours before they ever get on TV. I hated this during the Japan games, and purposely had to avoid some sports sites to wait until I could watch the events later.

You know what's going to be big at this year's olympics? Bittorrent. Even the Opening Ceremonies are delayed by several hours in the US, and my guess is that you'll find crisp, digital copies of BBC or other EU network recordings soon after they happen, and before they show in the US, as DivX files on torrent servers.

You know what I'd do if I were NBC? Provide downloadable video of all sports, regardless of whether or not they aired on TV. Plus, I'd toss ads into them. You probably can't air coverage of Archery on NBC in primetime, but imagine if you had every Archery event on the NBC servers. I bet companies selling bows and arrows would jump at the chance to buy an 30 second slot in a online-only video. You'd have happy fans and happy advertisers, because both NBC's content and their advertising could reach their perfect audience: superfans.

Here's my prediction: if in a couple months we hear NBC claim that internet downloads of pirate sports recordings cost them millions in lost revenue, know that a savvy network could have turned that kind of demand into a revenue source (via ads in downloadable video), instead of letting folks route around their damage. If NBC can't look at someone cruising dozens of shady websites, then waiting hours to download a couple hours of shoddy video as extreme demand for something they'd happily pay for, then NBC has bigger problems than I thought.

Oh, this will be the first HDTV olympics, but NBC hasn't bothered to put anything on the website they've been advertising for months. A "coming soon" message a week before launch can't be a good sign.

August 4, 2004 in News | Permalink | Comments (38) | TrackBack

TiVo comedy

I just got a copy of Patton Oswalt's new album and while listening to it, I couldn't help but notice one of his bits was about TiVo, and anyone that's ever owned one could probably relate to it. Here's the iTunes music store link if you want to hear a sample. The rest is good too.

August 2, 2004 in News | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

DirecTV makes moves to drop TiVo

Crap! This is the worst PVR-related news I've heard in a while. When News Corp gained ownership of DirecTV, many speculated (myself included) that Rupert Murdoch's other satellite company (with a DVR), NDS, might be used instead of the combination DirecTiVo boxes DirecTV customers now have.

Well, the sad truth is that indeed NDS boxes will be released early next year, alongside DirecTiVo boxes. The Tivo-DirecTV relationship ends in 2007, so hopefully they'll continue to support TiVo boxes after the NDS rollout next year. TiVo's stock to a hit today, since I think almost half of TiVo's million users are DirecTV customers running the combo TiVo unit.

This probably explains why all the Series 2 DirecTiVo boxes still don't have the Home Media Option or the USB ports turned on -- I'm guessing DirecTV would rather not raise customer satisfaction on a box they'd rather rid themselves of for a cheaper inferior NDS unit.

When people new to TiVo ask me what system they should buy, I always strongly encourage them to get a new DirecTiVo and DirecTV subscription over a standalone TiVo with cable, since it offers two tuners and great digital quality. With this latest news, I'm going to reconsider that advice and personally start looking elsewhere for the ultimate PVR solution, as it is clear now the future is murky for DirecTV and TiVo and my own beloved combo box.

August 2, 2004 in News | Permalink | Comments (81) | TrackBack

Alienware's new Digital Home Systems

Alienware is a high-end PC company known mostly for sleek, powerful gaming PCs. Last year they used to sell some pretty cool Shuttle PCs that shipped with Windows Media Center, but pulled them off the market months ago.

Today they re-entered the space with new cutting edge Windows Media Center systems. Their entire line of Digital Home Systems range form featureless black boxes at around 2 grand to integrated 30" LCD TVs for almost $9k.

Alienware has always been a high-end, high priced custom PC outfitter, but their Shuttle PC line of MCE boxes reportedly didn't sell well, at price points around $1500-2500. Now they've moved their entertainment line to price points in the range of $2,000 to $9,000. I know there are a lot of big ticket items bought by the HDTV early adopter crowd, but there are a lot of cheaper MCE devices than Alienware's line of new products that they have to compete with. For the budget-conscious home theater PC user, it might make more sense to buy an uglier, less powerful HP or Sony MCE box for half the price of Alienware's lowest end box, saving the remainder for LCD and plasma displays. But for those looking for high-end gaming power, tons of memory, speed, and storage, nothing beats the Alienware boxes.

August 2, 2004 in News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack