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Tag set-top boxes

Cutting The Cord

By Brian Filed in Media Tagged with , , , , , , , May 6th, 2010 @ 11:40 am

Making the rounds this week is a report from media analyst consulting firm Yankee Group that says 1 in 8 cable TV customers will cancel or downgrade their service in 2010 due to the increasing availability of video content online and/or the seemingly endless increases in cable service prices.

Here’s a little poll for those of you stopping by. Please feel free to add your vote. Poll remains active until midnight of May 15:


The idea that someday people would be able to get all of their television programming completely on demand from some video service in the ether has been talked about for the last fifteen years, but has really only been viable for the last couple of years, since it took most of that time for all of the necessary elements to converge — bandwidth, service providers, ubiquity of network access, quality of video streaming, etc. Like a lot of other disruptive technologies, it needed some sort of Gladwellian “tipping point” to cross over from something only being done by a small niche market of early adopters to being “the next big thing”, and it seems that the tipping point isn’t so much the tech as it is the economy. Who wants to pay a couple of hundred dollars a month for a bajillion channels they never watch, when they can get almost anything they want free or for a lot less? That appeals to just about everyone, not just me and my web-savvy buddies.

I had been fence-sitting about going cable-free for a long time. I’ve followed the development of the various online content services and the associated developments like set-top boxes for several years, but every time I thought I might be ready to pull the trigger, my inner geezer convinced me that sticking with things the way they were was just fine. However, a few weeks ago we started using Netflix’s instant streaming using our Nintendo Wii, and the experience has been so positive that it may be the necessary shove I needed. To be sure, there are still just enough hoops to jump through that I think the 1-in-8 rate isn’t going to go much higher, but that’s still a pretty remarkable number.

I know that most of my friends and family are a lot further behind on the adoption curve than I am, so I am interested to see what you all might have to say. Thanks in advance for taking a moment to answer the poll.

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“It’s Fucking Close To Water”

By Brian Filed in Media, Tech Tagged with , , , , , , January 13th, 2009 @ 3:07 pm

Canoe Ventures is the name of a joint venture between all six major cable providers in the U.S. to devise and implement a technology for delivering targeted advertisements to customers via their set-top boxes. The idea was first announced last spring and formalized in June, and to-date the cable companies have spent almost $150 million toward their goal, which foresees an eventual revenue stream of $15 billion per year in the form of commercial time sold. The total television advertising revenue figure per year is somewhere around $70 billion, so they’re talking about biting off a serious chunk.

As that first link points out, the venture is an attempt on the part of the cable companies to get their share of the market before Google beats them to it. Google has been testing selling television ads via AdSense in partnership with Dish Network since that same time frame last year, so the cables were already pretty far behind, and haven’t really closed the gap since. Meanwhile, there was some scuttlebutt that Google would call the cable companies’ bluff by building their own set-top box, but those rumors subsided and the current buzz is that Motorola might integrate Google’s “Android” mobile device platform into its own series of set-tops, since they are already committed to using Android on their cell phone products. Either way, their canoe is paddling frantically to catch up to Google’s cigarette boat.

On Friday, Investor’s Business Daily ran this story about Canoe Ventures, which rehashes much of the same background info, but also says that Canoe hopes to rollout their first set-top box “early this year”, and yesterday DSL Reports said that Comcast has plans to conduct a test in Baltimore and is also planning to build a data warehouse with storage “up to 500 terabytes” to collect viewing habit data on over 16 million customer households.

Of course, all of this will COMPLETELY protect your private personal data, with absolutely NO CHANCE of compromise I’m sure…..(rolls eyeballs disdainfully)

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Follow-Ups

By Brian Filed in Misc Tagged with , , , , June 24th, 2008 @ 2:29 pm

Here are some follow-ups to various things I’ve posted about:

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Linkapalooza: Sci/Tech

By Brian Filed in Science Tagged with , , , , , , , , June 18th, 2008 @ 2:05 pm

Good evening Mr. and Mrs. North and South America and All The Ships At Sea…FLASH!

  • At NewTeeVee.com, Chris Albrecht offers a catch-all summary of the various Video-On-Demand set-top boxes on the market. The transition from DVRs to VOD is already moving very rapidly; there are 11 different products on this list. Given the consistent resistance to DVRs from the broadcast television networks and their continued efforts to thwart people from skipping commercials, subscription-based VOD should see very easy acceptance from both the consumers AND the content providers. However, the lure of subscription-based VOD really threatens the continued existence of local television stations, who could find themselves without network affiliations down the road and have nothing to put on the air.
  • One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor — this blogger at PhysicsWorld.com has found a recent paper that outlines a method for forming diamonds by growing crystals in tequila . (via) Apparently the process, which is called chemical vapor deposition, is well-established, but the scientists who wrote the paper say that tequila is an excellent choice of ethanol because of its wide commercial production and low cost. And, yes, the two men who wrote the paper ARE from Mexico. So, fellas, when your GF starts hinting around for that rock, just buy her a bottle of Jose Cuervo and tell her to hit the laboratory
  • Engadget links to this article at Laptop Magazine which offers the first hands-on review of the Garmin Nuviphone I have been ga-ga over since I first read about it six months ago. It’s only a tantalizing taste, though, because most of the device’s functionality wasn’t available in the prototype the blogger got to play with. That doesn’t bode well for the original plan to launch the Nuviphone in the U.S. in Q3, but maybe they can still get it out the door in time for Christmas sales. If this materializes with all the features they promise, I would gladly forget all about the new iPhones.
  • Remember VeriChip? I wrote about them last September when they announced a plan to implant RFID tags into Alzheimer’s patients in Florida. Well, CASPIAN, the anti-RFID consumer watchdog group, has released a scorching report that takes the company to task for covering up research that showed a link between implanted RFID chips and cancer, lying and deceiving investors about their products and profitability. The company is going down in flames and trying to save what it can by selling off the implant chip business, but this new publicity from the report sure won’t make that any easier. A link to the full report from CASPIAN is in the Wired article in the first link, or at CASPIAN’s own website.
  • Are you ready for indestructible paper? This ScienceNOW article describes a new process for making paper that breaks up the cellulose fibers from wood pulp into substantially smaller lengths that present papermaking processes do, creating nanofibers that, when combined with a substance called carboxymethanol, have a tensile strength eight times greater than that of ordinary paper and more than double the strength of cast iron. Let’s see Dick Cheney shove THAT in his Vice Presidential Paper Shredder.
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In Soviet Russia America, TV Cable Box Watches YOU!

By Brian Filed in Media Tagged with , , , , , , March 21st, 2008 @ 12:26 pm

Via Broadband Reports comes this link to tech blogger Chris Albrecht’s interview with Comcast Senior VP Gerard Kunkel, wherein Kunkel says that Comcast is experimenting with putting cameras in their set-top boxes and using some sort of software to recognize specific individuals (though he specifically disclaims using facial recognition software) to “tailor” the viewing experience to whomever is in the room (in other words, make sure that the ads that are shown are customized to your purchasing history).

Everyone who thinks this is a GOOD idea, raise your hands……thought so.

This isn’t the first time the idea of using set-top boxes as detection devices has come around, by the way. Years ago, A.C. Nielsen and Arbitron, the two biggest television ratings services, worked very hard to develop a system that would detect when people were in the room and also try to match their physical profiles to their identities. The idea was that the traditional written diary system of recording who was watching what was quite easily cheated by people who would either forget to note what they watched and try to fill out the diaries later on or would deliberately misrepresent what they were watching to make themselves “look better”. If there was a set-top box that could tell when people entered and left the room and made an instant note of what/when/how long they watched, it would be more accurate. The idea was a little ahead of the technology in the 1980s, and in one case it was discovered that every time one family’s dog sat on the couch it set off the meter.

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A Big Fat One-Way Pipe

By Brian Filed in Links, Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , January 18th, 2008 @ 2:59 pm

Some assorted bits and pieces about the cable world to tie together for you:

All the various tech sites are reporting that Time Warner Cable is going to test-drive a “pay-per-bits” pricing scheme for Internet access. Not unlike your cellular service, you would pre-pay for a set amount of bandwidth usage per month and then pay a premium in the form of per-byte overage fees. But, as DSL Reports also informs us, TWC is likely to set the bandwidth cap pretty low during the trial period — perhaps as low as 5GB. On the face of it, that might sound like a lot to you, but to anyone who downloads media content from the Internet, 5 gigs is a pittance. A single movie might be 5GB.

Most reactions to this news are pretty unfavorable, but telco guru David Isenberg says he thinks this isn’t a bad idea at all as a stopgap measure to deal with bandwidth usage outstripping the existing network infrastructure. Making people pay will slow down some bandwidth hogs, and is probably a fairer way of dealing with the issue than abandoning net neutrality and establishing preferred-access tiers for providers.

Meanwhile, at the CES show Cisco announced a 1Gbps “concept” cable modem that would work under DOCSIS 3.0′s channel-bonding process (which otherwise caps out around 150Mbps). Since DOCSIS 3.0 isn’t even implemented yet (and probably won’t be for another year), this is a “sneak-peek” at something that might be four or five years down the road. Of course, if your cable service only lets you download 5GB a month, about the only thing a gigabit cable modem will do is let you use up your allotted bandwidth 25 times faster than you can right now, but maybe by the time this puppy starts shipping they’ll have beefed up the backbone a bit.

They will want to get going on that sooner rather than later, too. In 2006, cable provider Cablevision tested a “network DVR” service that let customers have some DVR features without having to have a set-top box, but the test was pulled due to a court order that said they were crossing over into broadcaster territory by “redistributing content”. Now, our friends at Comcast think they’ve found a way around that by limiting the functionality of the network DVR. Your TiVo, or even your cable company DVR set-top box can fast-forward and rewind through recorded programs as well as provide the time-shifting ability of recording a show and watching it whenever you want. Comcast’s test service will only let you jump back to the beginning of a program already in progress — no fast forwarding whatsoever (which means you can’t skip through the commercials), and, from the description Ars Technica provides I’d say that rewinding and recording aren’t going to be part of the feature set either. There are indeed times where it would be great to be able to jump back to the beginning of a program you just turned into (a feature you can’t do with TiVo or other hardware DVRs unless they’re already on that channel), but personally I can’t see why anyone would pay for that service instead of a full-featured DVR unless it is super-cheap. Unless, of course, the real goal of the cable companies is to defeat the DVR in the long term and make this sort of “crippled” service the only one you can have.

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