New TV, and it has a hard drive........................
mercurycenter.com
Posted at 11:29 a.m. PDT Saturday, September 18, 1999
Revolution is coming in TV viewing
BY DAN GILLMOR
Mercury News Technology Columnist
HARD-DISK digital video recorders have yet to sell in big numbers, but the early-adopter couch-potato crowd is drooling. A much-hyped feature of these devices, in which a computer hard disk effectively replaces video tape, is the Pause button, letting viewers step away from the tube during a live broadcast and pick up where they left off when they return.
Since I tend to tape programming ahead of time anyway, that doesn't give me any major thrills. But when I think about how these systems will evolve in the not-so-distant future, my mind spins.
Hard-disk recording (HDR) devices, and the gadgets we'll attach to them, will be vastly more than VCR replacements. They're likely to become the nerve center of tomorrow's home entertainment and information.
The key is technology's relentless progress. Disk drives are becoming spacious enough that not even Microsoft operating systems and Windows software applications can chew up more than a significant fraction of a typical personal computer drive.
When video is the digital content, however, no drive is big enough -- yet. The HDR systems now on the market, from Silicon Valley start-ups TiVo Inc. and Replay Networks Inc., give you just a few hours of recording time at anything resembling high fidelity.
But when capacity doubles roughly every year, as it has been doing lately, HDR gets a lot more interesting. Stretch your imagination, and it gets downright compelling.
Predictions: HDR will lead to the closest thing yet to video on demand. It'll give niche programming a massive boost. And it'll become the hub of home information and entertainment networks.
That may sound expansive. Here's why I consider it entirely plausible.
First, consider video on demand. Typically, people think of video on demand as the ability to watch any movie or program ever made -- and right now.
Now consider how people actually watch TV. They flip through the programming and hope to find something that interests them. People like me, who've figured out how to program video-cassette recorders, tape several things ahead of time that might be interesting, slightly increasing the odds of having something viewable when we want it.
Record everything
When you have 100 or 200 hours of space available on your HDR recorder, all that changes. You'll tell the HDR system, much more easily than you can do with today's VCRs, to capture specific shows you like. Or, even more powerfully, you'll capture everything relating to a favored genre -- say, ``Star Trek' shows or romance movies or golf or whatever. Then, when you want to watch TV, you can be almost certain you'll find something you actually want to watch. (You'll also be able to zap commercials, but that's a topic for another time.)
That isn't video on demand in the broadest sense. But for typical consumers it's the next best thing -- ``more of what they want when they want it,' says Marc Andreessen, an investor and board member at Replay Networks.
When you couple the vast storage capacity of tomorrow's HDR systems with the sophisticated electronics and software they'll need to handle TV-oriented chores, they also start to make sense in another role: servers.
A server computer dishes out information to other devices. Typically, such devices are personal computers, but a host of information appliances -- handling everything from games to e-mail to music and more -- is coming along. Home networks are coming along as surely as office networks captured business processes, and the HDR system could be ideal for this purpose.
In fact, a home server is precisely what TiVo's founders had in mind when they formed the company, before revising the business plan toward the HDR world.
TiVo envisioned its server as ``a gray metal box bolted to the side of the garage' capturing a variety of information feeding into it from satellite, cable, digital TV and phone, says Jim Barton, the company's co-founder and chief technical officer. The box would dish out information to various devices on the home's internal network.
What was missing, and what caused TiVo to move in its current direction, was the low-cost, high-capacity home network. But Barton says the original concept remains valid -- and that the TiVo box will someday be able to handle such duties.
What about the Internet? It'll be a crucial part of the future mix: one of the data streams coming into these future boxes, among other things. In theory, that should be wonderful news for niche TV content -- the kind of programming that networks will never produce because they aim for much larger audiences.
What's niche TV? I'd tune in to the Skiing Channel or the Acoustic Guitar Channel or Civil War Channel or My Hometown Neighborhood Channel if they existed.
In the meantime, the term ``niche' fits the kind of material you'll find on the wonderfully quirky Pseudo Online Network (www.pseudotv.com). There, you'll find streaming-video for programming so narrowly tailored that you expect audiences to be in the hundreds or low thousands, not hundreds of thousands or millions as today's cable and satellite TV shows try to capture. (Check out performance-art company Franklin Furnace's ``History of the Future' for a glimpse of the phenomenon.)
But it'll likely be some time before Net connections are the primary way we receive TV programming at the visual and audio quality we want. There are too many limitations in network capacity when large numbers of people are trying to download the same material at the same time.
That doesn't mean niche programming must be relegated to postage-stamp viewing on computer screens, however. Steve Perlman, co-founder of WebTV Networks, says current methods of delivering TV content -- especially cable and satellite -- will be inefficient in a world where most consumers have HDR capability. WebTV, now a unit of Microsoft Corp., is creating a HDR product in conjunction with satellite provider Dish Network.
Abundant storage space
When consumers have hundreds of gigabytes of storage in their homes, there's no need for traditional transmission, according to Perlman, who recently left WebTV to pursue new ventures. Distributors of content will pour vast amounts of content down various pipes -- with cable and satellite in the lead for now -- to be stored on hard disks. A cable or satellite channel that repeats programming several times a day will be able to use some of that capacity for niche programming.
Perlman also thinks HDR will alter the nature of TV programming, to make it dramatically more interactive. On this point, he's 180 degrees from Andreessen, who says, ``Interactive TV is when your team loses and you pitch your beer can at the TV.'
I'm not sure who's right on that point, though I tend to prefer TV as a mostly passive activity. But I do know that they're both correct when they predict vast new home info-tainment vistas as HDR matures. This is one technology that genuinely changes things. |
