Hi Sam, thanks for your reply. I am doing the same with regard to SFA. She is a funny kind of critter.
I am going to pose some questions / ideas here and on other relevant threads to see if I can get some answers. Lets see how this works:
Below is a very interesting article worth a glance.
Reading it has me asking the following questions. Can anyone offer any answers or explanation with some support / justification?
Note:
(PVR = personal video recorder. )
(STB = Set-top Box -> cable, sat. , or antenna too I guess)
Question #1:
Will PVR's / DVR's be stand alone boxes or directly incorporated into the STB?
"There's a strong business case to be made for giving set-top boxes the capability to view, record and store digital content. The idea of putting a relatively high-capacity disk drive in a digital set-top box to provide PVR functionality is getting increasing attention from both operators and manufacturers."
PACE, a STB maker is quoted: "We suspect now that within 18 months to two years, we probably won't be designing a box without a hard drive." Scientific-Atlanta's Wall believes the basic PVR functionality "is not all that difficult. But, to add some of the bells and whistles that either TiVo or Replay offer, there may be areas that you would want to work with them on that."
The question of whether or not PVR's are incorporated into STB's also begs the question of who
who controls the content? If PVR's are stand alone, the consumer controls the content. In a cable environment, if you have a PVR enabled set-top box, you have the opportunity to do that management either way. You can simply give it to the subscriber to manage and the cable operator can ignore the fact that it's there, or you can have the head-end equipment manage that as part of the storage environment."
So if you have a PRV enabled STB, does the MSO operator dictate what gets recorded at the headend and dole out that content accordingly? Or does the consumer control content. Gerovac, believes there is still a case to be made for the network-managed scenario. "I don't know what the value to the set-top box manufacturer is in working with a TiVo for example. We're not talking about terribly complicated functionality here. A large amount of work that's represented by TiVo and Replay is in their servers that do all of the program recording and whatnot. And presumably, the cable operator will want to have some influence over that directly," he says.
( Therefore is the greater presumption of the members of this thread that TIVO/Replay are not buy out candidates by the likes of the STB makers? )
My answer to question #1 is currently: Although "cable operators have a lot of things on their plate right now", I believe that the MSO's do understand the potential of this technology and will want to manage the content they deliver. Therefore PVR's will be integrated by the STB makers.
Question #2:
Will STB's go retail or instead be provided in some way by the MSO provider ?
STB's with PVR's and other options are going to cost quite a bit. "Cable operators have a lot of things on their plate right now. And this will be addressed when some of the other things get taken care of. So, it's a matter of timing for the industry as a whole."
Premiere World to Give Away its Set-Tops ( November 16, 2000)
German pay-TV outfit Premiere World, owned by Kirch Group, is planning to give away its d-box set-top box, free of charge, in an effort to turn around the Germany digital TV market. BSkyB, whose owners News Corp also own a 22 per cent stake in Kirch Group, used set-top box give-aways to great effect in order to convert its subscribers to digital, increase its market penetration, and hasten the early switch-off of its analogue service.
Some observers have suggested that News Corp may be exerting its influence on Kirch to use BSkyB as a business model to repeat the successes News Corp has had with the UK satellite broadcaster and crack the tough German digital TV market.
Question #3:
Is a Bluetooth or Internet based technology going to supplant the current methods of PRV?
Wireless:
Ref: techweb.com
"Within a sleek black chassis, IBM's A60i consumer PC…boasts the sort of video storing capabilities offered by TiVo Inc. (stock: TIVO) and ReplayTV Inc., as well as a free GuidePlus channel guide.
Video can be stored in either a 45- or 75-gigabyte hard drive, offering up to 100 hours of VCR-quality video, and then transferred to an optional 9.4-Gbyte DVD-RAM drive.
While some homeowners may not tolerate a PC in the living room, IBM will likely bundle a $60 peripheral that allows the video -- stored on the PC -- to communicate wirelessly to a TV a short distance away, Rasa said. "This is the year of IBM's direct-sales website," he said. "We'll likely offer that capability pretty soon." IBM is touting the A60i as highly expandable, featuring either the 1.4-or 1.5-GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor.
Internet:
Jovio Inc. is touting a solution that works in front of the TV or from any location that has Internet access. "What this means," says Derek Minno, chairman and CEO of Jovio, "is that you can go to a [Web site] that has TV listings on it. You click on the show you want with your mouse and a signal gets sent from that Web page to a storage device. That signal says that at a certain time, on a certain channel, it will record this particular broadcast-video stream on a disk. And then, similarly, when you want to watch that show, you go back to that Web page and you essentially tell it you're in front of your television now and you're ready to watch TV. You click that request and the video gets released from storage" with full PVR functionality.
The Jovio model employs proprietary, permission-based software that profiles each viewer based on demographic, geographic and psychographic data. That data is used to present viewers with targeted ads. That ad revenue helps pay for the service and could be split with operators. The company's ad-insertion engine matches the viewer's "affinity profile" and inserts 60 seconds of targeted television
Thanks in advance for all your help &
Good luck,
Eric
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Here is one of the articles of interest:
multi-international.com
Personal Video Recording Attracts Cable's Attention
There's a strong business case to be made for giving set-top boxes the capability to view, record and store digital content
BY MICHAEL LAFFERTY
Television viewing is suddenly getting personal these days. Over the past 18 months, a few new companies have pioneered a way for viewers to watch, record and store their favorite television shows with full VCR functionality -- pausing, fast-forwarding and rewinding, among other functions. This new-found ability to watch a show when viewers want to, regardless of a network's schedule, is producing what some are calling the biggest change in the TV-viewing experience since color television first caught on in the United States in the mid-1960s.
Companies like TiVo Inc. and ReplayTV Inc. have pioneered the concept of personal television technology and service that involves using stand-alone boxes (called personal-or digital-video recorders, PVRs or DVRs) to digitally record television shows without a videotape, so that viewers can watch what they want when they want to.
Just as importantly, the digital-recording capabilities of these boxes also allow viewers to watch live broadcasts while recording.
By most accounts, the impact of this highly convenient, user-friendly capability is almost impossible to underestimate. Earlier this year, research firm TechTrends Inc. released a study -- The Digital Television Revolution: Success Factors for the Emerging Digital Video Recorder Market -- that predicted sales of stand-alone PVRs would rise at a compounded annual growth rate of 173 percent through 2002. The study says that will result in approximately 5 million PVR units (of various designs from various sources) being installed across the United States alone.
Laurence Bloom, TechTrends' director of research and consulting, echoed a common refrain from those who've been able to time-shift their viewing habits. "It's a phenomenal technology," he says. "It's something, outside of DVDs, that consumers have never seen before, in terms of technological capabilities. Once they test it, they love it."
A hint at the impact time-shifted viewing may have on overall viewing habits was seen in a recent study of TiVo subscribers conducted by TV industry consultant Frank N. Magid Associates in May. Some intriguing results showed that 59 percent of respondents said they now watch programs that were once unavailable because of inconvenient scheduling. The report also noted that channel surfing among respondents had dropped dramatically -- down by 31 percent -- while 62 percent of respondents said they watch television more often with the PVR service.
TiVo has been signing a number of agreements in North America and internationally to expand its presence in the PVR space. It recently inked a deal with Spyglass Inc. (which was acquired by interactive-television developer OpenTV Corp.) to port that company's Device Mosaic 4.0 software to the open Linux operating system and integrate it with TiVo's Linux-based platform. The cooperative agreement will allow further multiple-service offerings on the TiVo platform and permit TiVo and its partners to author content for its service using standard protocols such as HTML and JavaScript.
In addition, earlier this summer, TiVo inked a deal with Thomson Multimedia to manufacture standalone TiVo personal-video recorders for the United Kingdom. Set to bow this quarter, the TiVo service will be delivered in conjunction with British Sky Broadcasting Group plc (BSkyB). However, the boxes will be able to be connected to any television, regardless of whether the programming source is the Sky Digital direct-to-home service, cable or terrestrial antenna.
BSkyB seems to be pursuing both an external box and internal hard-drive attack on the PVR space. It has also announced that Pace Micro Technology plc and NDS Group Ltd. (like BSkyB, a News Corp. asset) have been chosen to develop a satellite set-top box with an integrated personal-television recorder.
"That will be a 40 gigabit drive that gives about 40 hours of recording capability," says Graham Williams, vice president of engineering, U.S. market, for Pace. "It has two tuners so that you can record onto the drive while watching something else and still have the PVR features on the channel you're watching while recording another show. Ours is the first in Europe that's actually integrated into the satellite box. It's digital only, to work with BSkyB's all-digital service. It gives you the normal pause, fast-forward, and record functionality. There are potentially longer-term extensions that will allow more information to be carried in the signal to do even more advanced things in the future."
The idea of putting a relatively high-capacity disk drive in a digital set-top box to provide PVR functionality is getting increasing attention from both operators and manufacturers. Philips Electronics, which is already producing a variety of TiVo boxes in the United States, is more than willing to assist the effort. "I think the issue for us right now," says Mike Lang, vice president of marketing for set-top boxes for Philips, "is that we're happy to work with the operators to support the kind of box they want. Really, in the end, we can show them what our capabilities are and help them understand the market opportunities, but they have to figure out whether that kind of product fits within their strategy. I think that over time it will."
Lang reports that Philips has talked to some operators "in a general sense" and that there are a couple of low-scale trials going on that TiVo -- whose equity partners include cable operators Comcast Corp. and Cox Communications Inc.-- is supporting with stand-alone units so that the operators can "get some familiarity with the customer reaction and understand the technology."
Pace's Williams says interest in PVR functionality among operators has risen so dramatically this past year, that his company believes it will have a long-term impact on set-top designs. "I think, in particular when it comes to the U.S. operators, over the last six months their interest has grown rapidly as to what they can do with it and how they would use it," he says. "We suspect now that within 18 months to two years, we probably won't be designing a box without a hard drive." To underscore that point, Williams notes that part of Pace's recent announcement on Comcast's order for 350,000 interactive digital set-tops includes an option to integrate hard-disk technology which could enable "PVR-style" capabilities in those boxes.
Bill Wall, technical director for Scientific-Atlanta Inc.'s Subscriber Networks Sector, notes that there are "two or three" operators that are particularly interested in this type of functionality. But that interest, he says, has a solid bottom-line reasoning behind it. "There are a couple of issues," he says. "One is that our customers are the MSOs. Whatever we put in the set-tops has got to be what they're interested in. And I think for every dollar they're willing to invest in a set-top, they've got to see a return on it. So, there's got to be a business model that makes it work for them. Some of the MSOs have thought through this a lot, others, probably not as much."
This brings up a critical decision operators may have to make if they decide to deploy PVR service. Who controls the content? Does the consumer decide with his own PVR-enabled set-top box, or does the network operator dictate what gets recorded at the headend and dole out that content accordingly? "With TiVo and Replay," says Branko Gerovac, vice president of research at video-on-demand specialist SeaChange International Inc.,"it's the consumer in the home that's managing the content. In a cable environment, if you have a disk in the set-top box, you have the opportunity to do that management either way. You can simply give it to the subscriber to manage and the cable operator can ignore the fact that it's there, or you can have the headend equipment manage that as part of the storage environment."
With the consumer-managed model, both competitive and time-to-market factors begin to weigh into the equation as well. The question then arises if it would behoove digital set-top box manufacturers to strike some strategic deals with a TiVo or Replay to shorten that product timeline. Scientific-Atlanta's Wall believes the basic PVR functionality "is not all that difficult. But, to add some of the bells and whistles that either TiVo or Replay offer, there may be areas that you would want to work with them on that."
Gerovac, like Wall, believes there is still a case to be made for the network-managed scenario. "I don't know what the value to the set-top box manufacturer is in working with a TiVo for example. We're not talking about terribly complicated functionality here. A large amount of work that's represented by TiVo and Replay is in their servers that do all of the program recording and whatnot. And presumably, the cable operator will want to have some influence over that directly," he says.
There's even a third option that may come into play as well. Jovio Inc. is touting its Web-based time-shifting solution -- or "personal video agent" service, as they call it -- that works in front of the TV or from any remote location that has Internet access. "What this means," says Derek Minno, chairman and CEO of Jovio, "is that you can go to a [Web site] that has TV listings on it. You click on the show you want with your mouse and a signal gets sent from that Web page to a storage device. That signal says that at a certain time, on a certain channel, it will record this particular broadcast-video stream on a disk. And then, similarly, when you want to watch that show,you go back to that Web page and you essentially tell it you're in front of your television now and you're ready to watch TV. You click that request and the video gets released from storage" with full PVR functionality.
Minno says the Jovio model employs proprietary, permission-based software that profiles each viewer based on demographic, geographic and psychographic data. That data is used to present viewers with targeted ads. That ad revenue helps pay for the service and could be split with operators. The company's ad-insertion engine matches the viewer's "affinity profile" and inserts 60 seconds of targeted television commercials for each 30 minutes of recorded programming.
To prevent viewers from completely blocking out the ads, Minno says the company has developed technology that gives fast-forward control of the commercial to the advertiser. With Jovio's patent-pending technology, says Minno, advertisers are given the choice of whether the viewer can skip or fast forward through the commercial, or see an alternative advertisement when the viewer hits the skip or fast-forward button. Jovio expects to launch field trials in 2001, followed by commercial deployments during the second half of the year.
As if cable operators didn't have enough to worry about, PVR service is one more application to be analyzed to see where it might fit into an operator's digital system. TechTrends' Bloom believes PVR service, instead of being a stand-alone offering, may ultimately serve as an attractive "hook" to snare subscribers for a complete interactive package.
"What we really see happening," says Bloom, "is the functionality of personal television becoming a subset of a complete interactive marketplace. It's very compelling and consumers love it when they test it. But, it's an expensive proposition to ask consumers to pay for, when full-fledged interactive television with Internet access, e-mail, video-on-demand, and even gaming is about to be launched and they can have that for a similar cost per month.
"DVR technology, we believe, is really going to be sort of a standard feature or loss leader for premium interactive-television services. It can exist as a stand-alone service, but we feel the money will be made through licensing the technology to cable operators, to develop backend solutions and to make it part of an entire service,and to charge consumers perhaps on a per-use basis, rather than a monthly service. And of course, advertising, shopping and e-commerce will be a viable way to make money in this market," he says.
At the same time, SeaChange's Gerovac feels operators are missing the point if they think that by simply dropping a hard-disk drive into a set-top box, they've devised a PVR solution. If they think they have, he says, "they haven't figured out really what kind of problem they're trying to address."
"Cable operators have a lot of things on their plate right now. And this will be addressed when some of the other things get taken care of. So, it's a matter of timing for the industry as a whole. I think the technology for doing this is pretty much doable, straightforward. It's figuring out how you deploy it in a meaningful way to both the cable operator and the subscriber that has yet to work out. What we should be able to do is come home in the evening and watch the latest Friends episode, and it shouldn't matter that it was on last night and you weren't home," he adds. "That means what you're really providing is all of the content available to the viewer at their convenience, which drastically changes the viewing experience. And you see a hint of that when you look at the way people use Replay and TiVo."
"But, ultimately, you want the ability to watch something you forgot to record. And that's really what the long-term impact of PVR-style functionality is going to be," he concludes. |
