HDTV Almanac

Cox has apparently decided to join ‘em. In a recent story in the L.A. Times, Cox will put their video-on-demand (VOD) service into standard TiVo personal video recorders (PVRs), eliminating the need for a separate set-top box. The TiVo box also gives access to online services such as Netflix streaming video and Rhapsody music.

This is significant because it shows that a cable company is willing to let go of control of the set-top box, presumably in a move to help retain existing customers and perhaps attract new ones with this convenient feature. Cox is not the largest cable company, but with 6 million subscribers in 18 states, it’s in a position to be a trendsetter for other cable companies. And the deal helps extend TiVo’s reach at a time when it is increasingly difficult to get consumers to pay an extra monthly fee on top of their cable bill.

Netgear has announced their new ReadyNAS Ultra storage devices. NAS stands for “network attached storage” which means that the data on its hard drives can be accessed by any device on your home network. This provides you with a powerful storage system that lets you share files and create backups of critical data – including music, video, and photo files — from all your home computers.

One key feature of the devices is their ability to store data from a TiVo DVR using the network connection. And once the data is in the NAS box, it can be streamed to any TiVo box on your network. The device can also automatically reformat streaming video for viewing on mobile devices or home computers, transcoding on the fly. And Skifta software lets you access your media files from any DLNA-compatible device even when you’re away from home; you can even use a smartphone to access your media content remotely.

The four- and six-bay models are slated to ship later this month, with the two-bay models scheduled to be available in October.

TiVo and the satellite TV service Dish Network (and its parent company, EchoStar) have been embroiled in a series of legal actions over TiVo’s claims of patent infringement. Last year, TiVo won a $200 million judgment against Dish, but a federal appeals court recently decided that it will review that decision and the claim that the presiding judge should have given Dish a new trial to determine whether or not the company was still infringing on TiVo’s intellectual property.

Now the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has rejected two claims in TiVo’s patents. According to a report on NewTeeVee, TiVo believes that the judgment is in error, and will appeal the recent PTO decision. Earlier in the process, the PTO ruled against some of TiVo’s patent claims, only to have them ultimately upheld as valid. For its part, Dish claims that the recent PTO decision was the right one, citing prior art that should invalidate the patent claims.

As for the ultimate winner in this case, the only ones we can be sure of are the lawyers. Whether or not this dispute will end up having an impact on Dish subscribers remains to be seen.

TiVo created a revolution in television viewing when its digital video recorder (DVR) first showed up. In a world resigned to scrolling back and forth through an endless stack of VHS tapes, TiVo made it simple to record a show and watch it later. More than anything, the user interface made it quick and easy to set up recordings and play them back when you wanted. Now all sorts of services offer DVRs, but the latest wrinkle is a “whole home” feature: record the show on one television, and watch it on any other one in the house.

The latest entry is from DirecTV. And let’s start with the punchline; DirecTV Whole-Home DVR Service costs just $3 a month on top of your subscription (which must include HD and DVR services at $17 a month). For this, you get a box that will let you record up to two shows at once, and watch up to two shows on different televisions at once. And all this can be going on at the same time. You can manage your DVR recordings and schedule from any TV in the house, and even pause a show in one room and then go continue to watch it in another. And you can even increase the storage capacity by adding an external hard drive with an eSATA connection. You can get a 1 TB model for about $100 these days.

All this for $36 a year seems to be a pretty good bargain. It’s a convenient system that means you don’t have to buy a separate DVR for every room.

Another one bites the dust. Last week, the Washington DC area electronics retailer, MyerEmco Audio Video, announced that it was going out of business. Lack of available credit was cited as a major factor in the company’s demise. The president announced that the store would sell remaining inventory at half-price, with larger discounts available as they near the end of their stock.

One of the keys to the company’s failure was the downturn in new housing. This may seem strange at first glance, but high-end audio/visual stores like this rely heavily on new construction of expensive homes, which often include extensive wiring and complex home entertainment system. With housing starts stalled, the company lost its new installation business. Many buyers economized by buying directly from big box stores, and handling their own installation. And with increase information available on the Internet, consumers need less help from the experienced staff of the dedicated stores like MyerEmco.

As I’ve said before, there will always be a niche for high-end system integrators and installers, but not only is that market not growing along with the increased demand for HDTV and other home entertainment products, it’s actually shrinking. MyerEmco is just the latest casualty, but it’s certainly not going to be the last.

According to a Wall Street Journal article last week, Apple is in negotiations with TV networks to lower the price for TV shows sold on the company’s iTunes site. The report indicates that the goal is to make video content more affordable when the iPad starts shipping, presumably in support of their claim about it being the best way to watch such content. One source indicated that Applie has already been experimenting with $.99 per episode pricing, which is half the price for their standard definition TV shows. (HD versions cost $2.99 each.)

I find this to be a curious move, and wonder if Applie is falling farther and farther behind the curve. Leave aside the question of just how well suited the non-HD iPad is for video watching; are people going to want to buy episodes when so many are available for free? The network sites and Hulu offer a wide variety of episodes for on-demand viewing. If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you have streaming access to a large selection of shows at no additional cost.

TV episodes are qualitatively different from CD tracks. I believe that people are more inclined to buy music tracks which they will load into their iPod and listen to over and over. I don’t expect that people will be loading TV episodes into their iPads so that they can watch that same show over and over. Maybe I’m biased by my own personal preference, but I rarely like to watch reruns, especially in the same year as their first run.

Sure, Apple will sell more TV episodes if they cut the price in half. And yes, some people will watch them on their iPads. But I don’t expect the pricing or the delivery to have an impact on the television programming market that comes close to the impact iTunes has had on the music industry.

Last fall, I wrote about the Samsung Instinct HD cell phone that could capture HD video. Now comes news that SonyEricsson is following suit. The new Vivaz is a 3G touchscreen phone that can record 720p video using the 8.1-megapixel camera. (The phone originally was known as the “Kurara”.) Apparently, the press release announcing the product may have be posted prematurely, as it appears that it has since been taken down, but not until after the information got posted to a host of Web sites. According to various reports, the phone is expected to ship in the first quarter of 2010, but the company has not announced any specific plans to market it in the U.S.

The cell phone continues to become the kitchen sink of mobile devices, able to do just about anything you might want to do while on the go. As I’ve stated before, this is probably motivated more by the need to differentiate products from the competition than it is by the user demand for more features. But clearly this trend shows no signs of slowing down, so expect cell phones to continue to evolve into the Swiss Army knives of the consumer electronics market.

“TV Everywhere” is the moniker given by subscription video services to their attempts to let their subscribers watch their content through a streaming connection over the Internet. It makes sense; if I’m already paying for the content, why can’t I “tune in” over a broadband connection to see whatever my set top box can deliver?

It’s a nice idea, but it raises some thorny issues. Are the cable (and satellite and phone) companies distributing the content over the Internet, which could be an unlicensed use of the content? And what about security? Can the services guarantee that the content won’t leak out so that everyone can access it?

DISH Network has announced plans for another way to untie this knot. They will simply include Sling Box functionality in subscriber set top boxes (and retrofits to some existing set top boxes) that will allow individual subscribers to “dial into” their own set top box over the Internet. And if that box includes DVR functions, then they’ll be able to access that recorded content as well.

This plan is made easier by the fact that DISH Network’s parent company, EchoStar, bought Sling Box, which keeps it all in the family. And since it’s a point-to-point connection to equipment in the subscriber’s home, it’s not the same as making program streams available from the company’s servers. This certainly could serve as a model for making broadband access to broadcast video content available on a subscription basis. It remains to be seen whether consumers will choose this arrangement, or will vote with their dollars for some other configuration.

Multichannel News ran an intriguing story on Monday about TiVo. Apparently, the television digital video recording (DVR) service has suffered a loss of subscribers from 3.5 million a year ago to 2.7 million now. In an industry where you have to grow to move forward, these look like pretty crushing numbers. According to the article, the company’s new goal is to convince cable operators to use their software for DVR functions, to give their customers the tools they need to manage the exploding number of viewing choices available on cable services and the Internet.

TiVo may definitely have something here. Just as “cloud computing” makes sense for some computer applications, for many people it makes more sense to let their cable company handle the messy hardware aspects of DVR functions, and just access the stored program through their set top box. One problem is that these systems can be miserable to navigate. TiVo has been at this a long time, and many people hold up their user interface as the best example of how well it can work. One problem up until this point is that you have to buy some expensive hardware to get the features, and then pay an annual subscription fee on top of that. Wouldn’t it be more appealing to just pay a $5 a month TiVo fee to your cable company and get all the benefits? It makes sense to me.

But what if you get your television over the air (like I do)? Are there options to the TiVo box for us? There are all sorts of digital video recorders available besides TiVo, but they’re not cheap. If you already have a computer with TV tuners connected to your television and the Internet (as I do), you may want to check out Nero Liquid TV. Nero was selling a boxed kit that included a tuner card, remote control, infrared receiver, and a software package for the blowout price of $39.99, marked down from $199.99, but that offer sold out in a hurry. However, if you have a tuner card, you probably also have the remote and IR receiver, so all you need is the software. And Nero is still selling the Nero Liquid TV software as a download for $19.99 (marked down from $99.99). For that, you get the TiVo DVR software that runs on your Windows computer, plus a year’s subscription to the TiVo service which normally costs $99 by itself. And you get that great TiVo user interface.

Does it work? Stay tuned. I’ll be adding Nero Liquid TV to our home system and I’ll report back on how it works out. If you decide to try it out, let me know how it works for you: alfred@hdtvprofessor.com.

The Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) group announced the release of the WHDI specification earlier this week. This is designed to let HDTV equipment makers create wireless connections between devices, up to 100 feet apart and through walls. It relies on a 40 MHz channel in the 5 GHz unlicensed band, rated at less than a millisecond latency. The interface supports 1080p resolution and HDCP, and unlike some competing approaches, provides an uncompressed signal. (In other words, it doesn’t add any additional compression over what may have been applied to the stream already.)

A number of companies have already released products based on pre-standard versions of this technology (much like what happened before the 802.11n WiFi standards were finalized), including Sharp. Other companies backing the standard include Hitachi, Motorola, Samsung, and Sony.

This is not the only wireless HDTV approach, however. The WirelessHD is a competing technology that is supported by Intel, LG Electronics, Panasonic, NEC, Toshiba, Samsung and Sony. (Yes, some of the companies are on both lists, presumably hedging their bets.)

Getting rid of all but the AC power wire to your HDTV is a great idea. Having it be able to talk to your settop box and DVD player and other devices is even better. It will take some time to sort out which wireless connection will win out, but the WHDI seems to have made a good start.