HouseofMike

AP
NEW YORK — A top executive at Comcast Corp., the largest U.S. cable TV company, on Thursday predicted that the cable industry would move toward adopting a networking technology that could significantly increase the use of digital video recorders.

Steve Burke, the chief operating officer at Comcast, told an investor conference that he thought that a trial of the new technology that was recently announced by rival cable operator Cablevision Systems Corp. looked promising, and seemed to be on a solid legal footing.

“It’s a very good idea, very well thought through,” Mr. Burke said at the conference in New York, which was hosted by Bank of America. “If it all works out, I’m sure the rest of the industry will follow.”

The new system that Cablevision is trying would allow cable users to retrieve recorded shows from the cable company’s system, rather than from a hard drive installed on a special set-top cable box.

Such a system could save costs for the cable company by having less expensive cable boxes installed in homes, while also making it possible to offer the premium service to more subscribers.

The idea remains controversial, however, with programming providers concerned about copyright violations. Also, programmers are already worried that the growing use of ad-skipping technologies could upset advertisers.

This would be very, very bad.
So they don’t license Tivo’s technology, instead they use their own DVR, wait for Tivo to go out of business and then get rid of their DVRs. Nice.
Yes I know Tivo is still around. But considering all the cable companies and now DirecTV is coming out with their own DVRs, unless Tivo radically changes their business it’s just a matter of time for the end.

Are they going to store all shows shown on all channels say for at least 5 years?
I don’t think so. This is just about removing control from customers and forcing them down the road to pay to watch shows that we now can just record and watch over and over for free.
It doesn’t look like it now, but this is all about screwing the customer down the road.
If DVR’s can stick around until solid state storage gets big and cheap then the cost with hard drives crapping out for cable companies will go away.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 1st, 2006 at 11:39 pm and is filed under TV, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.