Are PVRs a thing of the past?

[hemicuda]

Originally Posted by sandor

i completely agree. if i have absolutely no reason to buy TB's worth of storage space, and can still access the content i want, when and where i want, i will be happy. this is the reason i love Netflix "Watch it Now" - i just want more content, and higher quality streaming. though if i have to choose, i will take accessibility over resolution.

I just got into this w/ my Xbox and I can't really tell the difference between a DVD and Netflix on a 42" Sam. That could also be due to my 3mon promo of 8mbit service. We'll see how it goes when it reverts back to 6mbit in Mar.

[tmiranda]

The fee I was referring for is for "premium" content, above and beyond the "basic" content.

For example, I now pay $72 per month for basic cable (which includes unencrypted QAM locals) + internet access. I'd be willing to pay about an extra $20 to add movies and on demand TV content. As far as I'm concerned I'd like to totally ditch the current cable TV and sat. model of "live broadcasting" and go totally with "on demand" content. That's worth $100/month so long as it's "all you can eat".

[wayner]

In theory I agree that having everything available on demand would be great. But in practice I don't know that I would trust the entertainment industry. I would want access to all content that I have now plus I would want all shows to remain available forever as long as I subscribe to the service. Isn't this how online music services work - any new releases are added to the service but they don't delete anything that has been there in the past?

I would also want live content to be available immediately. What I mean by this is that I like to watch sports in "near real-time". I will often start watching games an hour or so after they start and I will FF through commercials, half time, etc. and end up ending the game around the time that it actually ends. I wouldn't want to give this up under an on-demand paradigm as this is the most efficient use of a PVR - you can watch hockey or basketball games in 60 minutes or less, saving about 90 minutes - much more efficient then with regular TV content.

[skiingwiz]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

As far as I'm concerned I'd like to totally ditch the current cable TV and sat. model of "live broadcasting" and go totally with "on demand" content. That's worth $100/month so long as it's "all you can eat".

Exactly. This would be my ideal situation. I'd also be willing to pay a similar amount for this.

[stevech]

I think it'll be a long time before there's enough bandwidth in residences in order to change from broadcasting to exclusively on-demand.
Even with just two or so active feeds per home, it really adds up.

[wayner]

This depends on the market - in South Korea 100 Mbps to the home is very commonplace. It will be interesting to see how markets in places like South Korea evolve to see what trends may take place a few years later in North America when we start to catch up to them in terms of bandwidth.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by stevech

I think it'll be a long time before there's enough bandwidth in residences in order to change from broadcasting to exclusively on-demand.
Even with just two or so active feeds per home, it really adds up.

Perhaps. Keep in mind that cable lines (theoretically) can support a lot of data- if my back-of-the-envelope calculation is right, something on the order of 3gbps. That's using DOCSIS 3 with all the channels devoted to data. I'm sure that could get bumped up even higher with different coding techniques. So, its not the bandwidth to the door that's the problem. Cable operators can't feed nearly that much distinct data to each customer, since now a large portion of that is duplicated. Still, it seems like they wouldn't have to bring fiber to customers' doors to get it to work, which makes it quite a bit easier. Even if cable companies can feed the neighborhood boxes enough data, it would be awfully expensive for them to maintain enough wide pipes to the Internet backbone to feed the neighborhoods. That's why I think they something like a Akamai system would be used.

I'm not saying we'll see this in the next 5-10 years, but I do think that there's existing infrastructure and technology which would significantly help deployment.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by reggie14

I'm not saying we'll see this in the next 5-10 years, but I do think that there's existing infrastructure and technology which would significantly help deployment.

The cynic in me questions why cable companies would want to increase the bandwidth of broadband much above 10 Mbps when the only real need for that much bandwidth is video which could make cable TV subscriptions obsolete. They would therefore be complicit in slitting their own throats. Hopefully no cable company execs are reading this thread!

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by wayner

The cynic in me questions why cable companies would want to increase the bandwidth of broadband much above 10 Mbps when the only real need for that much bandwidth is video which could make cable TV subscriptions obsolete.

They'd have an incentive to do that if they charged people per-megabyte, rather than a flat rate. Also, I'm not convinced its feasible to do this without caching/storing things on cable operators' systems. So, you might still have to pay the cable operator a fee for access to their video distribution system.

[stevech]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Perhaps. Keep in mind that cable lines (theoretically) can support a lot of data- if my back-of-the-envelope calculation is right, something on the order of 3gbps. That's using DOCSIS 3 with all the channels devoted to data. I'm sure that could get bumped up even higher with different coding techniques.

I agree. And cable is often hybrid fiber optics-cable (HFC), where the last 1000 ft (or so) is coax and the rest is fiber. But - pushing that much bandwidth per house times a zillion houses takes a lot of digital horsepower and storage performance at the servers, since every on-demand stream is unique. Someday, for sure, e.g, when we have holographic storage or some such.