TiVo To Ship Place Shifting Transcoder Box This Year

TiVo Transcoder Box I’ve actually been working on a post about this for a little while, and on today’s financial conference call President and CEO Tom Rogers provided the final piece. Last month at CES 2012 TiVo was showing off a transcoding box and EngadgetHD has a very nice photo gallery of the unit (which is where I ganked the photo from). I didn’t report on it at the time since I wanted to gather some more info. Just before I left for my wedding & honeymoon I had a conversation with TiVo’s Public Relations Manager, Jessica Loebig, which filled in more info but left a few questions. She arranged for another conversation, with TiVo’s VP and GM of Product Marketing, Jim Denney, last Friday, just after my return. I’ve been a bit swamped catching up on life, and my day job, so more posts based on that conversation are forthcoming.

On today’s call Tom Rogers stated that the transcoding box would ship “later this year”, which I believe is the first firm public statement.

From a technical perspective, based on my conversations with TiVo, the unit that comes to market will probably resemble the unit previewed at CES, but it may not be exactly the same. It is planned to be an Ethernet only device, most likely installed near the router in the home. It will stream content from TiVo Premiere units using the same system as the Premiere-to-Premiere Multi-Room Streaming (MRS) available today. The content will then be transcoded to H.264 and forwarded to devices running TiVo’s client app – such as Android or iOS phones and tablets. Users will be able to view the streams in real time, or they can be saved on the device for later viewing – which is how side-loading is accomplished.

The hardware itself is powered by Zenverge, so it looks like my prior speculation was close to the mark. However, the unit is not planned to have MoCA. I asked Jim Denney about this and he said that MoCA was considered, but given the envisioned use case it was felt that the added cost wasn’t justified. And after discussing it with him, I see his point. Even if the TiVo units are on MoCA, that MoCA network will need to be connected to a non-MoCA network to reach the client devices. And that connection point is a logical place to connect the transcoding box. It doesn’t really make sense to connect it to the MoCA network when it’d have to send the transcoded signal back over the same network to eventually be bridged off to the client network. Keeping the unit dirt simple – just a power connection and Ethernet – keeps it small and keeps the component costs down.

From a capability standpoint, the unit can accept and transcode up to four streams simultaneously. And on today’s call Rogers made the interesting comment that it could be a recording, or LiveTV. I believe the latter is new. Today streaming is only between units that have their own tuners, either Premiere-to-Premiere or Premiere-to-Preview, so there isn’t a need to grab a tuner on the remote device for ‘live’ TV. But for those who want to watch live on a second screen device, it’d be a necessity. (As well as for another application that’s coming, but I’ll leave that for another post. ;-) )

I asked about the streaming technology – is it based on Sling Media or Monsoon Multimedia, or anyone else? It is not. It is an in-house implementation using Zenverge’s silicon and developer tools. So it is unique, and the clients will come from TiVo. That gives me some hope. While Sling & Monsoon Multimedia treat their clients as a revenue stream, TiVo has been giving away their client software. And since you need a TiVo with an active subscription to use this transcoding box they have that revenue stream to draw upon. Rather than milking the customer for anther payment, I’m hopeful they will continue to provide the client software for free, relying on the sales of the hardware, and the TiVo subscription, for revenue.

If they do this it also makes me hopeful that they might publish the client APIs for 3rd parties to build support, as well as create clients for other platforms that aren’t Android or iOS. But that might be a bridge too far since I’m sure they’ll need to protect the content to keep the content owners happy, and that means they couldn’t tell others how to decrypt.

From my conversation with Jessica & Jim, the current plan is for streaming within the home, with side-loading for ‘on the go’ viewing. But not for place shifting streaming content outside of the home. Jim & I talked about this for a while, since I’m a long time Slingbox user and for me streaming beats side-loading hands down. He made the valid point that side-loading has some popular use cases – the most obvious is for when streaming isn’t an option, such as on an airplane. I know parents also use it to load up a bunch of their kids’ favorite shows to whip out on demand to pacify them, etc. So I’m not going to argue against side loading. It isn’t a use case that really interests me, but I acknowledge that it is valid.

As far as streaming outside of the home, Jim was sure to stress that it has not been “designed out” of the product. It isn’t currently planned, but it is something that could be added if there is demand. A lot of the concern is over quality of the experience, bandwidth requirements, etc. I made the point that I’ve been using a Slingbox since I had 768kbps upstream ADSL and only 2.5G EDGE data on my phone, giving me maybe 200kbps if I was lucky, and it was usable even with 320×240 resolution. And these days I have a 5Mbps uplink and 4G LTE on my phone, which has a 720p screen and HDMI output capabilities.

I’ve streamed HD video from my Slingbox PRO-HD from Worcester, MA to Seattle, WA and viewed it on my laptop while I’m out there for work. Being able to access my personal content at home, in real time, while I’m on the road just can’t be matched by side-loading. So I’m strongly in favor of TiVo enabling remote streaming as well. I argued that bandwidth costs continue to drop as speeds continue to increase, and device capabilities have never been greater. Now more than ever before streaming is viable.

I felt it was a good discussion and that TiVo is very much open to feedback on this issue. So it’d be good to hear from the user base. Do you want remote streaming? Or does local streaming and side-loading meet your needs?

No pricing or specific release dates are available at this time, so I can’t comment on that. But if they can bring this to market at a decent price point I think this would be very attractive, especially if they add remote streaming. By way of comparison, the DirecTV Nomad is $149, but you also need to subscribe to the Nomad Mobile DVR Service. My impression of this TiVo unit is that it is a one-time purchase, so it may retail for more than the Nomad. By while the Nomad is strictly store-and-forward side-loading, with real-time transcoding, the TiVo unit does streaming and side-loading, and it sounds like it will transcode for side-loading in better than real time.

I, for one, would be very interested in getting my hands on one of these units.

About MegaZone

MegaZone is the Editor of Gizmo Lovers and the chief contributor. He's been online since 1989 and active in several generations of 'social media' - mailing lists, USENet groups, web forums, and since 2003, blogging.    MegaZone has a presence on several social platforms: Google+ / Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / LiveJournal / Web.    You can also follow Gizmo Lovers on other sites: Blog / Google+ / Facebook / Twitter.
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  • UncleAlbert2

    Kind of a shame TiVo didn’t offer the option of powering the transcoding box using PoE, completely eliminating the need for yet another wall wart.

    • Fanfoot

      There aren’t a lot of little home Ethernet switches with PoE support honestly.  You’d end up with an in-line dongle in most cases which would of course have a wall wart to give it power.  Not sure what the point would be.  If this were something you wanted to place on the ceiling or something I could understand the point, but as it is…

    • Fanfoot

      There aren’t a lot of little home Ethernet switches with PoE support honestly.  You’d end up with an in-line dongle in most cases which would of course have a wall wart to give it power.  Not sure what the point would be.  If this were something you wanted to place on the ceiling or something I could understand the point, but as it is…

      • UncleAlbert2

         Yes, hardly any surprise when so few devices currently support PoE, so it’s chicken and egg.

        A dongle that allows power to be injected into the Ethernet cable from a standard wall wart would seem an acceptable and cheap solution to help kick-start interest/raise awareness in PoE capable routers/switches. When devices are launched, like this TiVo transcoder, with only an RJ45 socket and a power socket, the argument against PoE seems rather perverse.

        As to the point, with many low-power streamers now coming to market which would all be perfect for PoE, they could all (in the future) be powered from a single wall-wart courtesy of my PoE enabled network switch. There would be no need for a multitude of wall-warts, one for each networked device, when instead they could be drawing power from the ethernet cable.

        • http://www.gizmolovers.com/ MegaZone

          We don’t know what the power demands of this transcoder box are, so we can’t say if it could run off PoE or not.

          I don’t think PoE will ever catch on.  Pretty much every PoE device I’ve ever worked with, that wasn’t an IP phone, came with it’s own wall wart.  Usually Ethernet into the wart, then one Ethernet/PoE cable to the device.  Only a slight bit neater.

          And very, very few home routers, gateways, or switches provide power for PoE.  Adding PoE to the device, presuming it could get enough juice, would add cost.  And they’d still have to ship a wart for the majority of users.  So I can understand why they don’t use it.  A wart that does PoE would cost more than a standard off-the-shelf unit.

          Which is also why I don’t see it catching on in the home.  Catch-22.  You’d need more devices with PoE support to drive routers & switches to include it, but router & switch vendors aren’t going to include it unless the demand is there.  Couple that with the move to Wireless – so less Ethernet in general – and I don’t see it happening.

  • Fanfoot

    Well, why would I use this?

    For sideloading?  Sounds like I’d probably have to queue up a transfer, then wait an hour (or the length of the show), and tell it to save it.  Then queue up another one?  Ugh.  Sounds awful.

    With TTG I can queue up a transfer ahead of time, and have it ready and waiting in iTunes for the next time I plug in my iPhone/iPad.  Or sync via Wi-Fi when I plug the thing in to charge overnight.  All pretty automatic.  Won’t work for premium/no copy content of course, but then I suspect neither will sideloading.

    For streaming in the home?  Well, in the home I’ve got these big monitors called TVs that I can use.  So why do I need to stream to my iPad?  I guess as a personal monitor, when there aren’t enough TVs?  Doesn’t happen a lot in my house anyway. 

    For streaming away from the home?  Well, that’s the killer app really, but the one TiVo may not support.  And for which I bought SlingBoxes that work pretty well.  This would be better than that because it wouldn’t take over the UI on the TV in question, which would be great.  But they’d have to prove their mettle wrt streaming over low bandwidth hotel WiFi and such.

    I suspect it will be easy enough to VPN into your home network to force it to stream remotely, but if they haven’t dealt with the ABR streaming issues in their implementation it probably won’t work that well most of the time, so we’ll likely have to wait until they get around to supporting it.  If ever.

    Honestly, more interested in the new “IP” box.  Lets see when that comes out, what price point it hits, how it handles live TV, whether it requires a cable card, what the monthly service fee is, etc.

    • Corporate Communications

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    • Corporate Communications

      Your speculation was correct. The news went out this morning.

    • Corporate Communications

      Your speculation was correct. The news went out this morning.

    • Corporate Communications

      Your speculation was correct. The news went out this morning.

    • Corporate Communications

      Your speculation was correct. The news went out this morning.

    • Corporate Communications

      Your speculation was correct. The news went out this morning.

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