Panasonic To Ship Tru2Way-enabled VIERA HDTVs This Summer

Posted on Thursday, March 13, 2008 by MegaZone

A couple of months ago at CES Panasonic was one of the vendors showing off Tru2way, nee OCAP, products. At the time I focused on their ‘portable DVR‘, which I still think is a poor idea. But what I didn’t mention at the time were their Tru2Way CableCARD HDTVs, which they said would be out later this year. Well, based on reports in Dealerscope and Home Theater Magazine, it looks like they’ll be true to their word. Panasonic will be introducing Tru2Way to their PX80 720p and PZ80 1080p VIERA plasma line-ups in the second half.

The first generation of CableCARD TVs, which were all unidirectional, didn’t sell well and they’ve faded to just a few models left in the market. The hope is that the new generation of CableCARD sets, with Tru2Way, will succeed where the first generation failed. With Tru2Way the TV will have all of the functionality of a non-DVR cable STB – support for Switched Digital Video (SDV), OnDemand, PayPerView, on-screen program guide, etc. It will completely replace the cable box while providing all of the same functionality, unlike the first generation which only allowed access to linear content – no SDV, VOD, PPV, EPG, etc.

In theory, Tru2Way-enabled TVs could also offer DVR functionality, either with built-in storage or an external add-on. The cable MSO could push down OCAP-based DVR software, like TiVo’s software for Comcast, to provide the DVR functionality. But that would require support in the hardware, including encoding chips to handle the analog channels. (Note that I’m talking in general here, there is no sign of the Panasonic sets having any such features!) This would all be easier with a complete digital system. Once NTSC is phased out (less than year from now), the last obstacle will be the lingering analog cable channels. If a cable MSO went 100% digital, or at least offered digital simulcast of all their channels, it would be possible to provide DVR functionality without any encoding hardware. You’d simply need to save the signal as-received, and then play it back later – and the playback hardware is already in there, of course. (This is how satellite DVRs work today, they’re 100% digital. And there are some cable DVR models like this as well, for areas where the system is already 100% digital.)

ZatzNotFunny also covered this today.

Posted in Cable, HDTV, OCAP | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

How Much Does A Failed Format War Cost?

Posted on Thursday, March 13, 2008 by MegaZone

The Blu-ray vs. HD DVD format war is over, but the fallout and consequences aren’t. And the big loser in the war, Toshiba, is facing the music for their failed campaign. Toshiba started the war in an attempt to increase their consumer electronics market share, but their attempted grab for lebensraum backfired and they’ve been left holding the bill. How large of a bill? According to Japan’s Nikkei business daily Toshiba will have to book a loss of $986 million relating to HD DVD, bringing their full-year profit down to roughly $2.44 billion. That’s certainly not a crippling blow for a company the size of Toshiba, but it certainly isn’t exactly pleasant. And it just goes to show the size of the risk, and the stakes, that where at the core of the format war in the first place.

Via CNET News.com.

Posted in Blu-ray/HD DVD | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Has Apple Been Working On An Apple TV DVR?

Posted on Thursday, March 13, 2008 by MegaZone

Back in October, 2006 Apple filed a patent application for a ‘Search user interface for media device’ which describes a search interface on a media device, which sure sounds like an Apple TV variant, with a remote control which resembles an iPod Nano with the click-wheel interface. Here’s the abstract:

A search menu includes a search input field and input characters rendered on a multi-dimensional displacement surface that rotates in response to a user input. A highlight region intersects the multi-dimensional displacement surface and highlights input characters while the input characters intersect the highlight region according to the rotation of the multi-dimensional displacement surface.

Don’t you love patent-ese? But perhaps the most interesting aspect are the images included with the patent. They show what looks very much like a TV Guide-style EPG for live TV.

Apple DVR patent EPG

AppleInsider uncovered the patent application, and they have some of the images posted in their write-up. It is easier to see them there than in the US Patent Office interface. Interestingly, the remote is meant to be a fairly intelligent device, with a display and local storage. It would download the EPG data so that you could take the remote with you and decide what to record, and then when you returned it to the device it would sync and setup the recordings. That seems pretty complex, and frankly of questionable utility, for a remote – but it does make more sense if the ‘remote’ could be a real iPod, doesn’t it?

The filing also includes a hybrid search which would search both the EPG data and the iTunes store for content – which sounds just like TiVo’s Universal Swivel Search, which searches the local EPG, as well as broadband content from TiVoCast and Amazon Unbox.

As with all patent applications, this doesn’t mean Apple is actually working on a product that does this, just that they had the idea and felt it was worth patenting – just in case they decide to do it, or someone else does and they want to collect licensing. But the lack of DVR functionality is the glaring omission from Apple TV, so many people expect that Apple will address that at some point.

Picked up from CNET News.com.

Posted in Apple, DVR, TiVo | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Thank You Reid

Posted on Wednesday, March 12, 2008 by MegaZone

Reid, thank you for the TiVo Rewards Referral. And also thank you to whomever donated on March 5. For some reason I didn’t get an email with the name like I normally do, I just noticed it in my account history.

I will be starting some Rewards giveaways in the near future for those who’ve commented on blog posts, as TiVo is closing out the program and I need to use up the points. So keep donating the points until April 28th, when they stop allowing it. Thanks!

Posted in TiVo | Tagged , | 3 Comments

TiVo To Bring YouTube To Series3 & TiVoHD – Sorry Series2!

Posted on Wednesday, March 12, 2008 by MegaZone

TiVo announced today that they will be bringing YouTube videos to the TV via the TiVo interface – but only on the TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD:

TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), today announced an agreement with YouTube™ that will offer access to YouTube videos directly from the TV via a TiVo DVR. The service will be available later this year to broadband-connected subscribers with TiVo Series3™ DVRs, including the new TiVo HD.

Every day hundreds of millions of videos are viewed on YouTube and hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded. Upon launch of the TiVo-YouTube service, TiVo users will be able to search, browse and watch these videos directly on their television sets through their broadband connected TiVo DVRs. The combination of having the YouTube experience with the convenience and familiarity of TiVo’s intuitive user interface will provide TiVo subscribers with the ability to discover and enjoy the most shared and most discussed web videos in the world on their televisions. Importantly, users will be able to log into their YouTube accounts directly from their TiVo boxes and access their favorite YouTube channels and playlists.

“We’re delighted to be working with the world’s leading online video community so that TiVo subscribers can access YouTube’s popular content on the TV via the TiVo DVR,” said Tara Maitra, Vice President and GM of Content Services at TiVo Inc. “Being able to make available YouTube videos to the TiVo subscriber base using one device, one remote and one user interface is another major step in our commitment to combine all of your television and web video viewing options in one easy to use service.”

Now, before Series2 & Series2DT owners break out the pitchforks and torches, this was pretty much inevitable. It is a hardware issue, the Series2 platform is just behind the times. The Series3 family (which covers the box generally known as the Series3 and the TiVo HD) has hardware that can decode MPEG-2, MPEG-4/H.264, and WMV/VC-1 – while the older Series2 platform only decodes MPEG-2. That means the S3 platform can support more services than the S2, and that’s just how it is – technology moves ever forward.

Interestingly, TiVo may owe a major debt to Apple. YouTube long encoded all of their video in FLV, or Flash Video, format. But the Apple iPhone does not support Flash. In order to get YouTube on the iPhone, YouTube has re-encoded all of their videos into H.264, which is playable in QuickTime – and, coincidentally, in the decoders in the TiVo S3 platform. (Adobe also added H.264 support to the most recent versions of Flash, due to demand, so content providers can use H.264 for all their needs.)

Which leads me to the next point. This implies TiVo is enabling at least H.264 decoding. Today the hardware is there, but the software support is not. The S3 is limited to decoding MPEG-2 just like the S2. But this announcement certainly means they’ll be enabling MPEG-4/H.264 decoding, and I’m hoping it means they’ll also be enabling WMV/VC-1 decoding at the same time, but I won’t count on that. In any case, this little implied nugget is probably the biggest news of all,

Why? Because H.264 is a highly efficient codec which is widely used to encode video blogs and video downloads, including high-def video. (H.264, also known as AVC, is the most widely used codec on Blu-ray Disc, for example.) So this decoding capability would allow for much more than just YouTube (not that YouTube support isn’t big news, of course), such as wide support for video blogs – without the PC-based transcoding announced for TiVo Desktop 2.6, high-def movie downloads from Amazon Unbox (though Amazon Unbox uses WMV/VC-1 for their PC & portable downloads, which is why enabling that support on the TiVo could be good – same HD file could be played on the PC or TiVo), support for PC-to-TiVo transfers without needing to transcode, and possibly other services.

Back when the Series2DT launched I remarked that I was surprised TiVo didn’t include advanced codec support in the hardware, as they did with the Series3. I foresaw that online content would be increasingly important, and had genuinely expected TiVo to including H.264/VC-1 decoding in all of their new hardware at that point. I felt that keeping the S2DT restricted to MPEG-2 would prolong the transition because it would take longer to reach a critical mass of S3 units to make it worth developing features restricted to that platform. And I think that has been the case. But it looks like we’re finally reaching the tipping point, and I hope this is just the first of many new features to take advantage of the additional capabilities in the Series3 hardware.

I know Series2 owners may not be happy (I own two S2 boxes myself, as well as my S3), but this is just how it is. At some point old platforms can no longer support all the new features. Someday there will be a Series4 and it’ll almost certainly support things the Series3 cannot, just as the Series2 has features the Series1 lacked.

Posted in Press Release, TiVo | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments