The B787 isn’t Boeing’s only new airliner, there’s also the B747-8. Yes, the B747-8. I know the B747 is hardly new, but the latest member of the family, the -8, is a radical redesign. The fuselage is a fairly direct evolution from the B747-400, albeit with a 220 inch stretch, but it has many enhancements. However the wing is all new, and the engines are brand new GEnx-2b turbofans, derived from the GEnx-1b of the B787. Boeing has released the following video highlighting the new design features of the B747-8:
The engines aren’t the only thing the B747-8 gets from its little brother, it also uses B787-derived avionics and some cabin features such as LED lighting. The B747-8 may no longer be the largest airliner flying, that honor now belongs to the A380, but it is the longest – taking that crown from the A340-600. And it remains to be seen if the A380 has as long and illustrious a career as the B747 has had, and continues to enjoy. Even if you’ve never flown on one you’ve probably benefited from it – over half of the world’s airfreight is carried by a B747 Freighter.
As part of their new YouTube channel I mentioned in my last post, DISH Network has also published several videos highlighting their ‘TV Anywhere’ feature. TV Anywhere brings Sling Media’s technology to DISH customers, either through the Sling Adapter add-on for the ViP722 DVR and the new Hopper DVR, or built into the ViP922 SlingLoaded DVR.
This is actually a very nice system, and one of the few things I’m envious of as a TiVo user. I use an external Slingbox with my TiVo, but that’s really a but if a kludge with analog A/V connections and IR blasters. The DISH Sling Adapter connects with a simple USB cable, and that’s all. TiVo’s forthcoming transcoder box will provide a similarly elegant solution via a single network connection, even moreso as it can support multiple DVRs with one box. However, initially at least, it will only stream within the home. I really hope TiVo comes around and adds true place shifting for streaming outside of the home as well. Then I’d gladly replace my Slingbox.
DISH Network’s recently announced Hopper whole-home DVR, and the Joey companion units, are now available to customers. The Hopper is a unique design with three tuners, but with a trick up its sleeve which allows it to record six programs during prime time. But it isn’t really a six-tuner DVR. Let me quote myself from my previous post, with a little trimming:
Three tuners, but it can record up to six HD channels at once? What kind of dark voodoo is this? Well, note the asterisk: “*DURING PRIMETIME HOURS”. And now note this from the quote above “ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC”. How it manages this trick is actually pretty simple, but requires a little explanation.
I’ll oversimplify a bit, but for analog broadcast TV you have one channel per frequency. A tuner did just that – it tuned a given frequency and therefore a program. But with digital content frequencies and channels have a more nebulous relationship. A single frequency block may contain several digital channels all multiplexed, or MUXed, together. And this is precisely how satellite works. They can’t use a dedicated transponder and frequency for each channel, rather channels are MUXed together. So ‘tuning’ a single channel is actually a multi-step process.
First the tuner tunes the desired frequency and this allows the unit to receive the data stream that is the MUX. Normally the next step is that the signal is de-MUXed and the desired channel is extracted, with the other data being discarded. This one channel is then saved to the drive as a recording. Can you see where I’m going?
Since DISH controls everything end to end, what they’ve done is place ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC in one MUX. And instead of de-MUXing the data as it is received they’re saving the entire MUX to the drive, all four channels. Then it is de-MUXed at playback time, not record time. That’s how it can record up to six channels with three tuners. You have one tuner recording the MUX, for four channels, and two tuners each recording a single channel.
But this is limited. As the page states, they do this during prime time hours only. And recording four channels takes up four times the space, even if you’re never going to watch all four channels. The Hopper has a 2TB drive, but only half is available for user recordings – up to 250 hours. The other half is used to store these PrimeTime Anytime MUX recordings, as well as pre-cached OnDemand content pushed the the box. And you can’t record up to six programs you select, you can only record up to three individual programs. Or two programs while the third tuner is occupied recording this MUX.
So you can record any three channels or the four-channel prime time MUX of the major networks and any two other channels – which is how they get six total. And it only does this during prime time, 8-11pm Eastern, so you won’t be doing this for day time programming, etc.
In addition to this PrimeTime AnyTime feature, the Hopper also supports TV Anywhere place shifting with the Sling Adapter add-on.
Last week DISH launched a new YouTube channel and they’ve gone on a tear uploading videos – most of which have to do with the Hopper. They do provide some useful product info:
They even have a couple of TV spots for it, though I’m not really sure if I should be amused or offended seeing as I currently live in central MA and my wife is from South Boston. And no, she does not have this accent:
They’ve even uploaded videos from the launch at CES:
In addition to the ARRIS Whole Home Solution, Buckeye is deploying the next generation ConvergeMedia video on demand (VOD) platform, and ServAssure Advanced network monitoring solution. So they’re bringing ARRIS in throughout their organization. That’s an area ARRIS has an advantage over TiVo. They can offer an end-to-end solution for small MSOs from a single vendor. This is the kind of small operator that TiVo pursues via their partnership with Evolution Digital and Clearleap. But a multi-vendor solution is rarely as clean.
My recent post about small cable MSOs using TiVo reminded me of a page I noticed on TiVo’s site a while back and meant to post about. But looking at my old posts it doesn’t look like I ever did, so I am now. TiVo has a page for U.S. Cable Business which contains their marketing materials targeting MSOs. They have one-sheets for each of the three products targeted at the MSO market: TiVo Premiere, TiVo Premiere Q, and TiVo Preview.
There are no real revelations here, but I find it interesting how TiVo positions the products for the MSO market.
It is interesting that the Premiere and Q mention Amazon On Demand as one of the features. That would seem to indicate it is something MSOs could provide, yet they generally do not. I think they need someone to review these though, as the Premiere’s one-sheet states “Record four shows at once”, which is a Q feature only. So who knows, maybe the Amazon mention isn’t so meaningful?
The TiVo Preview sheet mentions YouTube only once, in the overview at the top. But I note that Charter’s recently published feature matrix for their Preview deployment indicates that YouTube is not supported on the Preview. A goof on TiVo’s document? I wouldn’t expect Charter to disable YouTube on the Preview if it is supported, since they enable it on the Premiere.
Between this one-sheet and Charter’s document it seems the Preview doesn’t support any OTT video streaming services – no YouTube or Hulu Plus. I wouldn’t expect Amazon or Blockbuster, since those are download services and the Preview doesn’t have any storage. And Netflix we know isn’t available for contractual reasons. I wonder if the Preview has an issue with Internet video streaming services, not enough memory for buffering? It just seems curious. I need to remember to ask about that at The Cable Show in May.
The Premiere and Q sheets also say “connected to the home network through Broadband”, which doesn’t make any sense, even in context. What they really meant, from context, seems to be “connected to the home network through Ethernet”. But that’s a minor, geeky nit to pick, I admit.
The B787 isn’t Boeing’s only new airliner, there’s also the B747-8. Yes, the B747-8. I know the B747 is hardly new, but the latest member of the family, the -8, is a radical redesign. The fuselage is a fairly direct evolution from the B747-400, albeit with a 220 inch stretch, but it has many enhancements. However the wing is all new, and the engines are brand new GEnx-2b turbofans, derived from the GEnx-1b of the B787. Boeing has released the following video highlighting the new design features of the B747-8:
