The Weather Channel, Bride-o-Rama, Viropop, and Bleacher Bloggers have joined the TiVoCast line-up, according to E. Stephen Mack, Director of TiVoCast Operations.
You can subscribe to these on your TiVo in TiVo Central -> Find Programs -> Download TV & Movies or on the TiVoCast website.
Pioneer and Mitsubishi Chemical Media have announced the development of a new type of recordable Blu-Disc (BD-R) that uses an organic dye recording layer, according to CDRinfo. The new disc can be produced using modified CD-R and DVD-R manufacturing equipment, significantly reducing manufacturing costs. The technology is known as “Low-to-High” (LTH) and it is part of the Blu-ray Disc Recordable Format Ver.1.2 specification. The downside is that current Blu-ray drives cannot read the new format at this time, though it is possible that existing drives could support this format with a firmware update.
They’re currently demonstrating a 25GB single-layer disc which can be burned at 1x or 2x speeds. Commercialization of the new format, along with new drives that include LTH support, may begin as early as Spring, 2008. Future plans including bumping the write speeds to 4x, and later 6x, as well as development of a disc using a metal nitride recording layer.
This is good news as it will bring down the costs of burning Blu-ray in the home. And if current drives can be updated to support it, that’s even better news.
Now, I’m sure someone will object to new discs that aren’t fully compatible with existing drives. That’s been a mantra from the HD DVD camp – though it seems to have quieted down some since the bogus 51GB disc announcement. The fact is that neither BD nor HD DVD is ‘finalized’, there will be updates to the standards that may not work on all existing players – like a 51GB HD DVD, or this new BD-R media format. But this is nothing new – CD and DVD went through the same thing. CD-R and CD-RW didn’t work in a lot of CD players, even a number of players sold after the formats were introduced. CDs were originally limited to 650MB of data, or a 74min playing time with music. But the media format was tweaked to get 700MB/80min discs, and beyond – but some players have issues with those discs.
DVD has had similar issues. The best known, of course, is the DVD-R/RW vs. DVD+R/RW ‘war’. -R/RW is the official DVD Forum standard, while +R/RW is a ‘non-standard standard’ from a group of companies who were upset that their intellectual property (and hence licensing revenue) were not included in the -R/RW standard. (Same basic cause as the BD/HD DVD war.) There were, and still are, players which have issues with one or the other format. There are also early DVD players which can’t handle recordable and/or re-writable media at all – just as with the CD formats. DVD Video originally did not include DTS support, and hence the first couple of generations of DVD player also did not support DTS. DTS was later added, and those early players cannot access the DTS audio. There have been other changes – such as with the shift from 8x to 16x DVD-R media. In order to hit the higher speeds, physical changes were made to the media. A number of older DVD drives cannot write, and sometimes cannot read, the 16x media due to these changes.
The point is that both BD and HD DVD are still early in their lives as formats, and both are likely to see changes which may not be backwards compatible with all existing players. Such is the way of technology.
There is another issue here that might be overlooked – this reinforces the fact that Blu-ray is not a ‘Sony’ format. It is a true consortium effort, as evidenced by this development being from a Pioneer and Mitsubishi joint venture, without Sony’s involvement. Blu-ray is much more of a consortium effort than HD DVD is, as the latter is almost totally defined by Toshiba.
Spotted via EngadgetHD.
Sling Community did a nice article on the highly anticipated Clip+Sling feature. No, there hasn’t been a new announcement, but they found two patent applications from Sling Media relating to Clip+Sling – 20070168543 Capturing and Sharing Media Content and 20070198532 Management of Shared Media Content.
Check out the article, it is worth a read.
Kinda, sorta… OK, not really. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
An anonymous tipster emailed Gizmodo a shot of the upcoming ReplayTV Personal HD – an HDTV tuner in the form of a USB dongle. This is likely designed to work with the ReplayTV-branded PC software, which has been an also-ran in the market since it launched in mid-2006, despite an effort to boost sales with a price cut in March of this year. There are simply better options – cheaper and/or more capable.
PVR Wire @ TV Squad points out that this product looks an awful lot like a white Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950. The WinTV-HVR-950 can tune OTA ATSC or NTSC or analog cable – but no digital cable. That isn’t surprising as the only cards currently supported by the ReplayTV PC software are the Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 and WinTV PVR USB2. The little remote, which looks like it could be PCCard (PCMCIA) format for storing in a laptop, looks like a new addition to the product.
This is just a sad recycling of a once-proud brand name, like AOL using ‘Netscape’ on various idiotic products.
TWICE magazine today ran an article based on their discussions with Digeo at the recent CEDIA show. Digeo is apparently still planning to launch their new Moxi DMRs before the holidays this year, despite the dearth of solid information on the products.
Digeo is readying the launch of its Moxi digital media receivers (DMR) for what is expected to be a pre-holiday launch through select retailers across the country.
Really, nothing substantial has been revealed since the products were shown at CES back in January. If anything, the TWICE article makes it sound like Digeo has scaled back their launch plans:
Digeo will be looking to partner with A/V retailers that offer “an assisted selling environment in order to communicate all of the capabilities the product delivers,” [Michael Fidler, Digeo CEO] said.
“We have very modest goals for the product,” said Fidler. “We think it is establishing a new category. We know that TiVo has been out there with their product starting that, and this is a great new opportunity for retailers, who really haven’t participated in the cable industry at all, until the availability of a national umbrella [CableCARD] that allows this product to be sold in any retailer in the country [or] to any operator in the country.”
Digeo will look to build the Moxi brand mostly through online vehicles, Fidler said, although details of the launch campaign will be disclosed later.
Digeo will also supply a more basic box to be sold through retailers, Fidler said.
That sounds a lot more low-key than when I talked to them at CES. “Select retailers” and “mostly through online vehicles” – that doesn’t sound like they’re going to be widely available. The bit about partnering with retailers who do ‘assisted selling’ makes it sound like they’re going to be positioning this as more of a high-end boutique solution than something you’d see in the shelf in Best Buy. And while they’re happy to announce home control integration from 4HomeMedia they’re still not talking about basic features such as hard drive size or pricing. A year ago when the product was announced the price was set at “around $1000″ shipping in “fall 2007″ – they’ll certainly have to come in substantially below that to have decent sales in today’s market with the sub-$300 TiVo HD, or it really will be a small volume boutique item.
This bit makes me wonder:
All of Moxi’s retail-focused boxes will include a CableCARD slot that will accept multi-stream CableCARDs supplied by local operators.
Does that mean that the units will only have a single M-Card slot and will not be able to utilize two S-Cards, as the TiVo HD and Series3 can? Currently M-Card availability is still very spotty – my local Charter Digital outlet reports that they don’t have them at all yet, for example. Digeo could run into issues with M-Card availability in the near term if this is the case. Though, in the longer term, not having the second slot would decrease the component costs slightly.
I still think that, of all the vendors, Digeo has the best chance of competing with TiVo at retail based on their interface design and feature set. But they need to get a product on the market, at a competitive price, or it is all moot. I’d be happy to run a Moxi unit side-by-side with my Series3 to see how they compare.
