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The Time Warner DVR box model was free, and the service cost $7.95/month. Also I was excited at the possibility of finally getting high definition content on my Sony HDTV. I asked some friends who used it and they seemed happy with it.

But the reality of the situation was not so rosy:

I can sum up my experiences with the Time Warner DVR in one word: Argh!

Ed enumerates the myriad of issues he experienced with the cable DVR in his article at ZDNet. From the terrible button-farm remote with unintuitive controls, to the lack of a priority list for the DVR’s version of Season Passes, to odd quirks during normal use (like the screen blacking when you pause playback and having trouble resuming playback), and more. And it sounds like his family agreed:

After two weeks of this I decided enough was enough. The family all agreed. We wanted TiVo!

Ed considered paying the $150 repair fee, which would really see him upgraded to a Series2DT with his lifetime transferred. But he’d had a taste of HD and native digital cable support, so he instead opted for the TiVo HD. After ordering his new TiVo HD, but before it shipped, TiVo announced the TiVo HD XL.

Knowing a good thing when he sees it, Ed canceled the TiVo HD and ordered a TiVo HD XL.

I think TiVo should send a nice thank you gift to Time Warner and Cisco/Scientific Atlanta for providing such a crappy DVR. The bad experience helped turn a potential lost customer with a dead TiVo into a high-end customer with the latest and greatest TiVo. Cisco’s bad DVR was good for TiVo.

And I’m sure there others that I haven’t spotted.

Dave Zatz posted this video to YouTube:

Note that this is a proof of concept, a technology demonstrator, and not the SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone that will eventually be released. This was an engineering project written for jail-broken iPhones to characterize the performance of the platform and ensure that Sling could deliver a high quality customer experience on the iPhone & iPod Touch platforms. This allowed Sling to gain experience with the platform while waiting for the SDK to be released. The official SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone will be written using the SDK and sold through the iTunes App store like other official iPhone/iPod Touch applications. At least that is currently the intent.

If you’re attending the Apple WWDC this week you can get a look at the proof of concept application first hand. Sling Media Product Manager Vicky Shum will be at the Starbucks at 120 4th Street, San Francisco (across from the Metreon) between 10:00 and 16:00 (10am and 4pm) on Monday, June 9th running demos.

Disclaimer: I am currently employed by Sling Media.

Doug Lichtman suggested to Zinn that instead of developing a DVR that recorded copyright material they couldn’t sought out the content providers and asked permission to record the content and developed a box that the content providers would be happy with. Sure, we’ve seen some of what they’ve tried even with competition like TiVo on the market – talk of anyone who skips ads being ‘thieves’, looking to block the ability to fast-forward through ads, putting Do Not Copy flags on their content, setting timeouts to auto-delete digital content. I really don’t want to consider what a DVR designed to make Hollywood happy would be like. But I think it would’ve meant DVRs would’ve been DOA. Zinn put it well, as quoted by Howell:

Fortunately, the Constitution got it right. Copyrights are not absolute rights. TiVo did not have to go to the rightsholders for permission [to build a product that allows flexible use of lawfully acquired copyrighted content]. If they’d had to, there’d be no DVR. With no DVR, there’d be no VOD.

Even TiVo’s defiance of the content industry’s wishes has limits. TiVo does need to operate with the industry, and can’t afford to deal with constant lawsuits as beset ReplayTV, which took an even more antagonistic attitude toward content providers. TiVo ends up caught in the middle a lot of the time. Users, especially the zealots, tend to be upset with TiVo for not doing more – for putting TiVoGuard on TiVoToGo transfers, for encrypting MRV transfers, for obeying the Macrovision tags on recordings, etc. Some users want TiVo to carry the banner of open access and strip all the controls off of the content, despite that being a completely unrealistic approach and certain suicide. Various open source efforts may get away with breaking the rules, but they don’t have an easily-sued commercial entity for the industry to target. (And many of them do sensitive work off-shore in more friendly jurisdictions.)

Jay Williams of the MPAA, who was in the audience, also challenged Zinn that Tivo was was being philosophically inconsistent about intellectual property, due to TiVo’s patent battle victory with Echostar/Dish Network, suggesting that the patents were also barriers to innovation. In reply, Zinn highlighted one of the issues TiVo faces:

Zinn replied that TiVo goes out of its way to satisfy rightsholders that copyrighted material cannot readily be transferred out of someone’s home or to someone else.

It’s interminably slow to transfer material from one TiVo box to another in your home, because of all the encryption we’re using at the insistence of the rightsholders.

That might be a little hyperbole, a lot of the speed issues with MRV are due to the hardware – transfers on the Series3 and TiVo HD, which have more power, are faster. But the encryption certainly does slow things down. If they could do a straight file transfer without worrying about protecting it from sniffing, it would speed things up. But TiVo’s tactics have been to push the boundaries bit by bit, while doing their best to shield themselves from reprisal. Instead of trying to push the industry into rapid change, which would just trigger a backlash, they’ve slowly and steadily stretched what is allowed.

The full article is worth a read for a better understanding of the kind of mindset companies like TiVo are up against when trying to innovate in the entertainment industry. The entrenched mindset reacts negatively to any disruptive influence, and goes to extremes to stop it.

I caught this write-up thanks to Thomas Hawk’s mention at Seeking Alpha.