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SBC Builds A TiVo Rival

Posted by timothy on Tue Jan 04, 2005 02:28 AM
from the hubris-is-good-for-us dept.
Media Television Entertainment
ChipGuy writes "With all the hoopla around Tivo To Go, SBC Communications has launched its own PVR-plus-set-top box which integrates SBC DSL with its satellite service. From the looks of it, this could be the trend where phone operators offer their one set-top box/ home media servers. This is not good news for TiVo or Microsoft which harbors living room ambitions. 2Wire might be the dark horse in set-top box sweepstakes."
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  • FTTH (Score:2, Interesting)

    by lordkuri (514498)
    Fiber To The Home could make this a kickass box. Anything, Anytime...

    Could this be a saving grace for Blockbuster to finally get into the fray again with Netflix?
    • I'm sad to say that I can't think of what I'd use fibre to the home for over and above what I've already got. My whole city's [visitcanberra.com.au] got fibre to the curb, cat 5 to the stb and computer - 2mb/s for home users [transact.com.au] (plus additional bandwidth set aside for the cable TV and re-broadcast free to air TV channels they provide and video on demand), or up to 10mb/s for business [transact.com.au]. Now only wish that the provider would build some functionality like SBC's into the set top box.
  • I live in a very rural part of the South, and my Telco is a Mom and Pop job, I am the Only guy in town, that has a High Speed Line, that is maxed. We are lucky to get Tivo. Seriously.
    • With so many users still forced into dial-up access, it makes you wonder where the priorities are. For these companies to already be talking about FTTH while my parents still chug along at 56k seems as if the two are living in different worlds. So many peripherals are arriving to take advantage of services that are still largely unavailable to the common man. Lay down the framework first, then build upon that. The company that extends itself into getting more users off the narrowband will be reaping the

  • my thoughts. (Score:4, Informative)

    by bagel2ooo (106312) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @02:42AM (#11251967) Homepage
    When I moved we received something similar to this. We have the satellite TV with DVR as well as what appears to be plain DSL. Haven't thrown much at the DVR other than some Nova. The search functions took a little getting used to be the quality seemed well enough. Said it holds 100 hours but I haven't had time to take a closer peek to see more specs on it.
    • Satellite-integrated DVRs (at least in the digital satellite realm) take the MPEG-2 stream and save it directly to disk, so the quality is "perfect" ("perfect" in this case meaning the same quality as live satellite, which some picky folks don't like) every time. This is also the case with new cable DVRs from companies like Comcast and Time Warner. I would imagine that if they're projecting 100 hours, they're referring to a 120GB hard drive storing good ole MPEG 2-encoded NTSC/PAL (drops down significantl

  • Wow (Score:4, Funny)

    by updog (608318) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @02:44AM (#11251973) Homepage
    2 Wire actually has a product other than the bandwidth meter?!

    • Actually..... (Score:2, Informative)

      by cruc (599914)
      As a former employee of a major RBOC, I worked with 2Wire on several projects our company wanted them to provide: modems/routers, with some management capability primarily. I know that several RBOC's "parterned" with them to provide routers, including Verizon and SBC. While 2Wire initially sold their stuff in Comp-USA believe it or not(etc), it was the promise of the RBOCs that made them not invest in the retail side. The RBOC's didn't jump though.

      Anyway, my current home router is a 2Wire I got from that

  • Anybody else amazed? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wcitechnologies (836709) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @02:46AM (#11251980)
    Personally, I am amazed, AMAZED at how many new services SBC has started offering in the last few years. My telephone, sat. dish, cell phone, and yellow pages ad are all on the same bill as it is. Strangely enough their customer service hasn't gotten any better... does anybody here think SBC might be getting too big for our own good?
    • Why would they bother with customer service when they can just acquire all their competitors?

      SBC is the devil. They're everything that's bad about the Old Phone Company, only with more clout and no judicial oversight.
    • I'm not surprised by this. Time Warner is offering Digital Phone service and also has cellphone service planned too.

      The days of dedicated services are over. It's all about the network. If you have fiber/copper in the ground, you will be expected to offer phone, TV, Internet, Home security services...etc if you want to survive the market place.
    • Shows how different of a position they're in than Qwest, who pushed off its DSL customers to MSN, sold off cell phone assets, and doesn't even seem to be selling long distance aggressively...
    • When I worked for AT&T, we were told that customers didn't like "bundling" and having all of the stuff on one big bill.

      Fast forward only 5 years and guess what? Bundling is once again alive & well at SBC!

      Give it a few years, people will be sick of SuperBigCorp again.. heh

  • SBC institutionally incompetent? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Monkelectric (546685) <slashdot@monkelectr i c .com> on Tuesday January 04 2005, @02:55AM (#11251992)
    This would be great news if it were anyone else but SBC. SBC delivering TV over DSL is like letting the retarded neighbor kid fix your car. You know he cant do it, but it might be fun to watch him try.

    Seriously, SBC cant get DSL right (PPPoE, WTF?), I have no confidence in their ability to get TV working as well.

  • At least I'll be calling the same company to complain about all of the miss-charges, instead of the myriad I have to now.

  • One Stop Shopping (Score:3, Informative)

    by joebetoblame (846146) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @03:17AM (#11252040) Homepage
    I use to work for SBC back in the day, untill i got fired for hacking the phones and rerouting all my calls back to the call center. When i worked there the mentality was always One stop shopping, They want you to pay them for all services including but limited to..Phone, Cable TV service, Internet, Cell phone, Phone Equipment, Long Distance, web hosting, this would all come on one bill that could be paid monthly to SBC, This is their vision and route they are taking.
  • Oh...was I snoring?

    I'm sorry. I've seen this one before. It's the one where the snotnose brat says he'll be the biggets on the block then disappears when he finds out there's work involved.

    Wake me when something new comes on.
  • I'll avoid this new product unless I know it's not crippled like their gateways. Their gateways/DSL modems don't even let users turn off the router functionality, which is fundamentally important to certain setups. Also, 2Wire devices feel like rentals from the phone company, wholly tied-in for upgrades and configuration. While an unchangable/automatic configuration is good for most users, I'll stick with devices that let me configure them too. Even the parts of their products that allow configuration seem to center around looks and seeming newbie friendly than efficiency. For example, port forwarding doen't even let the user type the back-end IP address. The selection must be by NETBIOS name from a list you have to pray is complete and unambiguous.
    • The selection must be by NETBIOS name

      That's not entirely accurate. It uses the client hostname sent as a DHCP option. This name is also used by the internal DNS server to make your client hostname magically work via DNS.
    • It seems as though 2wire makes a good product. However, their wireless router appears to be a problem to me from a security standpoint. Even though the router has some type of firewall built in, due to the architecture of the box, I can't prove that it is effective for wireless (you point your browesr to 192.168.1.1 IIRC to manage the router). While I can put a Linux gateway in between the eth port and my lan, I can't get in between the wireless side and my wireless boxen unless I do that via wireless also.

  • Sky+? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Omicron32 (646469)
    One thing I never hear mentioned is the state of play in the UK. Is the TiVo here or coming here at all? What about this one? (Didn't RTFA, getting ready for work...)

    How does the TiVo service compare with the Sky+ service we can get over here that appears to allow the same features?

    • One thing I never hear mentioned is the state of play in the UK. Is the TiVo here or coming here at all? What about this one? (Didn't RTFA, getting ready for work...)

      TiVo was here in the UK before Sky+ and was in fact recommended by Sky for a time. I bought my TiVo in the first week that they were available and love it. My sister has Sky+ and it isn't a patch on TiVo. Sky+ doesn't have the full season pass feature, it has series link which only works on some channels, it doesn't learn what you like s

  • As is Ti[Drink Coca-Cola! Don't save the Sopranos!]Vo. Time to break out the old MythTV specs and try to make that bad boy work finally.

    Anyone got up-to-date recommendations on a PC box that won't look like utter crap on the TV cart?

    • Anyone got up-to-date recommendations on a PC box that won't look like utter crap on the TV cart?

      A good quiet, black or silver, brushed aluminum case looks pretty slick.

      I'm a big fan of this one [lian-li.com]. I've built a few computers with it.

  • Standardization of set top boxes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Raindeer (104129) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @03:23AM (#11252057) Homepage Journal
    Yesterday I had a discussion on set top boxes with a couple of colleagues. It seems to us that the living room of the future will have its own rack full with set top boxes. A set top box for your digital radio, a set top box for digital tv, a set top box for internet/dsl connection, a set top box for video on demand, a set top box for I don't know what else for a kind of DRM protected content.

    I can see all these set top boxes actually harming competition. Having to introduce a new set top box for a new service seems like a proper waste of money. The consumer might like a different provider per service but buying a new box just to make it work will be prohibitively expensive

    It would be great if we would get systems that are modular, maybe work with a set of chipcards or something along those lines.

    • I can see all these set top boxes actually harming competition. Having to introduce a new set top box for a new service seems like a proper waste of money. The consumer might like a different provider per service but buying a new box just to make it work will be prohibitively expensive

      Think "cell phones."
        • Actually, I was referring to non-GSM cell phones (AFAIK, only 1 carrier supports GSM in the US, though I could be wrong. Pretty much cancels out the provider-switching capabilities).

          The current "trick" is that cell phone prices are seriously, obscenely, horrendously inflated ($300 for a cell phone worth, at most, $50) so that you have to be loaded in order to buy the phone outright. But...! Here come the providers to save the day (*stroke stroke*) by knocking off 50-90% (sometimes 100% for the REALLY crap

  • Tivo rival? Nah! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by K8Fan (37875) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @03:47AM (#11252097) Journal

    All this talk about the various telephone, satellite and cable companies coming out with "Tivo-killers" is just talk. Anyone who actually owns a TiVo knows that it's not the hardware, it's the software. They can make all the boxes they want, but without the TiVo software, and the concepts behind it, they'll never reach the same level of functionality. I use a TiVo at home and a ReplayTV when visiting my brother's house. Each has features I desire in the other, but in general, the TiVo has a usability that the Replay can't touch. The Replay has better playback features (like the wonderful commercial skip), but the TiVo blows it away in terms of actually getting the programs in the first place (wishlists, etc).

    As the TiVo and ReplayTV were introduced at the same time, at the same Consumer Electronics Show, they've had a lot of time to place catch-up with each other and to come up with a lot of great ideas. I have yet to read about one of these new boxes from one of the giant media companies that had features that got users raving about them. It's possible, but unlikely at this point, that some new box is going to be anything other than a "me-too". They all seem like wishful thinking from entities that wish nothing more than for TiVo and Replay to have never been invented...that they will somehow be able to drive both of them out of business and then to start limiting features more and more to help "maintain control of copyright".

    • Hmm, I have to disagree. TiVo has a great brand name, but to Joe Average, it is still little more than that. When 'Joe' can get the key functionality by paying his cable company an extra $5 per month, when coworkers start talking about some show at the water cooler the next day, he'll happly say "shhh.. don't tell me, I TiVo'ed it" while he actually recorded it with some other random DVR.

      Plus, as DVR becomes a commodity, user interface will become more important.. and TiVo did great stuff, but they are f
    • Anyone who actually owns a TiVo knows that it's not the hardware, it's the software. They can make all the boxes they want, but without the TiVo software, and the concepts behind it, they'll never reach the same level of functionality.

      Having a higher level of integration with the TV tuner provides some better functionality. My ghetto-TiVo from Brighthouse is integrated with the cable box, which is nice. I can watch and record on seperate channels and I don't have to mess with IR flashers or a seperate dat
    • Here's some features for you (Charter DVR)

      - $10/month - I can return the unit anytime and get a new one, no questions asked

      - Tight integration with the native menu system.

      - Record two channels at the same time, or record one while watching another.

      I believe all the items above are indespensible and I have hard time understanding how DVRs are of any value without them.

      It seems to me, the TiVo hardware itself is overpriced and reduntant. Also, the monthly fee is a little much. I like the software though.
    • Amen, brother.

      Anyone who says "this is going to compete with TiVo" has never owned a TiVo. It's not the fact that it can record shows, it's how it records shows, and how it interacts with you. Excellence in design. Right number of features that require little or no explanation, because they work the obvious way.

      You can pry my countoured TiVo controller from my cold dead fingers.

      All hail TiVo-Crack!

    • Disclaimer: I am a Tivo subscriber and like it.

      I agree. Tivo is almost like Google. Tivo "gets it". They know what their customers want/need and keep it simple.

      Companies keep trying to come out with Tivo killers and fail. These companies either think they have a better product or their product is good enough.

      Companies that think they have a better product than Tivo probably don't "get it" when it comes to Joe Average.

      Companies with the "good enough" approach are just trying to be greeedy and will proba
    • the automated commercial skip (thats not available on new models)? or the 30 second skip? you can program your tivo remote to do 30 second skip, just go into now playing, start something playing, then hit select, play, select, 3, 0, select, you should hear some bong noises, then the skip button the remote will skip 30 seconds instead of skipping to the end.

    • I call BS (Score:3, Insightful)

      by swb (14022)
      Pricing means something. I can get an HD DVR from Time-Warner for something like $10 a month -- HD, multiple-channel recording, total digital cable integration (no IR blaster hackery), and NO CASH INVESTMENT UP FRONT.

      To many people this means something, and it should -- a Tivo + Lifetime will take YEARS to return its investment relative to the cable DVR, and that's IF it doesn't break. A cable DVR when it breaks or becomes out-dated goes back to the cable company for free replacement the same day. A Tiv

  • FFS, die already, won't you? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MerryGoByeBye (447358) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @03:57AM (#11252121) Journal
    TV is dying, folks. While the symptoms may not be outwardly apparent yet, the insides are rotting away like so much necrotic carcinoma. How much longer can TV keep going while a greater and greater (what is it now, over half?) part of the US (and world) establishes broadband connectivity?

    Do you think people can split themselves in two?

    TV already shot itself in the foot when it spawned 400-channel versions of itself and divided up the interest by its newfound extra channels. All that's left now is to watch as the shows go to crap, the heads roll and the whole burgeoning monstrosity becomes cannibalized by BigBand.
    • I wonder if they will start making shows that go straight to DVD. :-P
    • "How much longer can TV keep going while a greater and greater (what is it now, over half?) part of the US (and world) establishes broadband connectivity?"

      Well, I don't see them competing really. I mean, I watch TV for passive entertainment at the end of the day and weekend. The computer is used at work, and at home if I actively want to look up something or email. Two different forms of entertainment. I'd say most houses have the internet connection in an office (with or without a tv), and the tv in the

  • If it's as bad as the Moxi, Tivo has no worries... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Viewsonic (584922) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @03:58AM (#11252124)
    Seriously.. After using a Moxi for a week after all the hype, it came nowhere near what a Tivo can do. I've seen and used so many Tivo clones now it isn't funny. Not a single one comes close to the features. And it's not just features, it's also program guide data; everyone else has simple one or two sentence descriptions, where Tivo has an entire paragraph, adult rating symbols ( NC/V/N/AC/AL/etc ), director, actor, how many stars it got, what type of show it is (horror/anime/scifi/etc), if the show is a repeat or a first run .. And on top of that, the guide data is CURRENT AND CORRECT. I don't know how many times I saw how horribly incorrect other peoples guide data is.. Sometimes shows change timeslots because of a football game or something, Tivo updates the data a day later, their competition doesnt!

  • Not suprised (Score:4, Insightful)

    by yoshi_mon (172895) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @05:13AM (#11252235)
    As the TelCo's start rolling out TV service it's no real surprise to me that they want to get into the PVR game too. And not because they think it's going to earn them money directly, no rather it's once again about control.

    PVR boxes like TiVo, as I'm sure we all know, can be hacked up to all sorts of neat things that have been driving the content providers nuts. So it's only logical that Cable/TelCo providers start offering their own PVR boxes that are firmly locked down to prevent those nasty hackers from doing anything that they don't want with them.

  • And then there was Ucentric (Score:4, Informative)

    by BrK (39585) on Tuesday January 04 2005, @06:35AM (#11252462) Homepage
    Ucentric has also been quietly trudging away in this space from the old DEC headquarters in Maynard, MA. (http://www.ucentric.com)

    They did trials of their product with Comcast and AT&T (before it was bought by Comcast), and now have a rollout with Voom (the also-ran HD sat company).

    It's a good, stable, platform, but never seems to get any press (or customers). Linux based (Debian) with some fancy bits globbed on.

    The real sweet spot is in their thin clients and distribution technologies. Imagine having ALL of your PVR's content available simultaneously from every TV (or PC) in the house, from a client a little bigger than a pack of smokes. And, you don't need to run a bunch of Cat5 to get the signal to the other TV's, an old piece of coax will do just fine.
  • I got to spend a few weeks with this at my parents house over the holidays. They signed up for DISH through SBC in KS over DirecTV with TiVo.

    They hate it, despise it, and think it's the most clunky hard to use thing ever - but are stuck for a year.

    TiVo just works better (tm). Easier to schedule things, easier to fast forward through (you never think you'd miss it but their little backstep they do when you hit stop/play while FF is a godsend) and you end up watching commercials 4x their speed because an

    • Re:TiVo ToGo *Hoopla*? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Oh, and by "new killer features" I meant something like:

      You're on your lunch break at work with a high speed 'net connection and have nothing else to do, so you log into your SBC/2Wire box via a password protected web browser and see, basically, a java version of the PVR's menu. You pick one of your favorite shows and hit Play and the 2Wire box transcodes the video in realtime to a streaming format so you can watch the recorded show (or live tv, even) right there in your browser while you're away from home
      • Hell, I'd be happy with seeing that there's a crazy Nova special I didn't realize was on, and log into my set-top box with a web browser from work and tell it to record it. Transcoding would be nifty, yeah, but just getting the bits on and off would be great.

        I have a Happauge WinTV-PVR 150 card in my WinXP box and I don't know if it's the card or the software, but I'm not impressed. Of course, I could Remote Desktop in to record a show, but ick the Happauge scheduling software sucks.

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