Archive for September, 2005
Last week I mentioned the Samsung TV with full two-way digital cable support. Samsung has more tricks up its sleeve, if this tidbit from This Week in Consumer Electronics is accurate:
Samsung unveiled at a Christmas in August press event, here, a Home Media Center set-top box which integrates bidirectional digital cable reception, standard and high definition digital video recording, music and image playback, voice over IP cable telephony functions, and broadband cable modem service.
The Home Media Center is based on Digeo’s Moxi menu interface software and X-Stream x86 processor. The first iteration of the Home Media Center will be distributed on a lease basis through cable partners, but Samsung is hoping to have a retail version of the device as early as late 2006, after dual-tuner capability has been enabled for bidirectional CableCARD devices.
The enabling hardware is indeed on the way. It’s not here yet.
It’s frustrating to see these proprietary solutions appear while more open and extensible products like Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 still can only do over-the-air HDTV. This is enormously frustrating to people like Thomas Hawk, who recently said: “If DirecTV and TiVo can make a deal to get us an HDTV PVR surely Microsoft can as well.”
Well, no. TiVo cut a deal with DirecTV to supply DirecTV customers with a box and a back-end service. DirecTV owns the customers and in fact is about to cut TiVo off at the knees with its own box. The box is completely closed and I can’t get the content off it except via an analog port. If I cancel my DirecTV service and take my HD DirecTiVo to the cable company, it will be useless.
Likewise, I can get an HD DVR from my cable company. Scientific Atlanta and Motorola make them, but here too I can only rent them through my cable company. If I move, I have to give back the box, which would probably be worthless at my new home anyway. Scientific Atlanta and Motorola won’t sell me a box directly. Even if they could, what good would it be?
Sony and Matsushita already have CableCARD-compatible DVRs. (I wrote about the Sony model in this post last June.) I spent an hour or so yesterday reading through posts about the single-tuner, one-way Sony DHG-HDD500 DVR in one very long thread at AVS Forum. What I read didn’t make me want to run out and drop a thousand bucks on one. Especially when Comcast would give me a dual-tuner HD-compatible DVR for free.
It’s wishful thinking to say that Microsoft can cut separate deals with individual cable companies. That won’t work for two reasons. First, it will piss off customers. How would you feel if you’re in an area served by Cox or Adelphia, and you buy a Media Center PC only to find out that the promised HD recording works only with Comcast and isn’t available in your area? And second, even if individual cable companies wanted to cut their own deals, they don’t have the technology. The reason CableLabs exists is so that cable companies can count on a supply of standard gear for the head end and the set top.
HD recording from cable won’t happen until the companies that make TV tuner cards for Media Center to get a device certified that can handle at least one and preferably two CableCARDs. So what about it, Hauppauge, and AVerMedia and ATI and all the other companies on the Logo Partner List? Have you got these products in the pipeline? Have they been submitted for CableLabs testing? When will we see them on the market? Are you waiting for Windows Vista? If you’ve got any inside information you want to share anonymously, drop me a note: ed-blog AT bott DOT com.