Digital Cable anyone?

David Teague · **Posted:** Wed Dec 22, 2004 9:45 am

I had I was one of the first 20 regular people to have DSL in Raleigh when came out way back in 1997-98. I like my DSL it was pretty consitant speed, however RR is faster most of the time, in fact with time warner being 3mb down (t1 X2) I never notice and slow down problems around the busy times. I used to loathe TW, but in the last couple of year I have very positive expereince, IE always being on time when they say they would be there and sending people who actually seem to know what they are doing. When I first got digital cable I had just picked up the box at the cable office, we had a few problems the first couple of month, come to find out the cable that we had running from the box at the house to the digital box was and old one and not rated for digital, the replaced the cable and credited me the first month that I had some much trouble.

Also with vonage and most digital phones if there is no power you will loose your phone, I have my phone and my vonage box and cable modem all on a ups, I have not had to test it, but I am not that worried as we both have cell phones and Vonage has a feature that when your home phone can't be reached it will forward it to a number you select.

Richard Casto · **Posted:** Wed Dec 22, 2004 10:19 am

My quandary is that I have DirecTV so I have no need for Digital Cable (or any other cable package). I use Verizon DSL via a third party ISP (which gives me cool stuff such as static IP but with only 128Kup/768Kdown) which I am happy with, but I would like to trim my monthly bills by going with something like Vonage and ditching Verizon for my regular phone. But you can’t get DSL without having a regular phone, so that doesn’t help me at all

I could ditch all of my DirecTV stuff and just go cable, but the main reason I stick with DirecTV is that they have TiVo DVR. The TiVo DVR you get with DirecTV is a two tuner model that is much better (in my opinion) than the regular stand alone model. And the nearly universal opinion is that DVR that most cable companies offer sucks when compared to the DirecTV TiVo. So I am not giving up my four TiVos.

I need to look at the cost of getting just Broadband via TimeWarner + Vonage and see if that is cheaper or close to the cost of my existing Verizon phone, Verizon DSL + Third Party DSL ISP. I most likely would loose some of the features I get with my current third party ISP (such as very cheap static IP), but I may be able to deal with that.

David Teague · **Posted:** Wed Dec 22, 2004 2:08 pm

I've have never had TIVO but I do have a DVR form Time warner and I love it for 6.99 extra on my bill it is way worth it, I hardly ever watch live tv anymore. I has pip cabability and can pause live tv also which is cool.

BTW Tivo supposidly is going to start feeding commercials in when you are fast forwoading which seems pretty crappy to me.

Aaron Buckley · **Posted:** Wed Dec 22, 2004 2:41 pm

David Teague wrote:

BTW Tivo supposidly is going to start feeding commercials in when you are fast forwoading which seems pretty crappy to me.

Where did you hear this from? My bet is the Cable company told you this. There is not a chance they would do this with the service fee and deal they worked with DirecTv. - AB

David Teague · **Posted:** Wed Dec 22, 2004 3:05 pm

Aaron Buckley wrote:

David Teague wrote:

BTW Tivo supposidly is going to start feeding commercials in when you are fast forwoading which seems pretty crappy to me.

Where did you hear this from? My bet is the Cable company told you this. There is not a chance they would do this with the service fee and deal they worked with DirecTv. - AB

Nope Read it in the Paper they are going to start implemeting this next from pressure from advertisers for lossing money on people not watching commercials, I will try to dig up the article.

EDIT - Hear are the links to the articles -

http://lsolum.typepad.com/copyfutures/2 ... _out_.html

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-et-t ... 6496.story

Richard Casto · **Posted:** Wed Dec 22, 2004 3:24 pm

David Teague wrote:

I've have never had TIVO but I do have a DVR form Time warner and I love it for 6.99 extra on my bill it is way worth it, I hardly ever watch live tv anymore. I has pip cabability and can pause live tv also which is cool.

Long term TiVo has an uphill battle with the cable companies as eventually they will get their DVRs right. But right now they generally don't compare favorably with TiVo. It you haven't used a TiVo before, the DVR from the cable company probably seems pretty cool. It probably is like seeing your first car, but it is a Yugo. It looks really cool, but you just don't know any better.

But if you started out with a Honda (or better), the Yugo doesn't look that attractive.

David Teague wrote:

BTW Tivo supposidly is going to start feeding commercials in when you are fast forwoading which seems pretty crappy to me.

I follow TiVo pretty closely. I haven't heard about this at all. They DO sell promo space that is available via the main menu (gold star content), but it is totally optional. You don't have to watch it. They have been doing this for awhile now.

What TiVo has done to placate advertisers is to not build in a direct way to skip through an entire commercial (i.e. jump ahead 30 seconds). But via hidden codes, you can turn this feature on. Otherwise regular TiVo users have to just FF through a commercial. I actually don't have the 30 second jump turned on as I can FF through commercials pretty easily.

Aaron Buckley · **Posted:** Wed Dec 22, 2004 3:25 pm

Aaron Buckley wrote:

David Teague wrote:

BTW Tivo supposidly is going to start feeding commercials in when you are fast forwoading which seems pretty crappy to me.

Where did you hear this from? My bet is the Cable company told you this. There is not a chance they would do this with the service fee and deal they worked with DirecTv. - AB

David Teague wrote:

Nope Read it in the Paper they are going to start implemeting this next from pressure from advertisers for lossing money on people not watching commercials, I will try to dig up the article.

EDIT - Hear are the links to the articles -

http://lsolum.typepad.com/copyfutures/2 ... _out_.html

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-et-t ... 6496.story

Interesting reads there. Thanks for the information on that

It's making me re-think my TiVo subscription and just go with a standalone hard disk recorder or DVD recorder. - AB

Richard Casto · **Posted:** Wed Dec 22, 2004 4:01 pm

David Teague wrote:

Hear are the links to the articles

Ok, thanks for the links. The LA Times article is a little fast and loose with the truth, but it is not all wrong. I was thinking that based upon your first post that you wouldn't be able to fast forward through commercials, etc.

What TiVo has (and has had for awhile) is the ability to allow broadcasters to embed "tags" in the signal. So far this usually shows up as part of a commercial for a new TV show. During the commercial, you may get an icon that says "click thumbs up to record this show". This is basically the same deal but with some additional features. BUT you still can FF through the commercial. Nobody knows for sure if the hidden 30 second skip will remain, but my guess is "yes" since it is already a hidden feature and only die hard TiVo fans know about it.

It is very likely that this is actually intended to be is enhanced content from an advertisers point of view and that it would work best of you actually watch the commercial. But it would pop up if you FF through the commercial. But at top FF speed, that may translate to nearly 1/2 second for a thirty second commercial so this is designed to NOT impede the FF feature. Also the advertiser has to actively embed the tag into the signal AND send TiVo a check. So, I doubt that the bulk of commercials that you see today are going to do this. Just whoever feels that it is worth it to them to try to reach out and touch the TiVo generation in a new way.

So this is basically more of what they already do, and “no” the sky is not falling (yet). What the market place needs is more competition in the DVR arena. If there is just one player (TiVo is the biggest) then there is less pressure on them. Ultimately consumers will decide what is acceptable. There are other venders out there (like Scientific Atlanta which provides most of the DVRs used by Cable companies) and new startup Moxi that may keep TiVo honest.

One thing that the article mentions that David didn’t mention is the tracking of viewing habits. The article made it sound like it was a new thing. TiVo does this. But they don't sell data that links to an individual person or TiVo. This data is rolled up and sold to people at your standard demographics type of level. So I can’t buy data that show exactly which Pay Per View Pornography you watch

And you are free to opt out of the entire thing if you want.

If you are interested in TiVo a good source of info is...

http://www.tivocommunity.com/

Have we totally hijacked this thread.

steve remchak · **Posted:** Wed Dec 22, 2004 6:51 pm

in my neighborhood it is easy to tell when the kids, housewives, and home offices are on the TWC hi-speed. my VPN works twice as fast after about 10pm. DSL is slightly faster in my experience but not available here.

David Teague · **Posted:** Wed Dec 22, 2004 9:48 pm

steve remchak wrote:

in my neighborhood it is easy to tell when the kids, housewives, and home offices are on the TWC hi-speed. my VPN works twice as fast after about 10pm. DSL is slightly faster in my experience but not available here.

I was on a friends 24.99 DSL and it was awfull;y slow know I know that is the lowest lever but it was just sad. M
aybe I am lucky in my neiboorhood but last week at 8 something I did a bandwith test and I was pulling down 2557 kbps and 350 up, and I just tested it again and I tested about the same, I never saw thoose kind of speeds with my ADSL that I had, it was always 768 down and 256 up, so I basically never can tell when the system has a lot of people on it, I woudl suggest a speed test here, http://www.dslreports.com/stest .

As far as Tivo, it sounds to me like they will be putting banners of adds when you are fast forwarding, the reason I fast forward is becuase I don't watch the commercials, of course I just found the 30 sec skip thin on my TW DVR so I am not FF much, I know some of the people on that one page were scared they were going to disable the 30 sec skip feature on TIVO.

Graham Jagger · **Joined:** Fri Aug 29, 2003 12:53 am **Posts:** 1718

This latest incantation of DSL, DSL Extreme. Not a bad deal if you already have DSL for an upgrade. I paid $5/mo. Got more bandwidth, 384K up and 3M down, static IP, more mailbox space, and a couple of other minor bits. I took it.

I've tested the advertised numbers Bellsouth is telling me and I can consistently get that rated bandwidth from all the test sites I hit. Running traceroute and ping tests show really good turnaround. So even their routers must be pretty beefy. I've only had minor interruptions with them as my Connection and ISP.

Graham

Donnie Barnes · **Posted:** Wed Dec 22, 2004 9:51 pm

For those that care, a good use of broadband (back on topic *cough*) is downloading TV shows that you miss, forgot to record, or atmospheric conditions caused problems for. You can do it via Bittorrent, the peer to peer filesharing system. Check out what's available at:

http://www.tvtorrents.tv

My off-air HD signal is generally very good, but we're pretty far out so weather has been known to hurt it. It did just that the other night for the entirety of Desperate Housewives. All three Tivos got nothing but blotchy impossible to watch recordings. But by 12:30 that night it was available and so I started the download of the HD version and went to bed. Next morning there it was.

If you were so inclined you could build a Linux box and install MythTV. Use a video card with TV output and connect to TV. You can then set it to automatically download shows via bittorrent. Control it with a remote control, even. Use a TV capture card and it'll act just like a Tivo, only better. Build a big disk server in your house and you can rip your DVDs to the server. Build multiple MythTV clients and put them in different rooms and network everything to the server and you can watch any ripped DVD any time from any TV all completely independently. All the uploaded TV shows already have commercials completely removed. MythTV will remove commercials pretty much automatically from the stuff it records, too.

I'm relatively certain that if you get a DirecTV Tivo box (HD or not) you can also hack it to store unencrypted TV to your network server above and then use the MythTV clients to watch it from anywhere, too.

Someone is going to can this stuff good enough that consumers don't have to be hackers to make it work. When they do, the TV industry is going to go into a tizzy.

--Donnie

David Teague · **Posted:** Wed Dec 22, 2004 11:35 pm

Graham how much is DSL Extreme?

Donnie, I have a feeling that somehow someway the TV Compaines will say that tvtorrents is violating a copyright and it will be gone, any thing that you can do for "free" over the internet seems to be under attack, I remeber there were pople in a tizzy about having episodes of the simpsons and south park on the web a few years ago, even though you could record them on your own tv.

Graham Jagger · **Joined:** Fri Aug 29, 2003 12:53 am **Posts:** 1718

David Teague wrote:

Graham how much is DSL Extreme?

I'm paying about $45. No upfront costs or anything since I did an upgrade. Took a few days to get the upgrade and my static ip address to kick in.

So far so good.

Graham

Mark Vitacco · **Posted:** Thu Dec 23, 2004 11:53 am

Dick:
I'm in the middle of trialing TWC VOIP. I liked it so much we
signed up to convert after the second week. They supply a router
that will run the house phones, digital cabel, & cabel modum so to
insure service duirng a power outage you will need a battery
backup to keep the stuff running. TWC has UPS and they are
using NORTEL equipment for VPOIP that is carrier grade. I felt
comfortable with TWC VOIP becuase of their good record keeping
a signal though all the Hurricianes and storms we had thus far. In
fact I can't recall having a outage since TWC purchased whater it
was we had before.

Another option, Is to request essential line service from BellSouth
or whom ever. This would give you a land line with 911 access
and incomming calls but we plan to use the cell phone as a backup
along with a battery. I have not looked at them yet but I don't think
they are that expenseive my father in law just got one said he
paid something line $150.

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