Tag: Consumer Electronics Show

Downstreaming: The Future of Bypassing the Cable Box

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Central cable box
Image by Lars Plougmann via Flickr

Last month, one of the things that went up on our cable bill was the rental of our cable box. It now costs over $14 a month to rent a cable box. Can it cost more than a year or two’s worth of rental fees to actually buy a box? Yet cable box manufacturers insist there is no market for direct consumer purchase of cable boxes, and thus the cable card system is nearly a failure.

At CES, Time Warner Cable announced that they had made a deal to make live and on demand programming available over IP, eliminating the need for a cable box. The new service will be integrated with Sony and Samsung TVs, as well as the Samsung Galaxy Tab. For now, this will only be available to customers who have their broadband services, but going forward, there is no reason why such a service could not be provided over any network.

Verizon FIOS has similar ambitions. it wants FIOS TV on everything from iPads to BluRay players.

Time Warner Cables CEO insists the demand for online-only viewing is small. We’re not so sure. A full online-only version of the offerings of a cable company has yet to be tried. Most online services have serious limitations in terms of content. Some of the biggest complaints about cord cutting has been the fact that no one service offers what the cable company does. That may become different if it is a cable company providing the service. or it may be that the cable company will do an inadequate job simply because they do not wish to challenge their core business.

What seems inevitable is a transition from conventional cable delivery systems to an IP based delivery system. The design of the HDHomeRun and the Ceton InfiniTV TV tuners are both IP based. Each decode the stream and stream it to the computer(although the Ceton device uses a virtual ethernet connection). Imagine a future where a cable box is installed in a single location in a house and multiple devices can access that box over your house network to stream channels, including your computer and your network-connected television.

The step beyond that is the so-called TV Anywhere, where you can access your content over the internet anywhere. That is what companies are looking at, but the concern is that bandwidth is not at the point at which high-quality streams can be sustained.

Either way, hopefully change is going to come, and this news is very promising.

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Has Boxee Sold Out?

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Image representing Boxee as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

We’re big fans of Boxee here. We don’t use it on a daily basis(partly because of the issues with using it under Fedora Linux). We’ve been at every Boxee New York City event, we’ve annoyed their CEO.

Boxee is a media center application with a 10-foot interface designed for full sized televisions. As it began, there was an emphasis on socialization. Boxee has a lot of advantages. It has wonderful codec support for playback. But as Boxee moved toward a commercial model, playing local content was moved to the side, along withsocialization. People seem to speak less of those aspects nowadays.

Boxee turned to focus on streaming content, becoming popular for individuals looking for a new Hulu interface. Boxee played a game of cat and mouse with Hulu. Until the D-Link Boxee Box came along, and they announced that they would be putting Hulu Plus on. This logically means that the game is up. Even though Hulu offers content for free, Boxee, like many boxes, will likely support only the paid version.

Vudu and Netflix, showstoppers, are delayed and will hopefully arrive on the Boxee Box soon enough. That hasn’t stopped Boxee from expanding. At CES this week, Iomega announced a Boxee device that includes a hard drive. Viewsonic announced a TV set including Boxee.

CBS Interactive announced it will make full episodes available for purchase through Boxee. It is certainly a big move for Boxee. But they have gone from challenging the status quo to working with them. Working with CBS is certainly better in the long run. Working with content providers to get them to willingly put their content on TV is a better long term solution than creating apps that may stop working at the whim of said providers.

On the other hand, they may lose some of their devoted fanbase in the process. If every service costs money, then the value of purchasing a a dedicated device for several hundred dollars is lessened. One thing though…it’s still cheaper than cable.

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