Tag: Ceton

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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Hauppauge and Silicondust Announce Alliance for HTPC CableCard Tuners

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Silicondust USA Inc., maker of the popular HDHomerun networked digital TV tuner, and Hauppauge Computer Works, known for a variety of hardware tuners, have announced an alliance to introduce a USB-connected digital cablecard tuner.

Silicondust will concurrently be introducing its HDHomerun Prime, a cablecard version of their networked digital tuner. “Silicondust’s experience with digital cable access systems combined with Hauppauge’s strong computer TV tuner sales will produce a successful launch of this innovative product.” said Ken Plotkin, President and Chief Executive Officer of Hauppauge Computer Works.

The products should be available for sale by the end of the year. The competition, the PCI-Express based Ceton InfiniTV4 Cablecard Tuner, has suffered from parts shortages.

As previously mentioned, a recent change by Cable Labs has permitted these devices to be used in a limited fashion under Linux. As revealed by Jeremy Hammer, Vice President of Systems Integration for Ceton Corporation, during a recent podcast interview, developers are already working, with support from the hardware manufacturers, to integrate the necessary functionality into popular Linux DVR software MythTV. You can hear that interview on the HTPCentric Podcast, Episode 7(htpcentric.thedigitalmediazone.com).

The editor of this blog appeared in Episode 3 of the same podcast, discussing his MythTV setup. An update on that will be coming soon.

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