Today, my Westinghouse W3213 HDTV died. I camped outside of a Best Buy for a good 12 hours in 2006 on Black Friday, nabbing the TV for the nice price of $479.99. Just for comparison, Westinghouse’s equivalent model today still sells for $679.99.
But, enough about me bragging, the TV is dead after all. But, wait! I had the foresight to get a Best Buy Product Service Plan (PSP). I’ll let you know how it goes on getting that resolved. Best Buy has my TV, and they’re currently expecting to have it back to me in about 10 days (not unreasonable really).
So, now I’m TV-less, TiVo-less, right? Wrong. Sure, I have Windows Media Center, but I can’t get all my channels on that without CableCARD.
In comes Slingbox. With Slingbox, all my PCs, Macs, and my WIndows Mobile phone just shifted the TV onto my screen, all via Wi-Fi. I have full control of my TiVo HD, just as if I was sitting in front of the (now absent) TV.
Which reminds me, I haven’t yet poked and prodded TiVo over why they haven’t added Slingbox functionality to the TiVo software stack. I shouldn’t need to own a Slingbox to do all this… but hey, that’s a familiar mantra here, I only have a TiVo because Microsoft won’t fix CableCARD DRM.
Even though I only have the low-end Slingbox AV, it works great for handling the different HD and non-HD content feeds. The Aspect Ratio menu lets me break through common headaches, like DTV video that is 480i… but got recorded in 720p. If that sounds like greek to you, don’t worry, it just means that you don’t have to look at a bunch of black bars (letterboxing and pillarboxing). You just see the TV, and it can sit on top of other windows at all times if you chose.
It is more than a software issue, the TiVo boxes don’t have the hardware to do what the Slingbox does. You really, really don’t want to stream MPEG2 across the Internet, even if portable devices could really handle it. And if you’ve recorded HD content you really can’t stream it as is.
So you need to transcode things into a better format – like WMV or H.264. And adjust the resolution. For example, by default Slingbox uses 320×240 for Internet streaming (640×480 on the LAN). But the resolution can be adjusted for the device. And the bitrate is dynamically adjusted to handle the available bandwidth and device resources. Slingbox uses dedicated encoding hardware to do that – hardware that is not in the TiVo.
OK, so do it in software and use the CPU, right? On a PC, maybe, but a TiVo’s CPU is pretty weak. You’re talking about a max of about a 300MHz MIPS core, and that goes down to 166MHz on early Series2 boxes. And the CPU has to do other tasks so you don’t have even close to the full power to use, so it is worse than the raw stats would indicate.
I think that do add place-shifting TiVo would have to add hardware – either dedicated hardware for place-shifting, or make the CPU more powerful to be able to do it in software. (The hardware approach is probably most cost effective, but the general purpose power in the CPU could possibly be used for other new features as well.) And adding this hardware would increase the unit costs. Place-shifting is still a very niche market, so it would be hard to justify building it into all of the TiVos and either eating into their (slim, even negative) margins or raising prices for the small percentage of users who would use it.
Maybe an add-on – via USB perhaps – which would offload the transcoding work and then the users who want it could by the capability. (Neater would be something like a PCMCIA slot so the hardware could be slotted into the chassis.)
On another subject, do you have any advice on where to find Symbian UIQ users to beta test our new SlingPlayer Mobile client? 🙂
Well, yes, it would be a stretch even on a S3 unit, I was thinking that when in “sling mode” that the TiVo could put other functionality into standby (not user friendly, but do-able).
Elgato has H.264 encoders on a USB stick already, so that route is definitely a more viable option.
As to UIQ users… you’re off to Europe. The main reason is that no UIQ vendor has released a 3G phone with American UMTS frequencies. As such, the users that would be interested in them over here (tech savvy users), know to avoid it.
UIQ is much more popular in Europe… which is why Sony Ericsson concentrates its sales there of UIQ phones exclusively.
My personal advice would be to do a public beta… UIQ is close enough to S60 that bugs should be minimal, and you’ll get sufficient feedback that route.
Heh, that’s funny. I camped for something like 11 hours in the cold at a Best Buy in 2006 for that Westinghouse TV as well. Still works great — I ended up passing it on to the fiancee so I could blow a bunch of money on a Sharp Aquos 46″ 1080p set that my buddy got me on some ridiculous close-out discount.
Penryn MacBook Pros, Westinghouse TVs, HTC Moguls, and Slingboxes… we’re really not so different, you and me. 🙂