A Win For The Cable Guys
Greetings once again, I am on my way back to our home port in Port Canaveral in Florida from the Bahamas. I am sitting poolside typing this and it feels great out here on this ship.
The cable companies had a huge victory this week as the United States Supreme Court decided that cable companies could allow its customers to store their DVR recordings on hard drives at the cable companies headends instead of needed a hard drive inside their DVR’s in their home.
This move will give cable customers almost unlimited storage of their favorite shows and all recorded shows will be watchable anywhere in the customer’s house.
The Hollywood studios were against this idea all along and the studios that were comprised of GE (NBC Universal) News Corp (FOX), Disney, ABC and CBS all worked to fight Cablevision on this idea as they feared the new DVR system would allow customers to violate the studios copyrights because of the Digital Copies.
I applaud the Supreme Courts decision in this matter, they got this one 100% correct.
However this new DVR system and the ruling could hurt the satellite providers as they will be unable offer their customers the massive storage that will be available to cable customers.
Satellite Customers DVR’s have internal hard drives, however both Dish Network and DirecTV now offer support for hooking up external storage devices to their advanced DVR’s. This will allow satellite customers to have unlimited storage yet the customer will need to manage their video libraries themselves. With the cable solution just select the show or movie you want to watch and it will start playing instantly.
Sports Moves by DirecTV
This morning DirecTV made a number of changes to it sports packages and channel locations.
First off ESPN-U has now been made available to customers with the classic packages. ESPN Classic has moved to the sports pack. Channel numbers for these channels have not been changed as of yet.
NBA TV has moved to channel 216 and later this year it from move from the Premier and Sports pack to the Choice Xtra Package. This move will be made just before the start of the tip off of the 2009-10 season.
Speaking of sports DirecTV has announced that my former next-door neighbor Dan Patrick will be bringing his radio show to DirecTV’s 101 channel.
The Dan Patrick Show will air live each weekday morning at 9AM starting on August 3rd on the 101 Network.
youknowwho commented:
oh boy, have to throw in your neighbor used to be Dan Patrick. Does that mean you are really some cool guy? I doubt that. You are a prick, quite frankly
harshness commented:
For TiVo it will simply bring an end to their DVR business a lot sooner. Such is not to say that these services will come anywhere near the functionality, but rather that they will be "good enough" for a large percentage of the populace.
Scott K commented:
I don't see it as too much of a threat to satellite service. There is as mentioned the bandwidth issue, TW can't even offer good service in my area due to infrastructure issues. No way is any cable company ready for thousands of users to store and playback recordings. I also don’t think that the cable companies realize how much some people store. I predict one of two things happening with this service. Either there will be a time limit on storage and recordings will be deleted after say 30 days or in addition to the service fee there will be an additional fee based on how much storage you are utilizing.
puzzled commented:
How do they handle the situation where hundreds of cable subscribers start watching their recorded shows at the same time? There's only so much bandwidth on the copper cable.
celticpride commented:
how will this effect tivo with cable or fios?
rjk1977 commented:
dvr service is not my #1 thing when i chose a provider. i went with customer service and quality of programming. satellite companies are not going to be effected much by this.
riffjim4069 commented:
I agree...this decision will hurt satellite. Cable will have a competitive advantage by being able to offer DVR services with a lot less hardware and administrative expenses. This fact, along with added competition from the Telcos and the Cable Triple Play, may spell trouble for the DBS industry. Of course, DirecTV will fare much better due to their exclusive NFL Sunday Ticket and well-oiled Marketing Department. Dish Network will not fare as well and they may be in serious trouble after preparing to announce yet another quarter of defecting subscribers and having been found in comtempt of court for violating Tivo's patent and intellectual property rights.
