Comcast and Time Warner plan to roll out cell phone service later this month. The two announced a partnership with Sprint/Nextel last November.
Each company already provides residential telephone service over VoIP. But as companies like Verizon and AT&T roll out television service, the cable companies are trying to diversify their offerings as well. It's possible that Comcast and Time Warner may require subscribers to sign up for broadband or VoIP service in order to qualify for telephone service.
Convergence does have some benefits for the consumer. For example, Comcast has access to plenty of video content, PVR technology, broadband pipelines, and now cell phone service. Comcast plans to make short video clips from E! and other cable networks it owns available to cell phone users.
And starting next year, Comcast plans to roll out a kind of mobile PVR, allowing users to record programs directly to their phones. It's not entirely clear if this is a true PVR in the sense of putting a hard drive in your phone and allowing it to record content. I'd probably be happier with a setup that lets you record shows via a Comcast PVR at home and watch them on the go using SlingPlayer-like software on your phone. Of course, it's possible that Comcast just plans to stream on-demand full-length programming or video clips to your phone while calling it a PVR. But that wouldn't necessarily be all bad either.
Remember how Cablevision tried to roll out a networked remote PVR (nPVR) service which would give you all the power of a PVR without actually needing a PVR in your living room.
Content owners hated the idea because they beleived that storing content on remote networked PVRs and allowing consumers to access it on demand breached their copyright.
Among the companies that filed a lawsuit against Cablevision over the nPVRs was Time Warner.
It was bad enough that Time Warner had previously tried to launch a remote PVR service called Mystero some years before, but now it is launching its own nPVR service called "Start Over". JJ Hawkins has covered the new service here.
The service is a slimmed down version of what Cablevision offered. It simply allows users to backtrack to the beginning of selected shows, an hour and fifteen minutes after the show started.
So to sum up:
Time Warner thought an nPVR service was a good idea some years ago and tried it out, but abandoned the project due to legal pressure.
Time Warner then decided it was a bad idea and this year joined other content producers in suing Cablevision over its own nPVR service.
Now Time Warner think it's a good idea again and have decided to announce its own a slimmed down nPVR service.
Should Time Warner really be suing Cablevision? It seems very clear that Time Warner thinks a remote nPVR service is a good idea as long as they are the ones doing it.
On Monday, Time Warner Cable unveiled a service in the San Antonio area the company has dubbed 'Start Over'.
The service allows subscribers to Time Warner's digital television service to pause and rewind live TV via a standard non-PVR set-top-box at no additional cost. Call it a poor mans PVR. Better yet, just call it a PV because there's no actual recording of shows anywhere to be found.
The service does not give users the ability to fast forward in any capacity, so there's no hope of skipping through commercial, which is personally my favorite thing about PVRs.
The feature that gives 'Start Over' its name and the feature that Time Warner seems to be touting the most is the option to press a single button at any point in the show and restart the show from the beginning.
For some reason, that doesn't sound all that cool to me.
I typically have the 30-second skip activated on my TiVo. About once a week during the stormy season my power will cut out temporarily erasing the 30-second skip from my TiVo.
Some news popped up today over on TiVo Blog about the Time Warner Cable Series 3 Cablecard issue. Time Warner at first stated that they would not be supporting the Series 3 saying "TiVo devices compete with some of the converters and/or 'on-demand' type services Time Warner provide".
Now in a new email they seem to have changed their stance a little bit, after all if they refused outright to provide CableCards they would be going against FCC regulations. They have now said that they will supply CableCards with the Time Warner cable system but they will not be two way interactive.
It still seems to me that Time Warner are going out of their way to be difficult on this one. It might not look so bad if they were not already involved in suing Cablevision over the remote DVR service either. Suing Cablevision is not really bad in itself but considering the fact Time Warner Cable were the first to implement a remote DVR service but came up against legal pressure makes it worse.
Out of the 234 PVR Wire readers
who responded to our poll on how they were going to watch the Super Bowl, most were planning to watch it live rather
than rely on their PVRs to isolate them from the commercials. Nearly 40 percent said they would watch the big game
live, followed by 27 percent who were planning to delay their viewing by minutes.
Only 7 percent said they
would delay their viewing for another day. But not everyone was going to watch the game: 26 percent said they had no
plans to watch the Super Bowl this year. It looks like the Super Bowl may be one of those rare events where the
networks can count on live eyeballs and a PVR audience that keeps the fast-fastforwarding to a minimum. The only other
program that may attract similar loyalty is the Oscars.
As we stated last week, no one from PVR Wire was able to attend
CES 2006, although the Weblogs Inc. Network was there in force in the shape of the mighty Engadget team, and myself and
Todd did our best to keep track of all the latest PVR-related developments at the gadget expo.
It's no real
surprise that the big news at CES this year centered around video, and in particular PVR devices, both for use in the
"digital living room" and on the move. For us, the most significant news centered around four main things:
the Toshiba Gigabit S, Google's Video Store, the BSkyB-Microsoft deal and the sneak preview of the Series 3 TiVo.
Here's a roundup of everything we blogged over the course of the event, in case you missed any of it:
Back in 2002, Time Warner set out with an ambitious network
PVR project, known as "Mystro TV", which aimed to make its entire program schedule available on-demand to
cable viewers, but was ditched in 2003 due to a combination of pressure from Hollywood over copyright, and a lack of
demand from users.
However, the company has now relaunched its initial plan under the title "Start
Over", a software-based PVR service which seems very like the video-on-demand service TVDrive from Telewest here in the U.K., where
users can pause and rewind live TV or time-shift a programme if they've missed the start. (Hence the "Start
Over" title).
However, unlike a regular PVR user, Start Over customers can't fast fast-forward or skip
through ads -- which might put a smile of the face of the advertising execs who are currently chewing their fingers off
at the prospect of the forthcoming "PVR Apocalypse."
Start Over was introduced to 10,000 digital
cable customers in Irmo, SC back in November 2005, and features programming from 60 broadcast and cable networks - but
is now available to 25,000 subscribers in the Columbia area, with expansion plans well underway.
I'm sure many readers see it as part of our job here at PVR Wire to give out tips and advice on the best products and services to buy, but it can be difficult to get the balance right between purchasing a stand-alone HDD/DVD recorder, or a full-blown PVR subscription service.
With numerous companies offering a variety of digital video services, CIN Weekly decided to take a closer look at two popular brands: TiVo and Time Warner Cable.
If anything, the "bottom line" remarks are a good guide to go on if you find yourself stuck between the two.
Time Warner's cable TV systems and NBC are in a deal to let viewers watch the beginning of programs already in progress, The Wall Street Journal is reporting. About to be introduced in Columbia, S.C., the service also will let you pause and rewind. But it doesn't work if the program has already ended, the paper reported.
Time Warner won't charge extra for the service and no extra equipment is needed, according to the article. Time Warner plans to offer Start Over, the service's name, to all of its 5.1 million digital customers in a few years.
An article based on Tuesday's Reuters Telecommunications, Cable and Satellite Summit in New York suggests that industry officials see gloom and doom for TiVo if it tries to continue as a separate consumer service without hooking up with cable and satellite companies.
I think the most interesting comment comes from Bill Smith, chief technology officer at BellSouth Corp. He suggested that TiVo could easily be substituted with a subsidized Windows XP Media Center. Still, he acknowledged that the TiVo interface is popular enough to possibly prompt a deal with the company.
"TiVo is a technology. It's not a separate business," said Glenn Britt, Time Warner Cable chief executive officer. A better model is an integrated set-top box, whether or not TiVo is involved, he said.
The article shows how much TiVo must face if it's to survive. It seems to have very little sympathy from top industry leaders.
Comcast and Time Warner plan to roll out cell phone service later this month. The two announced a partnership with Sprint/Nextel last November.
Some news popped up today over on TiVo Blog about the Time Warner Cable Series 3 Cablecard issue. Time Warner at first stated that they would not be supporting the Series 3 saying "TiVo devices compete with some of the converters and/or 'on-demand' type services Time Warner provide".
As we stated last week, no one from PVR Wire was able to attend
CES 2006, although the Weblogs Inc. Network was there in force in the shape of the mighty Engadget team, and myself and
Todd did our best to keep track of all the latest PVR-related developments at the gadget expo.
Back in 2002, Time Warner set out with an ambitious network
PVR project, known as "Mystro TV", which aimed to make its entire program schedule available on-demand to
cable viewers, but was ditched in 2003 due to a combination of pressure from Hollywood over copyright, and a lack of
demand from users.
Time Warner's cable TV systems and NBC are in a deal to let viewers watch the beginning of programs already in progress, The Wall Street Journal is reporting. About to be introduced in Columbia, S.C., the service also will let you pause and rewind. But it doesn't work if the program has already ended, the paper reported.
An 
