| Home > Media > Digital video recorders and Electronic Program Guides |
| Digital video recorders and Electronic Program Guides | | Date Created: 27 Apr, 2005, 10:07 AM |
 Netvideo travels to Sydney next week to participate in a summit discussion of 3G content, organized by Network Insight. Although the business world has shown a marked aversion to video-capable phones for security and privacy reasons, it is still assumed that 3G take-up will mark a new era in communications. This conference will assess how mobile devices such as phones and PDAs are becoming major channels to the consumer and will provide some of the content previously confined to the Internet, TV and radio. We’ll publish a video interview next week on what is said about new ways to help the creation of content from all sources, including new enterprises and application developers, existing media and the Internet.
While in Sydney we will also interview Peter Vogel, the founder of ICE, a company which offers an electronic program guide (EPG) for a growing range of digital video recorders in Australia (such as the Topfield range). Netvideo has watched as companies such as www.itvworld.com licensed an EPG of their own from 2000 to 2004 to customers such as Australia’s leading telco, Telstra. That EPG was available on the Web, Telstra WAP cellphones - and an OpenTV Foxtel version was under development. But itvworld abandoned that line of business when it became apparent that the Australian free-to-air commercial broadcasters were not happy to share their program listings with third parties and large publishing houses started to offer an EPG as a loss leader in any case.
Now, it seems, the EPG market is hotting up. Indeed, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch brandish the commercial importance of digital video recorder technology as a major new phase for world media. Microsoft launched its new Windows Media Center in Australia last October and one of its key competitors, Elgato's EyeTV for Apple Mac, has been available for some time (see http://www.elgato.com). Foxtel’s CEO Kim Williams was last year calling the PVR a "category killer" and Foxtel’s IQ recorder is enjoying strong take up by Australia's upper middle class pay-TV subscribers. But market analysts wonder how the PVR will affect the free-to-air television industry’s long-term profitability (see Netvideo’s previous report on SMS TV). And ordinary TV viewers everywhere marvel at the value of being able to jettison the advertisements, cut TV to DVD and turn the TV viewing experience mobile. Microsoft’s Windows Media Center comes pre-installed in new PCs and laptops from vendors in Australia such as Acer, HP and Toshiba.
Elgato’s EyeTV for the Apple Macintosh is available now in various models that each have different capabilities for around $650 (see www.memsol.com.au and most Apple distributors). Vendors such as Development One (www.D1.com.au) also sell more proprietary Home Media Centres for between $1,699 and $1,799 which can store up to 180 hours of TV and, significantly, come with a TV program guide that permits effortless setting of the record function.
The Elgato EyeTV is a small light box about the size of a book that plugs into your Mac via a Firewire connection and lets you set a start and end time to record a particular TV show. The program you record is stored on the hard disk of your computer and you can either watch it while you record it or later on. Once the TV show is captured digitally, you can use a remote control to move through it much faster and more nimbly than with a traditional VCR using tape. This is useful if you want to jump through an entire night’s Rage video clips at, say, one minute intervals – which should let you ferret out and save your faves in just 20 minutes.
You can export and save the digital recording – with or without advertisements - as a digital file in some other location, such as a DVD you may burn the video onto, or the hard disk of your laptop. There are no technical restrictions on the number of times you can copy the digital recording to a new location or the number of people who can view it. Available export file formats include MPEG, DV (the same as most video cameras), Quicktime, .avi, MPEG-4 and 3G. In addition, both EyeTV (and the Media Center) manage and serve up more than TV. They also exhibit on the TV your photo collection and MP3 music.
Netvideo is keen to talk to Peter Vogel about ICE because it is at present, the most fully featured electronic program guide in Australia. It is also relatively inexpensive and able to automatically program PVRs. The challenge facing EPG vendors has partly arisen from the TV industry's ambivalence about whether it should encourage PVRs, but also because it is hard to establish a profitable service for such a small market. Nevertheless, it is very simple to set a recording with ICE or even EyeTV. Times at which a recording is scheduled are listed and, if the worst comes to the worst, you can always set a new recording manually after consulting a TV guide.
Once you start to accumulate a collection of recorded TV shows, you may want to watch them on your TV rather than your PC. Exporting a recording to DVD is a simple matter of creating a version of the recording that can be burned to disk using a standard program such as Toast (for Mac) or Nero (for Windows). Another way to watch your recording on TV is to purchase an inexpensive playback box such as the Elgato EyeHome that plugs into the TV and plays video from your computer via a wireless modem’s 802.11g connection (this method requires a $219 Apple Airport Express or similar modem for each TV). Alternatively you might settle for running Ethernet cable around your house (preferably via a Gigabit switch using something like a Netgear FS105). This will let you move your recordings between PCs swiftly (around 2GB/hour generates some hefty video files) but the cabling can be unsightly.
One important decision you need to make is whether to purchase a normal consumer digital STB that can receive the DVB-T signal or use something like the EyeTV instead. If you want to use an EyeTV alone, you would probably select the EyeTV410 which receives the digital TV signal directly, but if you already own a DVB-T receiver, or you are willing to settle for analogue TV transmissions (while they last) instead of digital TV, then you would buy the EyeTV200. The EyeTV200 has both an analogue TV tuner and composite, S-Video and stereo audio connectors that let you hook up and record from your video devices such as VCRs, camcorders or DVD players. There is actually an argument to buy both the EyeTV410 and EyeTV200 models if you want the best of all worlds and already have, say, a pay-TV cable or satellite box that you want to record off. The only drawback when using an EyeTV to record programs from an existing pay-TV set top box is that you need to change the channel on the pay-TV box manually for each recording.
We should know soon whether Microsoft (perhaps via NineMSN) will launch an EPG that works with the Windows Media Center in Australia. Even if it does, it is unclear whether the special Media Center guide will allow pay-TV to be auto-programmed as well. With Foxtel’s new PVR modeled on BSkyB’s in the UK, Foxtel will most likely offer its own digital program guide direct to Foxtel subscribers. But however the market evolves, TV viewers can look forward to a much more efficient and enjoyable TV experience. And when TV shows eventually become available via IPTV on ADSL connections and on other broadband devices such as 3G mobile phones, a new era for Australian television will have truly begun.
|
|
|
