AOL rediscovers TiVo’s daddy

TiVo and Replay were inspired by the servers created for video on demand trials in the mid-90s. These servers held massive libraries of movies and TV programming that could be served-up individually to customers, who could control them like videotapes with fast forward, rewind, pause, and that sort of thing. These servers were hard to … Continue reading “AOL rediscovers TiVo’s daddy”

TiVo and Replay were inspired by the servers created for video on demand trials in the mid-90s. These servers held massive libraries of movies and TV programming that could be served-up individually to customers, who could control them like videotapes with fast forward, rewind, pause, and that sort of thing. These servers were hard to build, because the server was located at the head end of a cable system far from the customer’s remote control, so moving the clicks up stream quickly was a challenge. Moving the video streams down to the customer’s set top box was also a challenge, because each box needed a separate feed, and the head-end typically serves 300 customers on a cable with about 100-200 channels of capacity.

The upstream challenge was solved by a deeply buffered, asynchronous API developed by my colleague Rich Rein and I for HP, and the downstream challenge by compressing the video stream into MPEG and decoding it in the set top box, enabling the cable system to squeeze multiple feeds into a single analog cable channel.

These technologies gave rise to PVRs like TiVo and Replay, which combined a pint-sized video server with a set top box, to digital cable and to digital satellite TV with pay-per-view. Each of these three technologies falls short of the entire set of features provided by the server trials, but each helps create market awareness of what’s possible with full-scale video servers and the right consumer equipment in the home.

Some of the companies who got their feet wet with the trials got distracted by the Internet bubble, and tried to shoehorn media onto its inadequate infrastructure, hoping that broadband would solve the delivery problem for them. Of course, it hasn’t, and the Internet has proven itself very resistant to progressive upgrade, even before our tech-topian Internet Amish started screaming that the Internet should never be upgraded for video delivery.

The solution for video content providers is to bypass the creaky, marginal Internet, and instead to roll out video servers on their cable systems. AOL/Time Warner is finally catching on, according to this piece in the New York Times:

The essence of AOL Time Warner’s Mystro TV is a technology that uses a cable system itself to provide viewers capabilities similar to computerized personal video recorders like TiVo: watching programs on their own schedules, with fast-forward and rewind. But it also lets networks set the parameters, dictating which shows users can reschedule, and it also creates ways for networks to insert commercials.

This technology has also been wrongly described as a “TiVo killer” by Boing-Boing, who doesn’t know better, and by Tim Oren, who really does. AOL/TW has no reason to fear TiVo – it’s a niche product, mainly owned people like me (I have two TiVos and a Replay), geeks who love gadgets and don’t mind bugs – not a mass market.

AOL/TW’s competition is Satellite TV, because it’s causing them to lose cable subscribers for the first time ever. DirecTV has a deal with TiVo that allows a specialized PVR to record the MPEG stream from the satellite direct to hard drive, with no loss of quality. Satellite has great economics, because new customers don’t require new infrastructure except in the home, and it doesn’t cost that much, at least compared to the cost of running cable in neighborhoods.

But the weakness of satellite TV is the lack of any ability to personalize services, because the same satellite serves everybody, and when its channel capacity is gone, it’s gone for good. Cable systems are isolated around head ends on the ground, and as long as the system can serve up customized feeds to all customers on each given head end, it can grow and scale nicely. So the logical way to provide customized services is with a server per head end and an MPEG decoder in each home, which is already there for people with digital cable.

The Mystro TV system takes just this approach, and it’s got one huge advantage over TiVo: access to a content library many times larger than anyone can ever have in his own home. AOL/TW can digitize all the stuff it owns onto the equivalent of DVDs. When you want to watch some movie from 1955 that you can’t get at Blockbuster, or first season of the West Wing, or last week’s Friends, your neighborhood video server plays it for you immediately if it’s on its multi-gigabyte RAID array. If not, it sends a message to New York which causes a robot to mount the DVD in the library and spool it down to your neighborhood server, probably on some of that dark fiber that’s all over the place. Then you watch it, and when your neighbors want to see it, it’s already there.

So they’ve got a larger library than your TiVo or your Blockbuster, a more personalized service than your satellite provider, and more reliable delivery than your Internet connection.

And you can keep using your Replay or stand-alone TiVo with it (perhaps in even more interesting ways, heh heh), so what’s not to like?

AOL is basically taking the advice I offered them a few weeks ago, so I’m not going to complain:

So maybe what AOL/Time-Warner needs to do is forget about the Internet and broadband, and get themselves some nice Tivo-type property to really make the synergy work. Then they can upgrade the book value of their “good will” instead of sending out bad vibes and like, bumming everybody out, you know.

Just send me my check, dudes.