S3 and the cable companies

[slimoli]

I have a few questions about the S3, when it is released:

-Will all the cable companies support it?
-I know that there are different cablecards with different firmware versions. Will the S3 work with any of the available CC?
-Do you guys think that the cable company can do anything to restrict its use ? My cable charges 17 bucks per HD-DVR and with the S3 they will get zip.
-wouldn't be a good idea if the cable company can buy a bunch of S3 and lease them back to us, as they alredy do with their HD-DVRs ?

I'm a bit concerned about the success of the S3. Cable users don't normally buy equipments. Cablecards don't work very well and in many cases there are picture and sound freezes. There are only 120K users in US, a very small fraction of cable users.

[cheer]

I have a few questions about the S3, when it is released:

-Will all the cable companies support it?
Define "support." They won't provide support, but the S3 should work with cable feeds just fine.-I know that there are different cablecards with different firmware versions. Will the S3 work with any of the available CC?Should, but we won't be certain until it's released.
-Do you guys think that the cable company can do anything to restrict its use ? My cable charges 17 bucks per HD-DVR and with the S3 they will get zip.They may have a charge for the cablecard(s). In any case, no I don't think they can -- and if they did I think they'd get heat from the FCC, as doing something like that defeats the point of cablecards.
-wouldn't be a good idea if the cable company can buy a bunch of S3 and lease them back to us, as they alredy do with their HD-DVRs ?I doubt it. There's no incentive for them to, and the S3 will be an expensive box.

Plus, Comcast (and, one hopes, others eventually) is going to be putting Tivo software on their own HD DVRs.
I'm a bit concerned about the success of the S3. Cable users don't normally buy equipments. Cablecards don't work very well and in many cases there are picture and sound freezes. There are only 120K users in US, a very small fraction of cable users.Maybe so, but I don't see how this is anything really different than the S2 SA Tivos. It'll do OTA and analog cable. It'll do unencrypted digital cable. It'll even do other analog sources.

It's not a guaranteed success, but IMO only in the same sense that any standalone DVR-type product that comes with a monthly service charge is not a guaranteed success. Time will tell.

[Dan203]

1) If it's on the list of devices approved by cable Labs then they have to support it.

2) I would assume that it's like any other CableCARD device in that if the firmware needs to be upgraded it will do so automatically.

3) Probably not. They can try to talk you out of it, but that's about it.

4) That's not going to happen. The S3 is a oneway device, which means it does not support PPV or VOB. The cable companie makes a lot of money off those services and wouldn't likely offer a device which didn't support them.

CableCARDs don't cause picture and sound freezes. In fact they can't. All they do is negotiate a set of keys between the cable company and the device so that the device can decrypt the incoming stream. It's up to the device as to how it handles the stream after that. If there are current CableCARD devices that are susceptible to freezing then it's because they have shotty hardware or software handling the decoding of the MPEG2 stream. TiVo has been dealing with MPEG2 streams since it's inception and is very good at dealing with them. In fact a S3 TiVo is really no different then a DirecTiVo in this respect. Both record a digital stream directly from a source which they have no control over. The DirecTiVo is the most sucessful TiVo ever.

Dan

[slimoli]

Thank you guys for such great posts. I recently switched from D* to cable because I couldn't watch the compressed SD picture and the HD-LITE on my 73" TV. What I'm missing, obviously, is the TIVO and I have high hopes that the S3 can be my next box.

[gkacher]

When will the S3 hit the market? Christmas?

[Dan203]

The only official word is "second half of 2006". However there was a contest a while back that had a Series 3 as the grand prize and the rules said that it would be delivered within 4 months of the end of the contest. The contest ended in mid May, which means that the S3 should be available by mid September. However the rules did have some wording that would allow them to get out of that time frame if need be, so it could be later then that, but it shows that they were at least shooting for having it out before mid September.

Dan