S3 and Futureproof-ness

IIRC, there's no standard for broadcast 1080p yet, and you've seen how long it takes for them to come up with those. save that 1080p for bluray/HDdvd.

 

Shouldn't this be in the S3 forum ?

 

Where are the S1 & S2 forums? Why is there a S3 forum?

 

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OK, your other points are valid, but why are you including this? No one knows when this will be a broadcast standard.

 

You're in it.

Does it matter why, really?

 

I don't think the op's points are cause for concern at all.

1) CableCard is the industry standard implementation for OpenCable. All set-top boxes from cable companies will be using CableCards in a few years.

2) Don't expect any 1080p delivered content over broadcast or cable in the next five years. Even then, it wouldn't matter for film-sourced content; your TV can deinterlace 1080i content to 1080p just as older TVs deinterlaced 480i to 480p.

3) Looks more like the Series3 uses HDMI 1.0/1.1. But HDMI 1.3 has no advantage over older HDMI versions for video sourced from broadcast and cable.

4) TrueHD and DTS Master Audio are high-bitrate lossless codecs that will never be used on broadcast or cable. These codecs are meant only for fixed disk media like HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

I'm more concerned with the following:

If you are completely satisfied with paying $800 for today's Tivo functionality with HD support, then the above shouldn't really concern you. However, if you were hoping the Series3 would provide the hardware to support future applications like a Netflix video store delivering high-def movie downloads over broadband, then you are in for a disappointment.

In my opinion, Tivo needed to implement the hardware that would give it room to grow in the future. As it is now, Tivo is going to find itself in a situation where it will have a relatively large installed base of Series3 Tivos in three years, but the xml and java video store applications that it must support to stay competitive won't work on the Series3, because of the decision to base the design on cpu/video hardware from 2004. Said another way, Tivo is building yet another legacy video device; the Series2 couldn't support online stores because it lacked MPEG-4 support, and now the Series3 won't be able to support them due to inadequate processing and memory capabilities.

 

Dan,

How many content providers are going to spend lots of money developing specifically for the Tivo platform? How many HME developers do you think someone like Netflix or Blockbuster employs? I would bet the answer is close to none. Both those companies have told investors they are developing online stores in Java and XML, to support a wide variety of platforms and devices, but the processor in the Series3 isn't adequate to support those.

What are the chances of a major content provider building one architecture for Tivo and another supporting everything else (PC, Mac, future standalone HD-DVD and Blu-ray players)? If you are Tivo, you need to support the architecture used by everyone else, not rely on every content provider to build a complete end-to-end solution just for your product.

The hardware in the Series3 doesn't even have the processing power to support the interactive menus and features on HD-DVD and Blu-ray. So even if Netflix were to produce an online store designed exclusively with HME, you couldn't view any of the interactive content designed for BD or HD-DVD. Contrast that to Vista or OSX, where all those features will be supported with third-party software (perhaps built into OSX). The iHD and BD-Java platforms are intended to provide the same interactive experience regardless of platform and source (i.e. same experience with a disk vs. download, same experience on PC vs Mac, etc) and I just don't see content providers creating separate versions of their video content for the Tivo.

The Broadcom processors are all backward compatible, for the most part. It looks to me more like Tivo was trying to leverage their experience with a a past hardware design. The Series3 really only departs from the HR10 design in two significant ways -- MPEG-4 by way of an add-on chip, and CableCard support in place of DirecTV, and the former isn't even supported by the current software.

 

BK:

1. You are right about the difficulties of getting others to come to your platform.

2. I think TiVo is a Broadcom shop and it is not easy to shift to another "architecture;" in which case, there are limitations, esp. when you don't have the money to fund development of products to your needs.

 

This is misleading at best. While CableCard may be the industry standard and may be used by cable company STBs, there are very clear indications that S3s being sold today will never be able to support the prevailing CableCard standard that will be applicable in the future -- the whole point of the thread is "futureproof-ness" and that's exactly what S3 doesn't have. In another thread folks waxed on and on about how unreasonable it would be to expect S3 to be futureproof, given the state of the CableCard spec and the direction of the cable industry.

 

Well, "fault" is a loaded word. There is no question that TiVo could have made decisions that would have made the S3 more futureproof. They decided not to do so. For those of us who wanted that futureproof-ness, that was a bad decision. For those of us who didn't care as much about that as about getting the S3 on store shelves already, it was a good decision.

 

Future CableCards will be backward compatible. So while the Series3 isn't "future proof" as far as supporting future cable services, the Tivo Series3 will continue to work as it does now after cable providers have moved on to using CC2.0 or CC3.0 in their boxes.

 

Unfortunately, much of the interactive content in the pipe is not conducive to that sort of server side operation. The interactive content on HD-DVD and Blu-ray, which is also meant to carry over to PCs and Macs, requires significant processing power on the client side. Broadcom's newer solutions are designed to support these features; the older BCM7038 used in the Series3 was not. Broadcom says as much in their marketing literature.

 

Nothing is futureproof. Tivo has delivered a box that meets today's standards that have been agreed upon. For cable card 2.0, it's pretty hard to build a box and get it certified when the specification hasn't been finished yet.

 

Microsoft's goal is to have downloaded high-def content -- from Netflix and others -- be functionally identical to the same content purchased on media.

Well, who is going to pay for this?

Is Tivo going to pay for it? I don't see Netflix doing it. I don't see Tivo doing it unless they get some compensation from Netflix.

Support would be so much easier if Tivo just supported the architecture used by everyone else (PCs, Macs, HD-DVD and Blu-ray players with ethernet and PlayForSure), and not rely on every content provider to build an end-to-end solution or separate server architecture just to support their product.

 

Future CableCards will only provide advanced functionality to devices designed to work with CC2.0 or CC3.0, i.e., not the S3.

S3 is far from futureproof -- the only question is how long until it can no longer provide all the programming that cable operators are offering.