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Originally Posted by Doug P
Have to say do not understand a word of the above... oh well....
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Basically, a major limiting factor on what Virgin (or any Cable Company) can provide is simply the amount of processing power available in the set top boxes. If these were installed some time ago, they probably don't have a lot.
As software gets more advanced it tends to require more and more processing power, and most cable companies will have a lot of old Set Top Boxes that are otherwise good, but lack processing power. Replacing all of them would cost millions, take a long time and you would still end up with the problem of some boxes getting missed.
For situations like this, it's actually cheaper to build a data centre, use THAT to run the software, then just install a small "client" application on the set top box that merely sends all the commands to the data centre, then displays the results for the user.
In terms of new customers, it would give Virgin the advantage that they could buy cheap set top boxes with almost no processing power and just a slot for the encryption card, which would cost them a lot less than the current Cisco and Samsung boxes. Not to mention that Tivo could stop being a seperate box. The data centre would act as the Tivo's hard drive, streaming programmes in much the same way as the current on-demand system does.