TiVo : virgin media trials-next-generation-tivo-box

[passingbat]

Originally Posted by Stuart

Check his location..

.

So, he is in Louisiana most days..

I can't see any Liberty Global operations in the US. Could they go under a different name there or do they lease the Horizon box to a US cable company?

http://www.libertyglobal.com/our-operations.html


http://www.libertyglobal.com/horizon.html

Horizon will first be introduced by our UPC cable operation in the Netherlands, shortly followed by Liberty Global’s other cable operations across Europe. With Horizon we are reinventing Television

[denphone]

Originally Posted by Nedkelly

I can't see Virgin dropping the Tivo system due to amount of money they have invested in the systems that run it . Just my opinion

Ditto.

[OLD BOY]

Originally Posted by mike_gain

If I'm honest I'm not too excited by this. I've had more network communication failures than box failures over the years and I doubt very much whether we'll be given unlimited storage spare for recordings (I can see this being driven more by broadcasters than anything else).

I've always seen cloud(hate that term) solutions as a backup/archive to onsite storage solutions. Even though I can see the advantages of having recordings, series links , wishlist etc stored offsite I'd still be happier to have my recordings in my house.

Perhaps a hybrid solution would work e.g. you could choose which recordings you wanted to archive offsite but you'd still have the option to keep some on the box in the house (although this would need a massive increase in upload speeds on the network or we;d need to choose at time of setting a recording if we wanted it recorded to the box in the house or the offsite storage).

I doubt whether we will ever get unlimited recordings, but one major advantage is that if our box goes down, it doesn't take all the recordings with it. Personally, I think that having all my recordings on the cloud is a big plus.

---------- Post added at 21:00 ---------- Previous post was at 20:57 ----------

Originally Posted by Nedkelly

I can't see Virgin dropping the Tivo system due to amount of money they have invested in the systems that run it . Just my opinion

They may do in the future, I think, but it is probably a long way off. We certainly need more recording space than is allowed on Horizon, although the cloud may overcome this little difficulty.

[RichardCoulter]

They're probably locked into a contract with TiVo, but Horizon would save VM a lot of money in licensing fees.

AFAIK, Horizon doesn't have 'Wishlists' and this feature is copyrighted to TiVo.

[Itshim]

Originally Posted by denphone

Well each to their own Itshim because its what suits people at the end of the day and the TiVo suits us fine.

One box supplies all the TV`s etc playing back different channels if required to each. Heck its even been set up to play to my TV when I am in Cardiff , so I can watch what ever I want, that's been recorded at home. Sorry but the Virgin version of Tivo is so last year ( and that's being kind)

Sorry Den my son has just seen this - its not a horizon - shows how much I know !! its a contour

[muppetman11]

Originally Posted by Itshim

One box supplies all the TV`s etc playing back different channels if required to each. Heck its even been set up to play to my TV when I am in Cardiff , so I can watch what ever I want, that's been recorded at home. Sorry but the Virgin version of Tivo is so last year ( and that's being kind)

Sorry Den my son has just seen this - its not a horizon - shows how much I know !! its a contour

Sorry but they're hardly comparable , the US market has always been a year or two in front of us with innovations , I used to spend a lot of time in the US and they had things like whole home DVR a good few years back long before we saw it here , the system your referring to is Cox Communications 'Contour'.

[passingbat]

Originally Posted by Itshim

One box supplies all the TV`s etc playing back different channels if required to each. Heck its even been set up to play to my TV when I am in Cardiff , so I can watch what ever I want, that's been recorded at home. Sorry but the Virgin version of Tivo is so last year ( and that's being kind)

Sorry Den my son has just seen this - its not a horizon - shows how much I know !! its a contour

Originally Posted by muppetman11

Sorry but they're hardly comparable , the US market has always been a year or two in front of us with innovations , I used to spend a lot of time in the US and they had things like whole home DVR a good few years back long before we saw it here , the system your referring to is Cox Communications 'Contour'.

And they don't have the same restrictions with streaming content in the US as we do here. just look at the terrible state of MRS channels, though I'm beginning to think VM may be to blame for a good part of that. I've been looking into Freeview PVRs recently and the Panasonic ones have been able to stream recorded content to other compatible DLNA devices for the last two years; The latest Humax ones are supposed to do the same.

[mike_gain]

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

I doubt whether we will ever get unlimited recordings, but one major advantage is that if our box goes down, it doesn't take all the recordings with it. Personally, I think that having all my recordings on the cloud is a big plus.

I think only having all my recordings in the cloud is a big risk. Most people would not be able to take advantage of having all their recordings offsite as their box would not fail but they would almost certainly be hit by the almost inevitable unreliability of the service.

Would happily have some or, if possible, all recordings backed up to the cloud in the unlikely event that one of my boxes fails but I'd always want direct access to them on the box.

Even better would be the option for me to backup the encrypted recordings myself. I wouldn't mind if they were backed up in a state that would only allow playback on a Tivo.

However none of this will ever take off until broadcasters change their attitude to streaming. I can't stream most of the recorded content I have 30 feet through my house.If the broadcasters are nervous about this (or slap a huge cost onto this) I can't see it being any better when streaming over the internet.