Silicon Valley start-ups TiVo and Replay TV have each begun field trials of what they hope is the next convergence product to hit your living room: personalized television viewing and recording. But, what is the cost in dollars and privacy?
Replay and TiVo are the inventors of settop boxes that provide television portals with onscreen programming guides capable of recording your favorite shows to their huge harddrives for temporary storage for future viewing. Each box contains circuitry that converts the TV signal into computer information and stores it on the harddrive for later retrieval. Viewers can pause, rewind and
even instant replay live television programs. When the telephone rings
during a favorite live television show, viewers can now hit pause, take the
call and resume watching the rest of the program anytime. Replay can also record a show after it has begun.
Both boxes use MPEG-2 technology to compress the video and audio to fit on the harddrives at varying degrees of quality. The more compression the less quality. But, Replay insists that even the highest compression level (two megabits per second) will exceed the quality of a VHS videotape.
Both TiVo and ReplayTV are licensing their technologies to a variety of equipment manufacturers, but neither has announced names. Both expect to make major announcements at January's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
ReplayTV will initially offer boxes in the $2,000 neighborhood for home theater aficionados that will allow 28 hours of recording. Replay both expect to offer consumer models with a lower capacity (six hours). TiVo will sell its box for $500 and says its boxes will store up to 28 hours of video, while ReplayTV's consumer box will cost $1,000, according to their Website. Consumers can expect the price of both boxes to decrease after introduction, just as the price of the WebTV classic dropped from $349 to its present day sub-$100 mark. Neither TiVo nor ReplayTV will offer e-mail or Internet browsing, but will instead focus on enhanced television.
ReplayTV comes with a free subscription to the Replay Network Service which allows users to create a customized channel guide with searchable TV listings. Users can create customized "Replay Channels" that will allow users to record all the programs that fit their tastes based on searches of titles, actors, or directors, enabling users to create an entire channel devoted to their favorite show.
The Replay Network Service is delivered to the set-top device using a standard telephone line through an Internet connection to MCI WorldCom. ReplayTV automatically calls a toll-free local number during off-hours to access the service and download updates of local broadcast information and other programming information. Listings will be available for off-air, cable and satellite services. The free Replay Network Service also automatically sets ReplayTV's internal clock and provides periodic software updates to allow in-the-home upgrades of ReplayTV.
TiVo also offers a subscription to a network service but it costs $10.00 per month. TiVo also connects to the TiVo service during off-hours to download listings and content, and to upload user information. TiVo offers a smart-agent technology that will watch what you watch and deduce what your favorite shows are and will record them for you automatically. Users can fill out demographic information and provide the box with the types of shows they like to watch. Based on viewing habits and stated preferences, TiVo will automatically package shows that match those characteristics. Users are free to program additional shows.
The user profiling also allows TiVo to target users for advertising and will allow advertisers to reach their desired demographics, something conventional television can't claim.
But this user targeting comes at the potential cost of users' privacy. Earlier this year, WebTV came under fire from the press and some users when it was revealed that it has been logging the TV and Internet viewing habits of WebTV Plus users.
Like WebTV, TiVo insists that the information collected is only used in aggregate form and will not be released in user-identifiable form. Nonetheless, privacy advocates are concerned that the technology could be an invasion of privacy and raises concerns when used to target children for advertising. ReplayTV has no plans to use customer profiling, but totes a larger price tag, giving consumers a choice between privacy and cost.
Since announcing the WebTV Plus, WebTV has been redirecting much of its attention to providing its vision of "Better TV." When the WebTV Plus was announced, the analysts expected WebTV to store video-on-demand on its hard drive. But, to date, the only video WebTV has stored on the harddrive has been commercials for products such as Ragu and Hewlett Packard printers. If the TiVo and ReplayTV vision of enhanced TV takes off with consumers, WebTV users may also see this type of technology in a future version of WebTV, although WebTV has made no such announcement. WebTV president Steve Perlman has previously indicated that WebTV users should expect larger harddrives in future versions of WebTV as prices come down.
WebTV is designing its new settop boxes around a new version of its Solo graphics chip. The Solo II will allow 2D and 3-D graphics acceleration and high-quality resizing with Microsoft's unique 2 1/2 MPEG-2 Main Profile @ Main Level (MP@ML) decoding functions which will allow high-quality fast forward and rewind of MPEG-2 video. This, combined with larger harddrives, would put WebTV in the prime spot to offer a settop box capable of Internet, video-on-demand, and digital VCR functions.
