In what’s shaping up to be a fall battle of over-the-air DVRs, highly touted Simple.TV has started shipping while Boxee pivots away from local content aggregation into broadcast television archival. Yet, Simple.TV is anything but… by incorporating just a single OTA tuner and requiring owners supply their own USB storage, this remains the provence of geeks. Simple.TV hardware runs $149, but to fully unlock its recording and placeshifting capabilities (to devices like Roku and iPad) will require an annual $50-$60 subscription fee. Potentially more interesting is Boxee TV, which clocks in at a mere $99 for hardware… but similarly requires a subscription for full-on DVR and placeshifting functionality at $15/month in this case. While that may seem steep at first blush, the dual tuner Boxee TV is positioning itself as a cloud DVR and the fee includes unlimited online storage. Bonus: With or without that subscription, Boxee TV incorporates Apple TV-esque features like Netflix and YouTube apps while remaining on Input 1.
Questions about both devices remain. For example, what sort of quality and encoding are we talking about in terms of resolution and audio channels. Also, while Boxee positions itself as a potential cord cutting device, it’s often the cable “television” companies providing our Internet pipe… and associated bandwidth cap, which might limit the usefulness of a cloud-based DVR. Lastly, both Simple.TV and Boxee TV tout the ability to record unencrypted digital cable (aka clear QAM). Well, good luck with that now that the FCC has granted cable operators to right to encrypt basic cable.
And then there’s TiVo, the original DVR (perhaps), which also provides OTA recording capabilities along a handful of Internet apps like Hulu Plus and Amazon Instant Video. By comparison, TiVo Premiere hardware runs $150 and requires $15/month in fees. While storage is local, 500GB is included – which equates to 75 hours of HD recording. And one would assume recording quality would best anything transcoded and streamed to/from the cloud as Boxee intends. Unfortunately, TiVo doesn’t natively provide placeshifting capabilities as Simple.TV and Boxee TV do. Yet, for $129, subscribers can pick up the TiVo Stream – it’s pretty killer, but limited to in-home playback on iOS devices. Whereas one could presumably catch a Simple.TV or Boxee TV recording anywhere in the world they happen to be.
TiVo can be MPEG2 or H.264. Although on FiOS none of the local Channels are using H.264. Some of their other channels use H.264 but you need a cable card for those channels. But the TiVo Premiere has no issues with the H.264 channels.
In one of the pictures a week or two ago, it showed the Boxee TV with an SD card sitting on top of it. Maybe there is an SDHC slot in the Boxee TV. Then if you put something like a 32GB card in there, it could temporarily store the recorded content on the SD card and upload it to the cloud at a slow upload rate sometime later. Of course as someone mentioned, anyone with caps will have an issue with this. But for someone on FiOS, with a fast upload and download with no cap, it won’t be a problem.
On the BoxeeTV webpage
http://www.boxee.tv/
It says that the minimum speed requirements are 3Mb/s down and only 1Mb/s up. So if they aren’t re-encoding to a lower rate wouldn’t they need to either be caching the recording locally and uploading it later, or sharing a cloud recording among multiple users.
“2 – DVR is not available in all areas. DVR recordings require strong reception and Boxee recommends minimum bandwidth of 3 Mbps download / 1 Mbps upload speeds for proper functionality.”
I know that TiVo hardware supports mpeg4/h.264, even my old S3 supports it, but as far as I know no cable company or OTA broadcasts come in mpeg4. But I last looked into this in, like, 2007. So that may well have changed.
@Glenn: Reports are that it has no substantial local storage. I guess it might have 16GB of flash NAND, and they could buffer onto that. Nobody really knows how it works, though.
“Although on FiOS none of the local Channels are using H.264. Some of their other channels use H.264 “
News to me, if true. Which channels?
wow, the initial boxee announcement was 199$ now 99$ sounds a LOT better. That said, if one HAS the OTA coming in, and boxee simply makes a local area recording of the same OTA, and the user STARTS to upload or capture the recording, essentially PROVING that they have access to it, and rights to record/store/etc., then why NOT simply BOOM THAT JUST HAPPENED cache it at the local storage ONE TIME and let that user then re-watch it at leisure? I don’t really see the issue with that. Same with my nearly a DECADE OLD ARGUMENT for a sligntype network tivo, that would require a user to own a subscription to either sat/cable sub in an area, and then simply record the same ONE TIME/MULTI-USE from that same area to a NETWORK TIVO and then allow users to stream BACK what was recorded via their authorized access.?
@Chucky
FiOS uses H.264 for some of the baseball channels and some of the Spanish channels. There were eight channels using H.264 on FiOS back in April. There could be more now though.