The ISP box in my home has a SFP cage, and fiber sfp adapter, with wireless ac and a nice OLED screen. Total cost is $130, but everybody gets a free rental.
Does it have video output though? We have a similar device as our modem (with Bell Canada) but still need set-top boxes at each TV in addition to the modem. The modem is given on a free rental, but the set-top boxes are not.
I would really like to buy a box that was sophisticated enough to cache which channels I have and what is showing on those channels. They all seem to do a very slow refresh every time I switch between menus.
It's now a distant memory being able to switch between channels instantly. I should at least be able to page through the menus quickly.
If you have a cablecard based system you can often get a network tuner like the HD Homerun Prime and do away with the company's cable box altogether. It's what I did, and I'm pretty happy with the results - through Plex I have unlimited DVR and the ability to watch on any device. Channel switching is still slow, though...
I do the same, it's great! The cable companies are mandated by the fcc to supply subscribers with at least one cablecard free of charge so you can use your own equipment, like a TiVo. I have a HDHomeRun Prime and use 2 cards. The rental on the 2nd card is only $1.50/month, and I get 8 streams with it. I also bought a cablemodem for like $50. Other than the $1.50 cablecard rental, I don't rent anything from them except the service itself. Saves a boatload over years.
Last time I signed up for cable was about a decade ago, and at the time, I had a HD TiVo box with twin cable cards. Worked out to something like $1-3 a month for the cards, IIRC. Way more reasonable than what my parents were paying for their awful, laggy Comcast boxes.
Of course, my cable provider had to make like three visits before they managed to scrounge up two working cards.
I always thought about putting multiple tuners in the box, and just decoding multiple channels simultaneously. Then to switch a channel you would just "put another window in the front".
You could have a predictive system that would decode the three most likely next channels and start decoding them. In the best case, this would move the latency of the first switch close to zero, and of subsequent switches to 1/2 or 1/3.
To save energy, you could get one of these fancy remotes that they have for telefone conferences, that can detect when you pick it up. Once you lift the remote, start the extra tuners.
I have a (pretty old) TiVo that lets you do something similar to this - there's some button on the remote (I honestly can't remember what it is called) that lets you cycle between the tuners. It works pretty much like you describe - if a bit more manually - and has the added benefit of not requiring you to type a multi digit channel number every time you want to hop between your favorite channels.
Current models have six live tuners. All running a buffer for whatever channel is tuned on each. Works fantastically well. There's a "Live TV" button on the remote than cycles through them, or you can manually poke through a quick submenu to jump right to one in particular.
Afaik the delay is not in tuning per se, but in waiting for first decoded valid mpeg segment with I frame, and those are usually 1 per second?
What could be done, on the cheap, Cable provider wide is authoritative server ready to give you arbitrarily generated I frames with 1/60 time resolution on demand, as most cable boxes nowadays are two way anyway (they need upstream link to transmit all the spyin^^^ channel usage statistics back).
Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
There's an assumption in this statement that doesn't survive scrutiny. This is original reporting. What makes you think there's an equivalent alternative? †
† This perception is obviously a huge problem for papers like the L.A. Times (and for writers, in general). For better or worse, this is how people see it, now. If you don't like the source, then you just imagine substituting in another one, like you're buying pork futures (or whatever the opposite of original reporting is).
Right, exactly, which is to trivialize original reporting beyond the dictates of fairness. An original piece of reporting and the blog post that summarizes it are not equivalent content.
The equivalent alternative for European browsers is this:
" "
I suspect we're more than 25% of HN's audience.
(Realistically, a mirror is the realistic alternative. Two have been posted and downvoted into oblivion. So it seems the HN community along with the LA Times support censorship. Nice.).
EU citizens are discovering what GDPR exposure means for US companies that don't get significant revenue from EU customers: they simply start blocking the EU instead of complying.
Because there's no way any company can actually comply with the GPDR; many of the rules conflict with each other. GDPR is a regulatory trap intended to allow the authorities to initiate selective enforcement against non-EU companies.
if those companies can't be sure that their customer privacy isn't up to some standard that half the world thinks can be adhered to, i'd say good riddance.
>Because there's no way any company can actually comply with the GPDR; many of the rules conflict with each other. GDPR is a regulatory trap intended to allow the authorities to initiate selective enforcement against non-EU companies.
Source, please? My reading of the GDPR is as a broad set of sensible rules requiring that you acquire consent for gathering and using people's data (and that consent can be revoked -- or withheld for non-core functionality). The law isn't machine code, it's a document interpreted by humans against the spirit of the law: act in good faith and respect people's privacy and you'll be fine.
When I see a company that doesn't even want to consider doing business with a European because GDPR, I see a company that I want as far away from my personal data as possible.
I have the same reaction every time I read about any cable company, and that's, "WTF are you all still giving them your money for?!"
They have a monopoly on a dying service you literally don't need at all, and most people hate having to deal with them. The pricing and contracts are antagonistic to customers. Is it just momentum at this point?
In the US, cable companies are generally the only source of high-speed internet, and they sometimes charge a higher sticker price to provide internet-only service vs. bundling with TV service.
Correct, I finally got tired of playing games with Comcast and I actually pay them more now for 250Mbps internet ($95) than I would for a TV+250Mbps bundle (I think the latter would have been $10/mo cheaper, at least for a year..)
This is exactly what I did. When I recently bought my first home, I was already aware that I would have to deal with Comcast if I wanted any semblance of high speed internet service. I could've gotten higher speeds for less (for a year before the price jump) and I could've gotten a lower price (for a year before the price jump) if I bundled cable TV...
...but between the so-called promotional pricing, the dicking around with another pile of box rental fees and assorted add-on costs, I just didn't have it in me. On some level I just decided that I would rather risk "missing out" on some minor bit of savings than buy anything more than the single thing I really needed to buy from Comcast.
If I had any other real options I wouldn't buy anything from them. But they are the only option for something I definitely need. I'm not about to pay them for anything more.
I think this might be illegal in EU/my country, so my ISP (liberty global) just charges same price for bare internet and internet+200 channels bundle.
Cable providers literary make money by giving TV service for free. They sell pre programmed channel spots like supermarket sell shelf space - You cant change channel order :/ plus they track/sell TV viewing data
Neither the access nor the bundled content portions are really dying. The assumption they must be bought from the same vendor is, but outside of very high speed plans, internet access tends to have data caps (sometimes capped unless you buy a TV bundle from the ISP as well as internet service), and OTT services with comparable content are just as expensive as cable plans (and mostly from cable/satellite vendors, though Google and Sony have services too), so you end up spending the same money plus eating your data cap if you buy separately instead of getting the content outside of your cap (or maybe even getting the content and getting rid of your cap at the same time.)
Yep, the content providers are 'fixing the glitch' so to speak. With the launch of the new Disney streaming Netflix competitor, etc. we'll be back in a world of silo'd content with bundles and fees and many people who want to do things legit-no-piracy are going to be having to subscribe to multiple services.
Let it go. So consuming. One of the best things of my self inflicted phone ADHD is that I don't care for movies or TV. I start a movie, then think, "This is not worth it". I stop. I never return. Slowly I've come to accept and appreciate not watching TV or movies. If you're into sports, well, I don't know, ESPN online?
And NHL and MLB are about $99. It’s a great time to be a sports fan in my opinion. Sports packages used to be so much more expensive.
Didn’t realize the NFL games weren’t live tho. That would be a dealbreaker for me. The NHL and MLB games are live, but there are blackout restrictions. A VPN will get around that though.
It's sad. Sometimes I boot it up only to find that movies I remember saving to my list aren't on the service anymore.
"Piracy" still manages to offer a superior service even after all these years. It's amazing how copyright actively prevents people from properly competing with it.
Most of the people living in the US between the coasts still live in urban areas. Only a few states have a minority of urban dwellers: Maine, West Virginia, Mississippi, Vermont. Many large interior states have overwhelmingly urban populations: Arizona (90%), Colorado (86%), Illinois (89%), Michigan (75%), Ohio (78%), Nevada (94%), Texas (85%), Utah (90%).
Yeah but the definition of 'urban' the census uses and the layman's conception of 'urban' are totally different. Take for example - how many urban areas do you think are in Kansas? Really go ahead take a guess. It's 78 (including 5 areas that cross borders). Somehow I don't think Sabetha, KS is going to strike many people as 'urban.'
Note that census “urban” is extremely broad, and basically includes what in common discussion would be all suburban and some rural communities, as well as conventional urban ones.
> Are there still places with cable TV but not cable internet?
Cable internet plus OTT live TV service is probably more expensive in most markets than Cable internet plus Cable TV with equivalent channel lineup, you still have to deal with the cable provider, and the OTT TV counts against your internet data cap, if (as is likely without a same-provider TV plan or an extra payment for uncapped data) you have one.
You still literally don't need it. Which isn't to say that most people don't want it really really bad, but still, it's different, and words matter.
Moreover, unless you're an extreme binge watcher, I'm guessing you could still consume more than you can eat of video entertainment for less money than the cable companies charge by buying DVDs. Let alone Netflix's DVD service.
> You still literally don't need it. Which isn't to say that most people don't want it really really bad, but still, it's different, and words matter.
In the economic sense of “need”, it isn't different at all.
Outside of the economic sense, generally “need” is meaningless unless qualified with a purpose.
> Moreover, unless you're an extreme binge watcher, I'm guessing you could still consume more than you can eat of video entertainment for less money than the cable companies charge by buying DVDs.
Buying DVDs is not effective for getting current news, sports, etc., however, whether direct coverage or timely commentary.
>I'm guessing you could still consume more than you can eat of video entertainment for less money than the cable companies charge by buying DVDs.
how? let's say you're on some expensive cable plan, $120/mo and DVDs cost $15. that works out to 8 movies a month, which might cut it if you only watch a couple of hours of TV on the weekends, but is nowhere enough if you watch daily.
> let's say you're on some expensive cable plan, $120/mo and DVDs cost $15. that works out to 8 movies a month, which might cut it if you only watch a couple of hours of TV on the weekends, but is nowhere enough if you watch daily.
DVDs are cheaper per hour if you get less-current movies or, even better, less-current TV collections (e.g., the Friends complete series is currently $70 on Amazon, for 80+ hours.)
So, if you are concerned merely with quantity of video content, it may be true that DVDs are cheaper than cable.
If you have concerns about the specific content, then the claim becomes harder to defend.
A generation of consumers have been raised to rent their content. I have DirecTV now, bundled with my cell plan so I pay like $15 a month. I have an MLB.tv subscription and I buy most of the rest of my media on iTunes. When movies are on sale they are like $6 and tv seasons for $10. I bought the entire Seinfeld catalog for like $60–easily worth the price and not to have to watch reruns with commercials. Generally, I spend $30 a month, so after a few years I have hundreds of movies and a dozens of TV shows. So most of the time I watch news on DirecTV, MLB.tv, or a movie in my iTunes library. I literally don’t understand Netflix and most of the shows on there haven’t been worth it for me to subscribe yet. But I definitely wouldn’t pay for a monthly streaming subscription. Maybe if I had kids.
DVDs can be borrowed from the library or rented from RedBox. You can buy whole seasons of TV shows for like ~$10. DVDs can also be sold when you're done and reduce your expenses further.
Actually cable's origin was to bring broadcast television to areas with poor or no reception. Cable systems were often started by neighborhood groups and local small businesses, which is why "cable" is sometimes called "CATV" — Community Access Television.
Later, satellite-carried "Superstations" were added like WPIX, WTBS, WGN, etc...
Later still, pay television services like HBO and Cinemax were added.
thanks sibling responders, I learned something new.
I grew up in rural southeast US and I've always associated cable with cities/suburbs and had broadcast/satellite (old giant ones most until middle school).
No, food is something you need. A cellphone plan is something you need to function in modern society without an enormous handicap. Television is not something you need.
For the past year, I've been trying to convince my grandparents to ditch cable for internet TV, and the transition has been surprisingly difficult. After two attempts (I don't live near them), I am still not successful, however I did reduce the TV/phone/internet bundle from $250 to $200. Next time I see them, I'm coming prepared with the items that prevented me from succeeding before, and hopefully I'll be reducing them down to antennae/phone/internet.
The biggest problem I've found is that the cable company installed their cable modem on the entirely opposite side of the house from where the living room is (where the office is), and the wifi signal is too week to stream video. My general options are either a) get a repeater, or b) try setting up a second internet source from the living room cable (not sure if it's internet ready).
Yes it is and while not the fastest, it works surprisingly well. I tried a couple of units several years ago and it was a bust. Some guy locally was giving away two TP-link 1000 plugs and they worked first time and I'm now a believer. Give it a shot.
Thanks for the link, it is an impressive article and while I work in IT, the electronic may be a bit off my league (I just solder a bit around IoT devices and flash them).
I realized with your comment that I have never actually tested the plugs when they are next to each other (say, on an extender). I did not expect there would be a physical limitation below the advertized 1Gbps (I now all I got 400 Mbps I think but I am not at home to get that with a local iperf loop). If they cannot deliver close to that I would be pissed off :)
I have, again from memory, a 2x1Gbps tplink pair.
This said, my power cabling is sub par so this was the obvious reason for me for the lower bandwidth.
Last time I tried this I had extreme packet loss if I plugged the two converters into outlets on different breakers, do you know if this is still the case?
I think it depends a lot of the wiring in the house as you've found. I think its normal to work across different circuits though - for me it worked OK. I'd expect newer models to be a bit smarter, but I imagine it doesnt work everywhere. Signal can be killed by some surge protectors & UPS or noisy motors etc.
You can also try a MoCA adapter. I've three Motorola 2.0 MoCA devices and they work great; much better speeds than WiFi albeit not as fast as Ethernet (but also without having to run Cat6 throughout the house).
Moca is like short range, high speed cable LAN. My parents house is wired for cable TV but not Ethernet. So the modem is in the basement, and a pair of moca adapters get internet up to the 2nd floor bedroom where there's a wireless access point.
Get a mesh wifi solution like Google WiFi, and spread the other access points around. Much easier than the alternatives and you'll have fast internet throughout the whole house so you can stream video in any room.
Explaining to an elderly person that you are moving a router to extend the range is much easier than telling them they need a 2nd networking device with mesh networking capabilities.
I've set my parents up with a Fire Stick with Netflix, Sling, Prime, etc.. But the internet in their area isn't that good and the streams cut out frequently. I live 3 hours away and have FIOS, so I typically don't run into issues on my end and can't easily drop by to troubleshoot. It's a hard sell when they are used to always being able to turn on the TV and have something to watch without the frustrations of network issues.
The allure of channel-surfing and just leaving something on in the background seems to be huge for some people. Getting stuff on demand is great, but it does require a bit of thought.
Streaming services probably can and should cater to that more.
I think sometimes the psychological aspect of it isn't appreciated. The whole point of plopping down on the couch and turning on the TV is to decompress. It's great that streaming services allow you to choose what to watch when, but if you've been figuring things out and making decisions all day, that's what you want to get away from.
Traditional broadcast TV and cable keeps delivering something even if you do nothing. You can override it (by changing the channel or using the DVR), but you need only exercise as much control as you feel like at a given moment.
There's an unofficial streaming site that treats shows like TV channels, and provides channels for movie genres. Even when I paid for Netflix, it was just so much more convenient to go to the other site because I could click on a show (or the random button) and I'd have something running until I closed the tab. It's really the best format I've seen if you aren't intent on binge-watching a show from beginning to end.
This is where sites/services/apps like PlutoTV are great. They're essentially a bunch of streams of mostly low-cost programming presented in a guide-type format. Nothing amazing but it serves the same purpose as basic cable if you just want to watch old movies, MST3K reruns, or cooking shows.
Even YouTube can serve this purpose if you get a decent set of subscriptions going and loads of TVs have this built in these days (even if you didn't really want it). For others, there's Chromecast or similar to put these things on the big screen if you don't have a computer or other "smart" device already hooked up.
> just leaving something on in the background seems to be huge for some people.
I have read accounts from people who have said that they need to have some kind of coherent sound around them - radio, tv, other people talking, etc.
Their argument is usually that without that constant chatter, they would have to be left alone with the thoughts in their head, and they don't want that.
I find such a position utterly alien, as a person who enjoys quiet time, pondering and thinking about things. I can understand wanting to "shut it out" occasionally and just "veg-ing" - but the way these individuals talked, it sounded like anxiety and fear for them to be left alone with their thoughts.
A possibility I found both disturbing, and depressing.
It's easy. We've been a cord-cutter household for years, but even I have to admit that an Apple TV + Netflix is a lot more complicated than the old days of flipping the cable box to channel 7.
It's not like people have to rent cable boxes. By law, you can get an STB from Motorola or wherever, and a CableCARD for a nominal monthly fee (couple of dollars).
Cable TV has been annoyingly sticky in my household. I don’t watch it but my spouse does and any time cutting the cord comes up, her requirements are the same:
- Access to a specified list of channels she likes
- Selecting content should be as easy as on basic cable: type in three numbers on the remote
That’s it. I’ve so far failed to find the replacement. If we were to cut cord today we’d still have to subscribe to multiple services to get the mix of content, each service with their own subscription and UI and menus to navigate. So alas we still hang on to basic cable.
i suspect the remaining customers aren't very price sensitive, and not the type to try something new to lower their bill by a huge amount. the cable companies have realized this and decided to milk it for all it's worth.
the issue now is that it is getting very expensive to not have someone who bundles many channels together. I know people bemoan high cable prices but with every content owner coming out with their own channels its going to be expensive to watch.
I have a FiOS Motorola QIP7232 cable box with a builtin 320GB harddrive (circa 2013).[1]
My last bill shows them charging me $21.99 per month for that box. (That's $263.88 a year not including taxes.)
Last week, I called Frontier FiOS to cancel the cable TV but keep the internet. After the customer rep cancelled the tv, I asked if she was mailing out a shipping box so I could return the Motorola. She said she wasn't going to bother with it. So there's one anecdote to gauge how much the hardware is worth to them. (I do see that used ones sell for ~$50 on ebay.)
You might want to hold onto it for a bit. I read the occasional "horror" stories about people getting big bills for "unreturned equipment" that they were previously told not to return. Or that was returned but never logged; suggestions are, for example, that if you return your Comcast box to one of their storefronts/offices, you make sure to get a receipt, preferably one having the equipment ID's on it.
Comcast had a deal with UPS Stores when I canceled 2 years ago. I just brought the cable box to the closest UPS Store franchise and got a receipt from them and they handled packing and returning it. That was a wonderful experience.
Agreed. Every time I try to return equipment to comcast, they ship me another unit because "we noticed you have cable TV service, but no cable box on your account!"
But you know damn well if I ever lose that box in my attic, some day they're coming after me.
I finally gave in and pay more per month for internet-only just so i don't have to store their damn box in my attic and I'm not inflating their TV subscriber numbers.
I'm reasonably certain the $231/year figure the author quotes is not the amount paid for a single set-top box (as he says), but the average total paid by a household for all their set-top boxes. That averages out to around ~3 boxes per household at rates similar to those quoted in the story, which is about what I'd expect.
That said, the charges are still a ripoff, and just one of many reasons I do not miss paying for cable TV.
The average household has 3 set-top boxes? That sounds like a lot. Even median would be a lot. Who needs to be able to watch basic cable in 3 rooms in a house?
No one needs to watch basic cable at all, but having a living room with a TV, a rec room with a TV, and a bedroom with a TV seems fairly common amongst my travels to different homes. Anecdotally less common in big city homes, presumably because space is at a greater premium.
I think the average number of TVs used per household is something like 2.x a month. But many households probably have a set top box hooked up to a lesser-used TV (guest room, rec room, etc.) that they're paying for even when it sits unused.
My parents are middle-class empty nesters, and IIRC, they have boxes in the kitchen, living room, home office, and maybe another in the master bedroom?
Clearly they do not 'need' that many, yet they have them. This is just another way in which the rigid, inflexible model of legacy television generates excessive revenue: one cannot carry a TV and cable box around the house as easily as they can a tablet PC or iPad.
On a slightly related note, I am highly disappointed with the Spectrum boxes and really miss my Comcast X1 box.
Spectrum and Comcast both rely on the same third-parties to supply their gear but Comcast works with partners like Arris to build their own custom boxes. They have their own custom OS running on the box. They're really fast and have a very modern UI. For instance it'll open sidebars to show current sports games with realtime scores. They also have their voice remote feature which, at first was a total gimmick to me, but ultimately became really helpful. You rarely know what channel # you want but to say "go to TLC" or "go to the world series" is really handy. They also have a remote control with an accelerometer that will glow when it jiggles, unlike any competitor. This is very useful at night.
Meanwhile my Spectrum box is virtually a thin client. For things like on-demand it's piping commands across the network to a remote host that is rendering what is displayed on your screen. The latency is horrible.
I've cut the cord once or twice with services like Playstation TV and Sling... but none of them really shake a stick to a proper cable plan. I'm disappointed with this price hike and Spectrum's hardware but for folks (my wife and I) who grew up in the generation of cable TV it's a difficult habit to break.
I had X1, was very nice. We have one "mommy" box and a couple of the slimmer boxes (don't know what they call it)
The mobile apps were very good as well. We have YouTubeTV now, but if I had, or wanted to spend the $ I'd go with X1 again.
Do you have Spectrum on fibre? I have their Arris (Arriss?) box on coax in Largo FL and find it a lot snappier than Comcast's Scientific Atlanta box was in Sarasota.
For me an even worse experience than either has been the Arris box Verizon/Frontier deployed to Sarasota. It performs like the thin client you don't like. It's slow as the 90s-vintage SciAtl Comcast box and doesn't have knobs to increase program information font size (amongst other UI negatives). I'm biding my 6 months on Frontier before I bounce back to Comcast despite the former's far greater program selection.
I have the Comcast "X1 Infinity Entertainment System" and IMO it stinks. It's a bad sign when the instructions tell you to restart it to solve problems. And at best, the delay from button press to response is nearly intolerable. I think basic UI guidelines suggest something on the order of 1/4 second and this box usually takes over a second. At times I sit there wondering if I need to press the button again. Usually I don't. I just need to be patient. At other times it simply does not respond. I can see a green LED light on the box when I press a button on the remote but other than that, nothing happens. That's when I know it is time to pull the plug. In a competitive market products like this would not be tolerated.
When I saw X1, it looked nice, and now Comcast is pushing the Plume pods (or something that looks like them) as repeaters. They're doing generally slick things with individual device blocking and such. That is to say, offering services that are actually harder to do on your own.
The slow button press is how I feel about DirecTV. I could simply never use it because I find the 1 second delay absolutely intolerable.
Anyone still renting should look to used markets for equipment. With the number of people cord-cutting, the market for used equipment is quite saturated.
I own a DVR and 4 or 5 "satellite" type boxes, cut the cord and looked to see how much I could get from them. Basically wasn't worth my time with hundreds of people in the same boat as me in my city.
Do you really wanna know how much it costs? Look at similar streaming hardware (think FireStick, Roku, etc)
The hardware (heck, even the software) is the same or very similar for the most part.
Smartphones made the hw price (and form factors) go down a lot.
If your decoder is DTV or Cable there's an extra cost related to the receiver, but that has also getting cheaper as well.
Long gone are the times of the first receivers where you had several ICs with dedicated functions and had to shuffle the data around in not so straightforward ways (the first DTV receivers had dedicated MPEG2 decoder ICs, I suppose DVD players had a similar architecture, then became integrated with time). Now modern smartphones decode more complex video streams with much less energy expenditure)
Yeah, the actual core of the device is going to be roughly something like a chromecast.
Almost certainly no asics, so the cost is going to be dominated by commodity parts-- displays, audio-visual jacks and then there's the branded plastic case, graphics, labels.
Basically, 5 or 6 IC's and related trimmings--- BOM cost? I am going to guess around $35-- that's what google sells it for. Since they're making money not on the device itself but rather the online activity that becomes enabled from using the device, I expect the retail price would be roughly the BOM cost.
A little more money if you're looking at a proper set-top, I guess, though I haven't actually seen a cable box in a long time. Are they roku-sized now, or just huge mostly empty boxes?
> Are they roku-sized now, or just huge mostly empty boxes?
I haven't seen a new one in a while either, but the last time I used one (at a relative's house IIRC), it was the same-old, same-old:
A box about the size of a DVD player, a bit larger (smaller than a VCR, though), mostly empty inside. Usually if it's a DVR, there's a hard drive, and the board is mostly a computer, generally running some kind of embedded proprietary closed-source RTOS. Occasionally you'll see linux, android, or some flavor of Windows CE. Beyond that - yeah, empty air.
I know that some of the very simple cable boxes are about the size of a Roku, but I don't think any of them are like a Chromecast (that is, usb drive size).
Tuners can be cheap or they can be expensive depending on the features you want. I don't think Broadcom's full-band capture tuner, which IIRC is basically a 2GHz ADC, is very cheap. It allows things like pre-tuning to adjacent channels which hastens channel changes. Security on set-tops is a big issue(as well as on OTT devices but STBs are crazy) and that may increase costs. Legacy interfaces like cable cards(no longer needed) increase costs and development time. Cable box SoCs(usually from Broadcom) are beasts and also not cheap. They support things like HDMI in and out, transcoding, multiple video streams(for Picture-in-Picture), etc. They are not in the same league as a Chromecast.
Don't forget about software. A lot of the stack is custom and needs teams of people working year after year to sort-of get it right(STB software is generally horrible). Each MSO(cable company) requests specific changes and customizations(beyond just branding).
Now that's not to say that you couldn't design an IPTV system which uses something like a Chromecast. This is often done and the hardware can be cheaper. I think it stresses out the network more vs, say, a broadcast design where you're dealing with a massive asymmetrical content delivery system which is just pushing the same bits to everyone. It's probably much cheaper to setup a cable headend for 250k+ subscribers than it is to make a IPTV system for the same number of people.
A TiVo box is basically equivalent to a modern set top box(give or take...DVR vs zapper, for instance). I would start with that to get an idea of what a cable box should cost.
Source: 10 or so years in the STB industry. I left because the industry is dying.
> Tuners can be cheap or they can be expensive depending on the features you want. I don't think Broadcom's full-band capture tuner, which IIRC is basically a 2GHz ADC, is very cheap.
True, but a basic ATSC/DVB/ISTB shouldn't be too expensive. Maybe cable ones are more expensive, but the tech is basically the same. Satellite is pricier.
> Cable box SoCs(usually from Broadcom) are beasts and also not cheap. They support things like HDMI in and out, transcoding, multiple video streams(for Picture-in-Picture), etc.
Yes, depends on the manufacturer, I've used/tested a couple of products from different manufacturers (including Intel's adventure on that area) but most stream boxes use the same hardware, chromecast is the exception, not the rule
"Not cheap" but IIRC $10/$20 for the SOC itself (but that was 10 years ago)
> STB software is generally horrible
YES. MPEG-TS decoding (especially metadata) usually goes "how sausages are made".
> After the Spectrum fee rises within days to $7.50 a month, that will translate to at least $120 million. Monthly. Or at least $1.4 billion a year.
I agree with the overall "screw those monopolistic rent seekers" theme, but I hate seeing summaries like this. Is $1.4 billion a lot? If you told me it was $100 million per year, that would still sound like a lot, but apparently in this context that would represent not a lot? These are meaningless big numbers.
Well, a $50 Roku boxI bought a relative streams HD from Netflix and other services. Way more than what a cable modem does. You'd have buy 28 million of them to hit $1.4 billion, but realistically they'd get volume discount. These companies sell less functionality for more money and keep charging after it's probably paid off.
Yes, comparing the price of a set top box to the price of a Roku sounds much more reasonable. And I'm sure we could think of a dozen different comparisons besides. The point is that we should be making these comparisons instead of dropping gigantic numbers by themselves for effect :p
I don't pay for cable, but there are similar economics in Internet routers/modems. Comcast used to charge me $10/month to lease their unit. After a few months of spotty WiFi (used cell data instead), I finally called. Service rep said that ~1/2 of the my specific router model were defective.
Finally purchased my own [1], which will pay for itself after a year. This is one of the easiest ways to save money.
Good point- This is an affiliate link. I actually don't want the money from Amazon from the referral link, I signed up for Amazon Associates for the API access to their product catalog for a side project. Amazon requires a certain level of activity for this. So if someone happens to buy, you're supporting a side project.
I have not had cable or satellite since 2008 and I do not miss it. Amazon prime has tons of free stuff. Have a Netflix account. Have a proxy that lets me watch things like the BBC (hey BBC, you could make money if you allowed an online subscription for those not in the UK - I did pay for a TV pieces BTW as my address is register to a friend in the UK). There is also iTunes for things. Have Kodi with my local collection of DVDs ripped.
What is missing is a roll up service. I want an application that has a list of my services and then presents me a uniform search box for all them! That would rock. Thought about writing one but it would just get shutdown for violation of the terms of service. Also a Kodi plunging for Amazon, NetFlix and XM would rock at some point.
With regards to a roll up service, this is something I want too. The best approximation I've seen is the media search on Roku. You can search for a movie or TV show and it will show you which Roku channels offer that content. It's of course not as seamless as a real roll up service could be, but I thought I'd suggest it. On your phone/tablet, you may appreciate the "Just Watch" app which lets you search the providers you select.
FWIW I used to swear by Roku but then they started randomly adding channels to my screen. This was basically a paid ad, if you were a service provider you can pay Roku to force your channel onto the device. Once that started I chucked all my Roku devices.
Thanks. The “Ads” are the reason I looked at the Roku and then said no. I was looking at an AppleTV also (I would have to convert some of my videos, but whatever) however the lack of an optical audio out kills that as I want the music to go to a different amp. So PC with Kodi and TV apps for Netflix and Amazon. The quest continues!
Do you need 4K? The 3rd-gen Apple TV has optical audio out but it's 1080p only. Very nice interface though. If you already have a 4K TV, does it really not have optical out built-in? My Roku TV has it and it's about as cheap as 4K TVs get.
Compute --> DAC
DAC --> TV --> Sound Bar for videos (also TV apps output to sound bar)
DAC --> Tube Amp (for music played from computer)
Record Player --> Tube Amp
Tube Amp --> 2 good speakers
Ideal would would be
Apple TV with XM, iPlayer, Netflix, Amazon App - HDMI to 4K TV - TV to sound bar
Apple TV with Optical to DAC to Tube Amp.
I have looked at some of the HDMI sound extractors but there seems to be limits on things you can play, having a remote, DRM.
Slightly off topic, Comcast actually stole my mom's modem that she bought from amazon! What happened is most likely the modem she bought was supposed to be returned to comcast by another customer, but that person instead just put it up for sale on amazon. Every so often a charge for a box rental would show up on her bill, she would go to the store in person to show them the receipt, get a refund and the charges would stop. Then 3 months went by and the charge appeared on the bill again. This went on for a year and a half. No one in customer service could help and at the end they said the only solution is just give us the modem and buy another one.
Apparently in order to deal with stolen modems, comcast simply charges whatever customer has that modem regardless of whether or not the modem itself was supposed to be returned by another customer but never was. That is one hell of a way to get your stolen modem's back. Can you imagine if you went to the golf course and had your own clubs which you bought on amazon, but the course charged you for club rental every time you went, until they demand you hand over your clubs, and force you to buy another set to be allowed to play?
That is how comcast harassed my mom for a year and a half, stole her modem, and tried to charge her rent for a different customers box.
That sounds unpleasant for your mom. But how is this different to buying a stolen bicycle and having it confiscated back by its legal owner? I thought the law was clear that, even if you didn't know it was stolen, your purchase gives you no right to the goods.
fair enough. I guess the difference is that bike rental stores don't have automated systems which apparently have a bug where they charge the unknowing victims of a crime rent for previously rented bikes which were stolen and sold online.
With a Usenet subscription, sabnzbd, and sonarr it's all automated. Subscribe to the shows you want and forget about the cable companies. Is it piracy to download shows broadcast on-the-air?
Ultimately I view it like I did music... give me a reasonable way to access and pay and I'll do so. And when iTunes came out I deleted my 10 gigs of mp3's and paid for music. I'll do the same when the media company come to their senses and respect the cost of scale they now have. I can live with that.
Even when I had cable I would use Popcorn Time behind a VPN for TV shows. No messing with DVR that may or may not actually record the show. Nice Netflix-style list of available programs and the ability to bookmark favorites and see if there were any new episodes.
I'm sure if I had felt like setting it up, usenet automation + Plex server would have been even better but this was simple enough.
Again, I had cable and I had a cable box but it was that much easier to watch streaming torrents that I still watched unlicensed recordings like that.
Basically, if you are going to charge me a monthly fee to borrow some set top box, you need to make the set top box worth the expense. My only "legit" option was something that looked like a 1998 leftover that barely worked, worked slowly, and cost me almost $10/month to borrow. If I wanted one of the nicer boxes, I had to sign up for unrelated services like some "triple play" with phone service included. Not happening.
Funny anecdote, before Java was Java, it was a way for appliances to abstract out the complexity of the embedded system and allow designers to write a UX that would work the same way on all the products.
The 'demo' application was a set top box because SGI was making a lot of hay with doing 'video on demand' in Florida and how that was the new hotness for selling servers.
So we had this demo that had Fang (the mascot) bouncing around in his virtual world where you could click on things to bring up different activities, and there were movie posters in this virtual world that if you clicked on them would bring up a screen letting you rent the movie or watch a trailer etc. Some excellent animations from an artist named Joe Palrang and it all ran on a Sparcstation 10.
We knew of course that set top boxes (STBs) at the time were 8 bit micros (think Zilog Z80 or Motorola 6811's) and cheap but hey with this cool new UI cable companies would surely be moving upscale on the STB. So we asked a number of cable companies where they saw their set top box in five years. (which would put it at 1998) and they were saying, "Well we are expecting big changes there, we are probably going to spend $100 per box rather than the current $50 per box."
That went over poorly since we needed way more oomph than that to host our fancy virtual world. And while there was a plan to keep the Java kernel small (45K bytes was the target) we didn't see a lot of hope with that cheap of a machine to run it on. As I recall that was around the time when Sun decided to cancel the whole thing.
Cable companies, like any company that tries to extract value by delivering streamed copyrighted content to consumers, are always squeezed nearly out of existence by rights holders in an unending battle to keep all the pennies. It is quite depressing and convinced me I didn't want to be in the cable business in my career.
The economies of scale are so great the margins are almost certainly fat. Other than cellphones I can't think of any electronic devices where that many identical units were being produced--millions and millions of indistinguishable boxes. About 20 years ago as a consultant in the EDA industry I got to tour of a set-top box manufacturing plant in Taiwan and it was fascinating. While the boxes were identical on the outside, on the inside they were doing everything possible to cut both component and manufacturing costs, including experimenting with paper based PCBs (apparently much cheaper than fiberglass?). I have to imagine they've only gotten better at cost optimization over time.
Cancelled my Comcast today. Price creep was the main reason, and it was just plain expensive for what it was. It was a liberating phone call though. I've been waiting for years to get out from under their cable/internet combo madness.
AT&T just brought fiber to my neighborhood last month with a $40/mo 100mb/s plan. That's 3x cheaper than the > 100mb Comcast plan I was on that required me to have internet and basic cable.
Both cap at 1TB and AT&T had no gear rental fees and a $10/out of contract monthly fee after a year. So far the only MAJOR downside is I can't use 1.1.1.1 for my DNS which took awhile to reverse engineer after I broke the internet...twice. A fix is coming, but I found 6 months of internet forums saying that.
And I think 5 of my neighbors are about to make the switch too. The Comcast person on the phone started to make their scripted argument for how they could reduce my plan. I said $40 and no TV or save the oxygen for the next customer.
In the end, it's probably just equally as evil but it works out far better for my bills.
There is a very big factor that the article missed - license fees.
A good chuck of that fee is goes to licensing. The guide software, guide data, DVR, VOD, etc. often have per-box licensing fees the provider has to pay.
The $250 also seams low to me. I’ve seen numbers in the $600-$900 range. Cable STBs are also much more expensive than IPTV devices because they have tunners, upstream modulators, MOCA (for whole home DVR), switched digital video, etc. vs a IPTV box that has an Ethernet port and basically just decodes mpeg4 multicast streams. The cost of STBs is one of the reasons MSOs like the idea of network based DVR.
Based purely on the dismal quality of these things, it cannot be very much. They don't seem to have gotten any better with time at all. Extremely laggy, awful UX, they run hot, they use a surprisingly high amount of electricity just to idle, and are generally just barely usable. Kodi on a Raspberry Pi performs better in pretty much all cases (except for, well, not having live TV -- usually), which is shameful on the part of these massive cable boxes.
On top of that, why does it still cost an additional monthly fee to record locally to a DVR? Surely there is little to no additional cost involved in that, that isn't easily paid for by the standard monthly subscription price. And unless you've got one hell of a box, you're still limited to only two shows. It seems like if a monthly fee is involved, the DVR tech would be considerably better. Maybe something closer to just saving recordings as standard, personal on-demand media.
My mother used to rent movies on demand, but she's gotten a refund every single time because they've been unwatchable. She's since stopped doing that, at least.
I used to work for a set top box middleware vendor, and at the time circa 2005-6 we had internal charge amounts of about a few hundred bucks for the mid range PVRs at the time. I just looked at a competitive analysis sheet I still have access to and it look like the total BoM for a modern PVR with all the bells and whistles like voice recognition and 4k is around $400-600 including a cheap AV rated drive to store the video.
The lower end ones with cloud PVR look like they're crazy cheap, like a low end cell phone. I wouldn't be surprised if the IP only ones were $50 in Q10000. There's a bunch of implementation notes about fiddly expensive analog calibration for the terrestrial and docsis transceivers, but it looks like the two major ASIC vendors both ship turnkey calibration systems to help reduce manufacturing cost. One of them has a nice menu of prevalidated contract manufacturers that already have production lines ready to go once you sign.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 89.2 ms ] threadIt's now a distant memory being able to switch between channels instantly. I should at least be able to page through the menus quickly.
Of course, my cable provider had to make like three visits before they managed to scrounge up two working cards.
You could have a predictive system that would decode the three most likely next channels and start decoding them. In the best case, this would move the latency of the first switch close to zero, and of subsequent switches to 1/2 or 1/3.
To save energy, you could get one of these fancy remotes that they have for telefone conferences, that can detect when you pick it up. Once you lift the remote, start the extra tuners.
What could be done, on the cheap, Cable provider wide is authoritative server ready to give you arbitrarily generated I frames with 1/60 time resolution on demand, as most cable boxes nowadays are two way anyway (they need upstream link to transmit all the spyin^^^ channel usage statistics back).
It's becoming rather farcical that I may have to use Tor to browse from ... a European IP.
† This perception is obviously a huge problem for papers like the L.A. Times (and for writers, in general). For better or worse, this is how people see it, now. If you don't like the source, then you just imagine substituting in another one, like you're buying pork futures (or whatever the opposite of original reporting is).
Edit: I'm not saying that's a good thing, guys. I agree with dionidium.
I suspect we're more than 25% of HN's audience.
(Realistically, a mirror is the realistic alternative. Two have been posted and downvoted into oblivion. So it seems the HN community along with the LA Times support censorship. Nice.).
If two draconian policies don't add up to a level playing field, why not go for the hat trick!
It's an LA Times article written by an LA Times reporter published in the LA Times for the benefit of LA Times readers.
What European alternative do you suggest?
I'm not suggesting a European alternative, I'm saying that this does not belong on hackernews.
Asto it being original reporting, that's a little hard for people to factor in when it's entirely blocked.
Because there's no way any company can actually comply with the GPDR; many of the rules conflict with each other. GDPR is a regulatory trap intended to allow the authorities to initiate selective enforcement against non-EU companies.
Source, please? My reading of the GDPR is as a broad set of sensible rules requiring that you acquire consent for gathering and using people's data (and that consent can be revoked -- or withheld for non-core functionality). The law isn't machine code, it's a document interpreted by humans against the spirit of the law: act in good faith and respect people's privacy and you'll be fine.
When I see a company that doesn't even want to consider doing business with a European because GDPR, I see a company that I want as far away from my personal data as possible.
They have a monopoly on a dying service you literally don't need at all, and most people hate having to deal with them. The pricing and contracts are antagonistic to customers. Is it just momentum at this point?
It's certainly overpriced for what it is, but it's still much, much cheaper than a complete package, which is easily twice that figure.
...but between the so-called promotional pricing, the dicking around with another pile of box rental fees and assorted add-on costs, I just didn't have it in me. On some level I just decided that I would rather risk "missing out" on some minor bit of savings than buy anything more than the single thing I really needed to buy from Comcast.
If I had any other real options I wouldn't buy anything from them. But they are the only option for something I definitely need. I'm not about to pay them for anything more.
Cable providers literary make money by giving TV service for free. They sell pre programmed channel spots like supermarket sell shelf space - You cant change channel order :/ plus they track/sell TV viewing data
Neither the access nor the bundled content portions are really dying. The assumption they must be bought from the same vendor is, but outside of very high speed plans, internet access tends to have data caps (sometimes capped unless you buy a TV bundle from the ISP as well as internet service), and OTT services with comparable content are just as expensive as cable plans (and mostly from cable/satellite vendors, though Google and Sony have services too), so you end up spending the same money plus eating your data cap if you buy separately instead of getting the content outside of your cap (or maybe even getting the content and getting rid of your cap at the same time.)
Edit: To clarify, there are 3 tiers of GamePass. What you get depends on where you purchase and access from.
USA: only preseason live
GB, Mexico & maybe some others: regular season games live (no postseason)
Rest of the world: All games live + RedZone
Seems like they get paid a lot by existing corporate players for exclusive distribution rights in the states.
Didn’t realize the NFL games weren’t live tho. That would be a dealbreaker for me. The NHL and MLB games are live, but there are blackout restrictions. A VPN will get around that though.
"Piracy" still manages to offer a superior service even after all these years. It's amazing how copyright actively prevents people from properly competing with it.
Not really. Data caps are unnatural and are simply a method to fleece users, high bandwidth or not. Normal Internet plans have no caps.
Unless you live in a place without broadcast television, or little broadcast television, and with little to no internet service.
So pretty much 20% of the United States. The nation is much larger than the east and west coasts.
https://www.icip.iastate.edu/tables/population/urban-pct-sta...
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-210...
And anecdotally, I know several people who live in urban places who still don't have access to cable television.
Back to the topic, though — the OP stated, "you literally don't need at all." My point is that his postulation is invalid for millions of people.
Here, click around: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9079984,-95.8056799,3a,75y,7...
You'll see what I mean.
Cable internet plus OTT live TV service is probably more expensive in most markets than Cable internet plus Cable TV with equivalent channel lineup, you still have to deal with the cable provider, and the OTT TV counts against your internet data cap, if (as is likely without a same-provider TV plan or an extra payment for uncapped data) you have one.
http://valleycom.com/
Moreover, unless you're an extreme binge watcher, I'm guessing you could still consume more than you can eat of video entertainment for less money than the cable companies charge by buying DVDs. Let alone Netflix's DVD service.
In the economic sense of “need”, it isn't different at all.
Outside of the economic sense, generally “need” is meaningless unless qualified with a purpose.
> Moreover, unless you're an extreme binge watcher, I'm guessing you could still consume more than you can eat of video entertainment for less money than the cable companies charge by buying DVDs.
Buying DVDs is not effective for getting current news, sports, etc., however, whether direct coverage or timely commentary.
how? let's say you're on some expensive cable plan, $120/mo and DVDs cost $15. that works out to 8 movies a month, which might cut it if you only watch a couple of hours of TV on the weekends, but is nowhere enough if you watch daily.
DVDs are cheaper per hour if you get less-current movies or, even better, less-current TV collections (e.g., the Friends complete series is currently $70 on Amazon, for 80+ hours.)
So, if you are concerned merely with quantity of video content, it may be true that DVDs are cheaper than cable.
If you have concerns about the specific content, then the claim becomes harder to defend.
It depends on what you want to watch.
Later, satellite-carried "Superstations" were added like WPIX, WTBS, WGN, etc...
Later still, pay television services like HBO and Cinemax were added.
Even later, we ended up with what we have today.
I grew up in rural southeast US and I've always associated cable with cities/suburbs and had broadcast/satellite (old giant ones most until middle school).
My options for broadband are cable, or.... nothing.
I mean, I guess technically I can get DSL for $40 more a month than my whole cable bill for 1/10th the bandwidth.
The biggest problem I've found is that the cable company installed their cable modem on the entirely opposite side of the house from where the living room is (where the office is), and the wifi signal is too week to stream video. My general options are either a) get a repeater, or b) try setting up a second internet source from the living room cable (not sure if it's internet ready).
This is still 200 Mbps, better than the Wi-Fi the device could get.
200Mbps is their real PHY speed, 900Mbps is just a Scam
Thanks for the link, it is an impressive article and while I work in IT, the electronic may be a bit off my league (I just solder a bit around IoT devices and flash them).
I realized with your comment that I have never actually tested the plugs when they are next to each other (say, on an extender). I did not expect there would be a physical limitation below the advertized 1Gbps (I now all I got 400 Mbps I think but I am not at home to get that with a local iperf loop). If they cannot deliver close to that I would be pissed off :)
I have, again from memory, a 2x1Gbps tplink pair.
This said, my power cabling is sub par so this was the obvious reason for me for the lower bandwidth.
A cheap Ethernet cord would fix the problem. Move the router closer to the office.
I think sometimes the psychological aspect of it isn't appreciated. The whole point of plopping down on the couch and turning on the TV is to decompress. It's great that streaming services allow you to choose what to watch when, but if you've been figuring things out and making decisions all day, that's what you want to get away from.
Traditional broadcast TV and cable keeps delivering something even if you do nothing. You can override it (by changing the channel or using the DVR), but you need only exercise as much control as you feel like at a given moment.
Even YouTube can serve this purpose if you get a decent set of subscriptions going and loads of TVs have this built in these days (even if you didn't really want it). For others, there's Chromecast or similar to put these things on the big screen if you don't have a computer or other "smart" device already hooked up.
I have read accounts from people who have said that they need to have some kind of coherent sound around them - radio, tv, other people talking, etc.
Their argument is usually that without that constant chatter, they would have to be left alone with the thoughts in their head, and they don't want that.
I find such a position utterly alien, as a person who enjoys quiet time, pondering and thinking about things. I can understand wanting to "shut it out" occasionally and just "veg-ing" - but the way these individuals talked, it sounded like anxiety and fear for them to be left alone with their thoughts.
A possibility I found both disturbing, and depressing.
It's not like people have to rent cable boxes. By law, you can get an STB from Motorola or wherever, and a CableCARD for a nominal monthly fee (couple of dollars).
- Access to a specified list of channels she likes
- Selecting content should be as easy as on basic cable: type in three numbers on the remote
That’s it. I’ve so far failed to find the replacement. If we were to cut cord today we’d still have to subscribe to multiple services to get the mix of content, each service with their own subscription and UI and menus to navigate. So alas we still hang on to basic cable.
https://outline.com/FGRxsT
My last bill shows them charging me $21.99 per month for that box. (That's $263.88 a year not including taxes.)
Last week, I called Frontier FiOS to cancel the cable TV but keep the internet. After the customer rep cancelled the tv, I asked if she was mailing out a shipping box so I could return the Motorola. She said she wasn't going to bother with it. So there's one anecdote to gauge how much the hardware is worth to them. (I do see that used ones sell for ~$50 on ebay.)
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=motorola+QIP7232&source=lnms...
But you know damn well if I ever lose that box in my attic, some day they're coming after me.
I finally gave in and pay more per month for internet-only just so i don't have to store their damn box in my attic and I'm not inflating their TV subscriber numbers.
That said, the charges are still a ripoff, and just one of many reasons I do not miss paying for cable TV.
My parents are middle-class empty nesters, and IIRC, they have boxes in the kitchen, living room, home office, and maybe another in the master bedroom?
Clearly they do not 'need' that many, yet they have them. This is just another way in which the rigid, inflexible model of legacy television generates excessive revenue: one cannot carry a TV and cable box around the house as easily as they can a tablet PC or iPad.
Spectrum and Comcast both rely on the same third-parties to supply their gear but Comcast works with partners like Arris to build their own custom boxes. They have their own custom OS running on the box. They're really fast and have a very modern UI. For instance it'll open sidebars to show current sports games with realtime scores. They also have their voice remote feature which, at first was a total gimmick to me, but ultimately became really helpful. You rarely know what channel # you want but to say "go to TLC" or "go to the world series" is really handy. They also have a remote control with an accelerometer that will glow when it jiggles, unlike any competitor. This is very useful at night.
Meanwhile my Spectrum box is virtually a thin client. For things like on-demand it's piping commands across the network to a remote host that is rendering what is displayed on your screen. The latency is horrible.
I've cut the cord once or twice with services like Playstation TV and Sling... but none of them really shake a stick to a proper cable plan. I'm disappointed with this price hike and Spectrum's hardware but for folks (my wife and I) who grew up in the generation of cable TV it's a difficult habit to break.
For me an even worse experience than either has been the Arris box Verizon/Frontier deployed to Sarasota. It performs like the thin client you don't like. It's slow as the 90s-vintage SciAtl Comcast box and doesn't have knobs to increase program information font size (amongst other UI negatives). I'm biding my 6 months on Frontier before I bounce back to Comcast despite the former's far greater program selection.
The slow button press is how I feel about DirecTV. I could simply never use it because I find the 1 second delay absolutely intolerable.
I own a DVR and 4 or 5 "satellite" type boxes, cut the cord and looked to see how much I could get from them. Basically wasn't worth my time with hundreds of people in the same boat as me in my city.
The hardware (heck, even the software) is the same or very similar for the most part.
Smartphones made the hw price (and form factors) go down a lot.
If your decoder is DTV or Cable there's an extra cost related to the receiver, but that has also getting cheaper as well.
Long gone are the times of the first receivers where you had several ICs with dedicated functions and had to shuffle the data around in not so straightforward ways (the first DTV receivers had dedicated MPEG2 decoder ICs, I suppose DVD players had a similar architecture, then became integrated with time). Now modern smartphones decode more complex video streams with much less energy expenditure)
Almost certainly no asics, so the cost is going to be dominated by commodity parts-- displays, audio-visual jacks and then there's the branded plastic case, graphics, labels.
There's an iFixit teardown of the chromecast here: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Chromecast+2015+Teardown/501...
Basically, 5 or 6 IC's and related trimmings--- BOM cost? I am going to guess around $35-- that's what google sells it for. Since they're making money not on the device itself but rather the online activity that becomes enabled from using the device, I expect the retail price would be roughly the BOM cost.
A little more money if you're looking at a proper set-top, I guess, though I haven't actually seen a cable box in a long time. Are they roku-sized now, or just huge mostly empty boxes?
I haven't seen a new one in a while either, but the last time I used one (at a relative's house IIRC), it was the same-old, same-old:
A box about the size of a DVD player, a bit larger (smaller than a VCR, though), mostly empty inside. Usually if it's a DVR, there's a hard drive, and the board is mostly a computer, generally running some kind of embedded proprietary closed-source RTOS. Occasionally you'll see linux, android, or some flavor of Windows CE. Beyond that - yeah, empty air.
I know that some of the very simple cable boxes are about the size of a Roku, but I don't think any of them are like a Chromecast (that is, usb drive size).
Tuners can be cheap or they can be expensive depending on the features you want. I don't think Broadcom's full-band capture tuner, which IIRC is basically a 2GHz ADC, is very cheap. It allows things like pre-tuning to adjacent channels which hastens channel changes. Security on set-tops is a big issue(as well as on OTT devices but STBs are crazy) and that may increase costs. Legacy interfaces like cable cards(no longer needed) increase costs and development time. Cable box SoCs(usually from Broadcom) are beasts and also not cheap. They support things like HDMI in and out, transcoding, multiple video streams(for Picture-in-Picture), etc. They are not in the same league as a Chromecast.
Don't forget about software. A lot of the stack is custom and needs teams of people working year after year to sort-of get it right(STB software is generally horrible). Each MSO(cable company) requests specific changes and customizations(beyond just branding).
Now that's not to say that you couldn't design an IPTV system which uses something like a Chromecast. This is often done and the hardware can be cheaper. I think it stresses out the network more vs, say, a broadcast design where you're dealing with a massive asymmetrical content delivery system which is just pushing the same bits to everyone. It's probably much cheaper to setup a cable headend for 250k+ subscribers than it is to make a IPTV system for the same number of people.
A TiVo box is basically equivalent to a modern set top box(give or take...DVR vs zapper, for instance). I would start with that to get an idea of what a cable box should cost.
Source: 10 or so years in the STB industry. I left because the industry is dying.
True, but a basic ATSC/DVB/ISTB shouldn't be too expensive. Maybe cable ones are more expensive, but the tech is basically the same. Satellite is pricier.
> Cable box SoCs(usually from Broadcom) are beasts and also not cheap. They support things like HDMI in and out, transcoding, multiple video streams(for Picture-in-Picture), etc.
Yes, depends on the manufacturer, I've used/tested a couple of products from different manufacturers (including Intel's adventure on that area) but most stream boxes use the same hardware, chromecast is the exception, not the rule
"Not cheap" but IIRC $10/$20 for the SOC itself (but that was 10 years ago)
> STB software is generally horrible
YES. MPEG-TS decoding (especially metadata) usually goes "how sausages are made".
On top of that, you have mfgs having to hack in power management support to meet european regulations and it's just a shit show.
I agree with the overall "screw those monopolistic rent seekers" theme, but I hate seeing summaries like this. Is $1.4 billion a lot? If you told me it was $100 million per year, that would still sound like a lot, but apparently in this context that would represent not a lot? These are meaningless big numbers.
Does that put it more into perspective?
Finally purchased my own [1], which will pay for itself after a year. This is one of the easiest ways to save money.
[1] https://amzn.to/2Js5q3e
What is missing is a roll up service. I want an application that has a list of my services and then presents me a uniform search box for all them! That would rock. Thought about writing one but it would just get shutdown for violation of the terms of service. Also a Kodi plunging for Amazon, NetFlix and XM would rock at some point.
FWIW I used to swear by Roku but then they started randomly adding channels to my screen. This was basically a paid ad, if you were a service provider you can pay Roku to force your channel onto the device. Once that started I chucked all my Roku devices.
Compute --> DAC DAC --> TV --> Sound Bar for videos (also TV apps output to sound bar) DAC --> Tube Amp (for music played from computer) Record Player --> Tube Amp Tube Amp --> 2 good speakers
Ideal would would be Apple TV with XM, iPlayer, Netflix, Amazon App - HDMI to 4K TV - TV to sound bar Apple TV with Optical to DAC to Tube Amp.
I have looked at some of the HDMI sound extractors but there seems to be limits on things you can play, having a remote, DRM.
Everything is controlled by Logictech Harmony.
Apparently in order to deal with stolen modems, comcast simply charges whatever customer has that modem regardless of whether or not the modem itself was supposed to be returned by another customer but never was. That is one hell of a way to get your stolen modem's back. Can you imagine if you went to the golf course and had your own clubs which you bought on amazon, but the course charged you for club rental every time you went, until they demand you hand over your clubs, and force you to buy another set to be allowed to play?
That is how comcast harassed my mom for a year and a half, stole her modem, and tried to charge her rent for a different customers box.
Ultimately I view it like I did music... give me a reasonable way to access and pay and I'll do so. And when iTunes came out I deleted my 10 gigs of mp3's and paid for music. I'll do the same when the media company come to their senses and respect the cost of scale they now have. I can live with that.
I'm sure if I had felt like setting it up, usenet automation + Plex server would have been even better but this was simple enough.
Again, I had cable and I had a cable box but it was that much easier to watch streaming torrents that I still watched unlicensed recordings like that.
Basically, if you are going to charge me a monthly fee to borrow some set top box, you need to make the set top box worth the expense. My only "legit" option was something that looked like a 1998 leftover that barely worked, worked slowly, and cost me almost $10/month to borrow. If I wanted one of the nicer boxes, I had to sign up for unrelated services like some "triple play" with phone service included. Not happening.
The 'demo' application was a set top box because SGI was making a lot of hay with doing 'video on demand' in Florida and how that was the new hotness for selling servers.
So we had this demo that had Fang (the mascot) bouncing around in his virtual world where you could click on things to bring up different activities, and there were movie posters in this virtual world that if you clicked on them would bring up a screen letting you rent the movie or watch a trailer etc. Some excellent animations from an artist named Joe Palrang and it all ran on a Sparcstation 10.
We knew of course that set top boxes (STBs) at the time were 8 bit micros (think Zilog Z80 or Motorola 6811's) and cheap but hey with this cool new UI cable companies would surely be moving upscale on the STB. So we asked a number of cable companies where they saw their set top box in five years. (which would put it at 1998) and they were saying, "Well we are expecting big changes there, we are probably going to spend $100 per box rather than the current $50 per box."
That went over poorly since we needed way more oomph than that to host our fancy virtual world. And while there was a plan to keep the Java kernel small (45K bytes was the target) we didn't see a lot of hope with that cheap of a machine to run it on. As I recall that was around the time when Sun decided to cancel the whole thing.
Cable companies, like any company that tries to extract value by delivering streamed copyrighted content to consumers, are always squeezed nearly out of existence by rights holders in an unending battle to keep all the pennies. It is quite depressing and convinced me I didn't want to be in the cable business in my career.
AT&T just brought fiber to my neighborhood last month with a $40/mo 100mb/s plan. That's 3x cheaper than the > 100mb Comcast plan I was on that required me to have internet and basic cable.
Both cap at 1TB and AT&T had no gear rental fees and a $10/out of contract monthly fee after a year. So far the only MAJOR downside is I can't use 1.1.1.1 for my DNS which took awhile to reverse engineer after I broke the internet...twice. A fix is coming, but I found 6 months of internet forums saying that.
And I think 5 of my neighbors are about to make the switch too. The Comcast person on the phone started to make their scripted argument for how they could reduce my plan. I said $40 and no TV or save the oxygen for the next customer.
In the end, it's probably just equally as evil but it works out far better for my bills.
A good chuck of that fee is goes to licensing. The guide software, guide data, DVR, VOD, etc. often have per-box licensing fees the provider has to pay.
The $250 also seams low to me. I’ve seen numbers in the $600-$900 range. Cable STBs are also much more expensive than IPTV devices because they have tunners, upstream modulators, MOCA (for whole home DVR), switched digital video, etc. vs a IPTV box that has an Ethernet port and basically just decodes mpeg4 multicast streams. The cost of STBs is one of the reasons MSOs like the idea of network based DVR.
On top of that, why does it still cost an additional monthly fee to record locally to a DVR? Surely there is little to no additional cost involved in that, that isn't easily paid for by the standard monthly subscription price. And unless you've got one hell of a box, you're still limited to only two shows. It seems like if a monthly fee is involved, the DVR tech would be considerably better. Maybe something closer to just saving recordings as standard, personal on-demand media.
My mother used to rent movies on demand, but she's gotten a refund every single time because they've been unwatchable. She's since stopped doing that, at least.
The lower end ones with cloud PVR look like they're crazy cheap, like a low end cell phone. I wouldn't be surprised if the IP only ones were $50 in Q10000. There's a bunch of implementation notes about fiddly expensive analog calibration for the terrestrial and docsis transceivers, but it looks like the two major ASIC vendors both ship turnkey calibration systems to help reduce manufacturing cost. One of them has a nice menu of prevalidated contract manufacturers that already have production lines ready to go once you sign.