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.
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I think Simple.TV is a dud and I'm pretty psyched about where Boxee is headed... although I recognize their shift in approach will leave many prior customers and supporters feeling burned. The new Boxee isn't entirely devoid of local playback capabilities, it's just not the emphasis, and both DLNA and USB storage will be supported at launch... albeit with less robust codec support. Also, I learned from Boxee that DVR-ed recordings will maintain the resolution they were viewed in - although I assume there would be a loss in fidelity due to compression. Also, while it'll pass thru whatever audio you receive, it'll only record in stereo. Something to consider. Lastly, there's something weird going on with the way they are launching only in select markets - I couldn't get them to sufficiently explain to me why they're doing it that way and feel like I'm missing a piece of the puzzle. Not that it'll probably matter much to me... as it seems I'm still on the wrong side of the OTA digital cliff.
So when you press record on the new Boxee box, does it start sending the stream to their servers? That doesn't seem right.
In terms of rollout, it would seem that Boxee would need to setup some type of data center in each market that can start the recording when a signal is sent from the Boxee box.
Yeah, I started asking about CDNs and such but they really didn't want to go into that level of detail. I'd be willing to bet there's some on board flash storage that temporary recordings are saved to before/as the content is stored to the cloud. Guess we won't know more until we get our hands on it.
Regarding the QAM: Comcast has been using some sort of loophole with all of that to decrease the number of channels available. One of the things that impressed me about WOW when they moved into our neighborhood was their commitment to allowing access to QAM if you had at least one receiver in the house. They list the QAM channels online and even have a mailing list informing you of changes and when/if you need to rescan the channels.
I've no doubt Comcast, and the other big guys, will take advantage of finally scrambling those last channels. But the regional providers seem to understand people like me (a former cordcutter) came back to cable because they could find a company that treated its customers as customers and not just basic numbers. If they turn on us, we'll leave them in droves.
In that regard, with cable users on providers like that, the Boxee stands a chance.