[clue-tech] Anyone set up an HD Tivo with Comast?

[Nate Duehr]

Robert L. Harris wrote:
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> ~  I have 2 other standard TiVo's but my HD Tivo arrives tomorrow.  
> Anyone know any
> gotchas I should have in mind?  I need to call comcast and have them 
> provide a 'cable card'
> is all I've heard so far.

I've been watching the HD TiVo with interest, and the major "gotcha" 
coming up in a few years is that the cable companies are trying HARD not 
to support CableCard standards.

They're required (by law) to support the standard, but they're moving 
channels they deem "unimportant" to a new modulation scheme that saves 
them RF bandwidth on the cable plant, and hiding behind some loopholes 
when CableCard customers scream that they can't get the channel anymore, 
but they're paying for it.

This battle is REALLY big in Southern California right now, not 
Comcast... but I'm sure all the cable systems are "watching" how the 
legal issues come out.

Additionally with CableCards in the TiVo, you will not have any of the 
"on-demand" or other features that require communication back upstream 
to the Comcast servers, etc... things available through the normal 
Comcast box.

The TiVo has a so-called "one-way" CableCard interface inside the TiVo, 
and there IS a "two-way" standard, but TiVo chose not to support it. 
Whether or not TiVo can come to some agreements to just "turn that on" 
after figuring out how to talk to some of these cable company services 
-- or if it's a built in hardware limitation, I've not found that info.

TiVo is "partnered" with Comcast in the Northeast (Maine, I believe) so 
that bodes well for TiVo owners in other Comcast territory, but remember 
that much of the outside plant and gear here in Colorado is really the 
old AT&T Broadband network, depending on where you live... so the 
capabilities and functionality of "Comcast" isn't the same everywhere, 
on the technical side and in their head-end... assuming that large 
corporations love "standardization", this will slowly change over time 
as gear is switched out and things get updated... but if something 
requires an outside plant change... don't count on Comcast putting a lot 
of capital into the Denver market.

(Example, from discussions with friends back there, Indianapolis is WAY 
ahead of Denver on back-end speed capabilities on "Comcast"... of all 
weird things.  It's all related to the gear that's out in the field in 
the outside plant there, versus here.)

Also the closer you get to "FIOS Territory" where Verizon is the RBOC or 
CLEC in any particular area, back east... the cable companies really 
stretch to go faster... FIOS where it's available is kicking their 
butts.  I hold no breath for Qwest ever having the capital to really do 
FIOS, ever... too expensive out here.  Too much territory to cover. 
They have their Highlands Ranch fiber-to-the-house test site, and never 
took it any further, really.  There's also a couple of fiber-fed 
neighborhoods up in Ft. Collins/Longmont area, but they were private 
ventures, and not Qwest's doing.

A friend asked me the other day... he wants to receive off-air HDTV and 
have a DVR that works well, but he does NOT want to build MythTV or 
build anything, he wants to buy it.  He was wondering what options he 
had.  I sadly said that unless he could find folks who build Myth boxes 
and sell them, his next best bet was probably a Media Center PC.  Ugh... 
not a lot of options for off-air recording to a DVR without building it 
yourself, and that's kinda sad, since the very best network signals come 
from their own transmitter towers.  Satellite and Cable are compressed 
at the head-end, to varying degrees, and while the signal you're getting 
is "HD" -- they've stolen out a lot of the bits from the original 
broadcast.

Will be interesting to see if that's the next political battle... 
content providers requiring a specific level of compression or less in 
their contracts... "Thou shalt not compress our signals more than X 
percentage." types of mandates to cable and satellite providers.  May 
already be happening, that wouldn't be something they'd share with us 
lowly "consumers" unless it made them look good.  "We never compress 
anyone more than X."  Problem is, most people don't know they compress 
the HD signals, anyway.

Nate