Supreme Court OKs DVR-In-The-Cloud Concept

I read somewhere on a DVR forum, someone proposed the idea of being able to pull shows that you missed from the aggregated DVRs of other subscribers near you. Thus the burden of storage/bandwidth would not be on the provider as much as little bits from the community as other DVRs would act as seeders for recordings. I think that would be kinda cool.

tech-tard

DVR in the cloud...I dont see this working very well. Talk about lag, this would be ridiculous. Also I dont see the point of it.

bonedog73

@Accelerata: I know what they say - the problem is that the door is open so advertisers will pay and cable companies will capitulate. Hulu has only 1-3 minutes of commercials in a 21 minute sketch. Broadcast TV averages 11 minutes. None of this is good.

@Mytilus_edulis: Cable VOD systems tend to have RAID 5 setups. That's not a full backup of course, but certainly is better than what a plain old DVR does now.

@dancekat1: if you read the very short article, it specifically says they will allow you to fast forward through commercials, which is the part that was most likely being objected to in concept through an awkward legal argument. if it didn't let you fast forward through commercials, it would be Hulu.

Accelerata

@QuinbyNekrologist:
They'll probably eventually charge you an extra monthly fee depending on how much you have stored on your virtual DVR, or for how long you keep it. In fact the company can probably just save one copy of everything that was broadcast and redistribute it to as many people as "recorded" it virtually. They wouldn't actually waste storage space on multiple copies of any program but they'll charge multiple people to view the one copy.

GiltProto

they should be thrilled. this way rights holders could keep tighter tabs on what people are doing with recorded media.
i don't have a DVR, but frankly i'd rather have the physical media in my home than in the cloud.

@Mytilus_edulis: Well thats part of the point of having it in the "cloud".

tande04

@(Splat): Unfortunately, I don't trust whatever storage cablevision has, you need redundancies on your own record shows onto your own redundant hard drives or even using a blu ray burner (I dunno if dvrs allow that, I've never had one, I don't even have a TV). Don't trust a faceless company to back up your stuff though without paying top dollar.

I actually kinda get where 'Hollywood' or whoever is coming from on this one. If it is completely emulating a DVR, then it should be fine. If you can go back and pick whatever you want (which would be totally awesome), things could get a little dicey.

rjw1880

@(Splat): ^ 1.5 TB, I mean. Geeze, remember when gb's were big?

What I like about this concept is that it should eliminate two pretty major problems with my current set-up (1.5 gb DirecTV HD-DVR):

1) Failure of my Hard Drive = Loss of All Recorded Content (Surely the cloud will have some sort of redundancy)

2) Failure of my DVR Hardware = New DVR = Loss of All Recorded Content (as currently all recorded programs can only be played back on the DVR that recorded them)

Cloud recordings, I'm sure, will be tied to customer accounts - not hardware. The system I use now has allowed me to archive a couple hundred of my favorite movies in HD to my DVR. But someday, inevitably, on what will be a very sad day, I'll lose them all. It'd be nice if that wasn't the case.

But I won't be convinced until the pipeline is fast enough to serve the programming as quickly as I get it now.

I understand that everything will eventually be delivered via "pipe" into our homes - but I have to be concerned about the "delays" in pausing, playing, starting, and stopping that will occur. Comcast VOD is very slow to respond to remote commands. Plus...now we'll be forced to watch commercials. Thumbs down on this - vote with your wallets.

This does sound great for Cablevision, however I have a couple of questions on the implementation of this. On my current DVR I added an external hard drive that gives me all the space I need (especially for HD). Will there be any limit to the amount of space I can use in the cloud? Will there be any time limit for how long I can save a show?

QuinbyNekrologist

dont get what they are whining about... dont zillions of people already use "non cloud" based dvrs?

urbanturban666