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Time Warner Cable Runs Out of HD DVRs

Posted by CowboyNeal on Fri Jan 26, 2007 05:33 AM
from the selling-like-hotcakes dept.
Television Media
jalvear writes "According to TV NewsChannel 9 in Syracuse, NY, Time Warner Cable said that they have run out of HD digital video recorder (DVR) boxes. Apparently, there's a shortage of HD DVRs because the company that makes the boxes have been 'overwhelmed by requests for them.' Seems like almost everyone has bought an HDTV during the holidays and wants to watch the Super Bowl in HD format."
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  • cabele companies (Score:5, Funny)

    by thebear05 (916315) on Friday January 26 2007, @05:43AM (#17766230)
    Wow cable companies doing a piss poor job of taking care of consumer needs. I'm Shocked
        • Fortunately in the DC area, the cable companies (cox and comcast depending on the area you are in) carry all the channels. Verizon also just entered the market with FIOS. I hate Verizon, but I hate comcast even more.. granted this is slightly off topic since I am talking from an internet standpoint. I get my TV through Directv. But you will find that regardless of whether its Cox, Verizon, or Comcast, they all provide horrible service, and hire the dumbest techs/sales people who do not seem to understa
        • Wow... You've done what I thought was impossible. You've made Canadian cable providers seem generous and fair.
        • Time warner rocks in NEOhio. I get fox and cbs and just about every other station I don't watch!

          For reference you might wanna google "verizon customer service" they have one of the worst records, so don't get your hopes up.

  • Not a problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Keeper (56691) on Friday January 26 2007, @05:49AM (#17766258)
    Fortunately it's possible to receive HD cable programming without one of their HD boxes ... Oh, wait, you can't...

    • Fortunately it's possible to receive HD cable programming without one of their HD boxes ... Oh, wait, you can't...
      Why not? I've seen friends that have Cox Cable and they don't need a digital cable box to receive the HD channels... at least not for the broadcast stuff from ABC/NBC/CBS... but what else is there to watch in HD? Discovery Channel? HDTV is the most overrated technology I've ever seen. It looks beautiful, but the content is still crap.
      • I've got Discovery HD.. Still waiting for Sci-Fi HD, though. Can't wait to watch Mansquito in HD!

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by thebdj (768618)
        DiscoveryHD (which is worth it), TNT-HD, ESPN HD, ESPN2 HD, Comcast SportsNet HD, INHD (which shows VS. NHL games), the OTA stuff (which living as far away from the transmitters as I do, it is a good thing to have cable). There is also Universal HD (I don't get it, but I know it exist.), HBO HD, Showtime HD, Starz HD, Cinemax HD (I think), and HD On-Demand.

        There is tons of content, and it isn't all crap. If you watches Sports then ESPN and ESPN2 in HD are both well worth it. If you like the movie chann
        • You know, anyone I hear someone say they don't care for a product why does someone come along and say "you don't like [insert technology here] because you can't afford it." or roughly insinuate the same. It's a real nice backhanded argumentum ad hominem for when people really don't have much of a case to debate with the person but don't like what the person said. Cute.

          You can get HDTV for an extremely low cost these days, gone are the days when you couldn't buy anything with HD in the name unless you paid

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by thebdj (768618)

            You know, anyone I hear someone say they don't care for a product why does someone come along and say "you don't like [insert technology here] because you can't afford it." or roughly insinuate the same. It's a real nice backhanded argumentum ad hominem for when people really don't have much of a case to debate with the person but don't like what the person said. Cute.

            Because I can name a number of cases where this has been the case. You will find a number of people in this world who will berate things merely out of some degree of envy or jealousy. Are there people who do not want HD and could afford it? Yes, but he blatantly attacked a lack of content which is a terribly false assumption as I can list a fair number of HD channels.

            Why do you join in on the lack of content? I know a lot of adopters who are sports fans, and maybe the fact that there is a good deal of

      • The content is catching up.
        Pretty much any sport you watch is in HD. I know a lot of the slashdot crowd isn't in to sports, but for those of us who are, HD Football looks so much better.
        Almost any new show is in HD as well.
        I get the movie network in hd, and now we don't rent movies any more, because that looks better then DVD...it just means we have to wait a few months more to watch the movies.
        The only show that I would really like to see an HD version of is Deal or No Deal...maybe not though...HD really

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by CheSera (176903)
      This is pleasantly untrue. If you have a TV with a QAM tuner, or any device with a QAM tuner, you would be able to pick up the HD signals for the local broadcasters just fine. Also, since we're talking about local broadcast here, you could go one step further and pick up an OTA and HD tuner and not have to have cable at all. Not to mention what has been already said, that you could still pick up a non-dvr hd box. So you can still get your hd without one of their boxes.
    • Actually you can. In comcast land many of the HD OTA channels are tunable by any Decent HD-TV set. If your set can it's either really old, or one of the crappy ones without a ATSC/QAM tuner.

      The fun part is that if you get a A180 ATSC tuner card and install it under linux, you can not only tune the entire QAM constellation but you can also watch the on-demand feeds your neighbors are watching as they are unscrambled.

      We were watching someone that was in the neighborhood of the office that was getting some o

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by aboyko (16319)

      Fortunately it's possible to receive HD cable programming without one of their HD boxes ... Oh, wait, you can't...

      Sure you can. Most cable companies don't encrypt the digital QAM feed for at least the local broadcast channels (and sometimes quite a few more channels), so a QAM tuner (built into many HD TVs, or available as an set top box or as a computer peripheral) will let you get HD content to do with as you will. I get something like 8 HD channels unencrypted. plus a few dozen SD digital channels, as a regular analog customer with no cable company-provided box.

    • this is the only option short of buying a new set many users have. Over the air ? How many people do you know who actually do that and have HDTVs? I can't recall the last time I saw one let alone met anyone using over the air TV.

      The Satellite service I have offers a DVR with HD Ability for a rate far cheaper than anything I can get from TIVO and if it breaks they will replace it. Also, since my TV isn't capable of receiving/interpeting HD on its own this single device covers both my needs (that and it ca

    • You are totally wrong.

      You can receive HD programming without a HD box.

      Typically, on regular cable a lot of channels will not be encrypted and all you need is a QAM tuner.

      Generally, the good stuff is encrypted, so all you can get is local and educational channels without a box. No espn or discovery...

    • Re:Not a problem (Score:5, Informative)

      by jeaton (44965) on Friday January 26 2007, @10:34AM (#17769112)

      Fortunately it's possible to receive HD cable programming without one of their HD boxes ... Oh, wait, you can't...
      Sure there is: Cable cards.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by powerlord (28156)
      Sure you can. Cable-Cards into a TV of Series3 TiVo.

      Mine is working just fine without any need for an HD-DVR from TimeWarner.

      In fact, since they have a shortage, I feel altruistic for helping lower the demand for their crappy HD-DVRs. :)

  • Watch superbowl? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ForestGrump (644805) on Friday January 26 2007, @05:52AM (#17766278) Homepage Journal
    Why! why for the love of HDTV?

    Just go download the commercials on your fav torrent site or youtube. Don't waste your life watching the filler.

    Grump
    • Dude. It's all about the live experience. With an HD DVR, you can start the party, then have everyone sit down two hours after kickoff and watch the commercials without sports interruption. And yeah, you can also avoid the halftime show with "Hooray for Everything" (shudder), without missing the eventual nipple.

  • Is that real? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WinKing (1043446) on Friday January 26 2007, @05:54AM (#17766284) Journal
    It might be, but I think most of these type of stories are created for publicity or an advertising stunt. Will like to read others comments.
    • Surely the last thing a company sitting on a pile of hot products would do is tell its customer base that there's none left. How many people thinking of getting a box will now read this and think "forget it"?
      • Surely the last thing a company sitting on a pile of hot products would do is tell its customer base that there's none left.

              What, like Sony and the PS3 you mean?
    • It might be, but I think most of these type of stories are created for publicity or an advertising stunt. Will like to read others comments.

      It's the same story in Raleigh, NC. 11,000 orders for HD service since December 1st. In a market of 500,000.Time Warner rushes HD boxes [newsobserver.com]

      The geek who thinks that HD is going nowhere had better look again. The train has left the station.

  • Debunking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by robbiedo (553308) on Friday January 26 2007, @06:03AM (#17766320)
    A considerable amount of commentary concerning the format war between Blue Ray and HD-DVD is based on the notion that standard definition is "good enough," for most owners of HDTV's, thus neither format will achieve deep penetration in the short term. However, this run on HD-DVR shows a clear demand for HD content. Comcast offers rental for their HD-DVR for a modest price, and no contract, and customers are snapping these units up. ON DEMAND had HD movies that can be viewed at the customers leisure, much of this content is at no additional charge. It has been posited that the format war is irrelevant due to people downloading HD content over the intertubes; however, the cable companies may make this argument irrelevant with the ON DEMAND feature, and the growing HD content. People want HD content, but are not willing to get hosed in the process by greedy corporations trying to win an unnecessary format war.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Xugumad (39311)
      I don't know what broadcast TV in the US is like, but here in the UK SD broadcast TV isn't even close to DVD quality, while the HD broadcast is generally around HD-DVD/BluRay quality, meaning there's a much bigger improvement visible.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by mikael (484)
        The best example of poor quality is watching one of those orange fireball explosions. Then the JPEG compression blocks are clearly visible.
    • Also, another claim often made was that nobody actually has an HDTV, which, judging by demand of the DVRs, is not true. I don't think HDDVD+Bluray is going to outsell regular DVDs any time soon, but statements like "This format is dead because nobody has an HDTV to watch it on" are just FUD.
      • Like the guy below you pointed out, how many people who have HD-DVRs actually have an HD TV? It's a valid question. There's probably quite a few people who opted for the HD-DVR because it gets better quality than the standard DVR, even with a regular TV. Maybe they got the HD receiver because all the stuff in standard res is overcompressed crap with tons of artifacts. Then again, maybe the HD stuff is too. I don't have HD tv, but the standard digital cable is often worse than the analog signal that run

  • uh, no... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 26 2007, @06:12AM (#17766362)
    Many people (including me) got an HD-DVR not because they have an HD TV set at home (I don't). The disk in those HD-DVRs are the largest ones (160 or 120GB) and they work just fine on standard definition TV sets. The disk space is the only reason why I and many others went with an HD-DVR. I was about to replace my other old Explorer 8000 with an 8300HD this weekend. I sure hope I will be able to get one.
    • Is that really all the disk space you get? An HD-DVD movie can be 25 GB. The one they posted on Pirate bay last week was 19 GB I think. That's only 8 movies on 160 GB. Or maybe they just over compress everything they record. You'd be much better off getting a TV tuner and a 500 GB disk, and recording everything in standard definition at 12 Mb/S

  • hddvr, not hd boxes, are out. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    is everyone but me ignorant? this says they are out of DVR boxes. DVR > but not = HD Box.

    Just because they are out of DVR's does not mean they dont have Non-DVR HD boxes.
  • I guess people want them in hi-def this year.
  • They priced HDTVs under [variety.com] their market price:

    The fiercely competitive pricing came at a cost. Best Buy and Circuit City, the nation's two largest electronics retailers, both missed analyst expectations in their third-quarter earnings, reported in mid-December. Circuit City posted a sharp loss for the three months ending in November, which the retailer blamed on low HDTV pricing. Even so, the retailer said it had no plans to back off as it tried to gain market share.

  • So it's a toss up between craven theft and indifference, and their general inability to figure out what the fuck they are doing on any given day. As a TW customer in NC I can attest that there are two divisions inside TW that fight neck and neck for supremacy in the company. One is the We Don't Give a Shit division and the other is the We Don't Have a Fucking Clue division.
    • Just like verizon.. they must use the same management training seminars..

      I hate ALL cable companies, I have had to deal with 3 in my 10 years in the DC area, Adelphia, TW (I actually worked at Roadrunner for a short while) and Comcast.. I despise them all, I also hate verizon, but I hate them slightly less then I hate the cable companies. I am happy with my SDTV directv, customer service is good, and I like my directivo :) The fact that they no longer use said boxes is dissapointing. Whats even more diss
  • It doesn't sound like people want to watch football. If they company is having a shortage of HD PVRs, it's because the people with HD sets want to record their shows in HD, or skip commercials. If you just want to watch HD source material, just get an HD cable box. It sounds like they have those available.
  • the box TO AVOID is the infamous hr20.

    its a truly crappy piece of engineering (often called a POS or POC on the dbstalk forums...).

    I had one for 2-3 days. cancelled my DTV service when that box lost 2 shows in 2 days! come on - go back to tivo - at least they know how to make embedded software for dvrs.

    but noooooo! directtv had to go it on their own. they outsourced the development (I suspect) or even worse, they did it in-house and had insufficient talent to really pull it off. its been in 'debug mode
    • I think I am coming to the same conclusion as you. We just got a HD set a few months ago and I fear making the complete switch to HD. We have DirecTV and we have been very happy with it compared to the cable option (Adelphia).

      We have had Tivo for years and love them. Currently we have a various Tivos and can only use them for non-HD content. The only HD content we watch is the free over-the-air stuff. We watch it sometimes and sitting through commercials is very weird to us. :-)

      So now I am looking at our DV
    • never on my SD tivo box (dual tuner direct-tivo) would they be able to remotely disable the ability to view shows I already saved!

      so many things have happened that I would never have believed before (patriot act, DMCA etc)

      tivo can adjust your programming on the fly.

      if the broadcast flag every gets tossed into the FCC's ring- you can be damn sure that some content owner will sue, and force the 'flag' applied retroactively to tivo content.

      REALIZE THIS: Tivo has the ability to program wise do anything to that
  • If so, there's a ton of consumers out there that are going to be very frustrated. I've never dealt with a shoddier product than the Scientific Atlanta PVR that I had through Rogers Cable a couple years ago. It was a HUGE pain in the ass to use.

  • My local cable carrier can't spell HDTV (or Internet for that matter). I went with DirecTV for a couple other reasons but I haven't even subscribed to their HDTV offerings yet. One reason is they were having HD DVR shortages for a while last year.

    Follow this thread at Lumenlab [lumenlab.com] and build your own HD antenna! I live ~45 miles as the crow flies from the nearest transmitter. With an antenna I built based on some of the ideas there I can receive 3 HD channels out of 4 possible offerings. I can pick up FOX, NB

  • So many people dont seem to know how good digital broadcast TV is. By law almost all the HDTVs sold nowadays have tuners built in. All they need is a cheapo antenna and they pull stunning pictures off the air. Where I live I cant get a single analog TV off the air. I just live 10 miles from the transmitters, but this place is full of hills and valleys. But with a cheapo antenna from Walmart I am getting 11 digital stations, one from some 80 miles away! I get CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, PBS, WB and one evangelical s

  • it's their pricing model. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Deathlizard (115856) on Friday January 26 2007, @08:20AM (#17767140) Homepage Journal
    I'm a recent Adelphia to TWC transfer. Adn I can tell you that it's not exactly HDTV demand that pushing these units.

    Under Adelphia, it was roughly $5 for a standard digital box, and $10 for a HD DVR. last month, I get a rate adjustment that raised the Standard box by $3 and dropped the HD DVR by $2. That's right, the HD DVR is now the same price as the cheap SD box with no DVR. So basicially, if you already had DVR service, you might as well replace all of your SD units with the HD DVR's because you're paying the same price anyway for the SD units, and you can get the free HD channels as well. (even without an HDTV, the HD local channels are much clearer than their analog equivelant)

    I'm sure I'm not the only person from the Adelphia changeover that noticed this.
  • I've got my HD DVR box from Time Warner. For one, I can never live without DVR again. The amount of TV I do watch actually has gone down, because if I feel like watching a show I just pull it up from the list.

    The HD DVR is beautiful. I've got "They Live" and a couple other movies stored in HD (nothing like a 20 minute fight scene in HD).

    There are two drawbacks, one of which is Time Warner's problem, the other isn't.

    For one, the unit freezes up about once a day. This happens quite a bit when I'm watching
    • Actually NFL footbal was revitalized for me by HD broadcast, and the large screen format. I had not watched football for years because it just was not very much fun to watch on a 32 inch fuzzy square picture. I bought a external HD antenna for my 52" HDTV, and was wowed by the over the air broadcasts for free, especially the NFL broadcasts. The technology that the networks are employing to exploit the format is just amazing. I was blown away by it, I bought an HD 720p projector about 6 weeks ago, and I am
    • The problem here, is patents.

      The enitre HD scene is chock loaded with patent upon patent dealing with nearly every aspect of the hardware, software and content of the Cable/PVR/TV suite. It is impossible for competitors to emerge when the big companies involved are bristling with frivolous lawsuit ready patent portfolios.

      Without fear of patents, imagine the possibilities. There's probably two dozen people reading this story who could string together a company selling linux based PVRs. I've half toyed with the idea of setting up some kind of company making pimped out terabyte TiVo/PVR home servers streaming content wirelessly to Joe SixPack's TV. I'd sell it to him like a microwave oven, and I'd make it usable. Off the shelf parts, screw it together yourself. You could make 30 a month in your garage.

      But its a fantasy, and not only because I'm no real entrepreneur. For a start, thanks to the cable monopoly, I could never really get the PVR to "Just Work" with the cable signal. And that's before TiVo et al come pounding on my door with cease and desist orders.

      Imagine how real entrepreneurs must feel. There's honest to goodness market out there, waiting with its cash for a good product. People want it, you can make it, but you just can't sell it.

      But hey! Thats what patents are all about right? Stopping those greedy garage geeks dishonestly profiting from the tireless innovations of companies like Time Warner. Without patents, Time Warners CEOs would starve!

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Shads (4567)
        What you expect people to know what they're talking about before they spew bs comments?

    • They were selling decent 8' HDMI cables for $19.95. Not bad considering Radio Shack and Best Buy and Circuit City and ALL of them don't carry any for less than $60.

      What do you mean, decent HDMI cables? They're a digital cable, there's no data loss until the cable degrades enough that all the data is lost. That's what error-correcting codes are for.

      That's what I hate most about cord manufacturers. The cost of a DVI cable seems to have gone UP because they now can be used for TVs. The worst,

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