Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV

Thomas Hawk writes "Cory Doctorow is posting over at Boing Boing about some technology that he apparently saw this weekend at London's Open Tech conference. According to Cory, this new technology from Promise TV takes the form of a home-built PVR with lots of high-capacity hard drives and claims to be able to record every show on every channel being recorded in the UK for an entire month. 'Why program a TiVo to get certain shows for you when you can record every single show on the air, all at once, and then use recommendations, search, a grid, or any other means you care to name to figure out which of those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of programming you want to watch.' The company seems somewhat cryptic with a simple website that appears to be collecting your email addresses for an announcement in August. "

This was featured at OpenTech

[badfish99]

This was supposed to have been featured at OpenTech 2005, according to their website [ukuug.org].
OpenTech 2005 was featured in a Slashdot article a few minutes ago here [slashdot.org]
Did anyone go to OpenTech and see this thing?

Although... it says there that it will record an entire week, not a month. So maybe that was this one's baby brother.

There are hundreds of UK TV channels

[rklrkl]

This is utter bunkum because there are hundreds and hundreds of UK channels - 5 analogue terrestrial, about another 25 on digital terrestrial and about another 300 (!!) on digital satellite. Yes, with 5 analogue or digital tuners, they could record BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5, but let's face it, most of that's now rubbish and the better stuff is on digital satellite (which they will *not* be able to record massively in parallel - Sky who run it currently only have a twin tuner for example and that needs a dual LNB on your dish too !).

I'd rather see some effort made to allow broadband users to download TV shows (even a small fee for this would be acceptable - a few pounds a month) from the time they are aired on normal TV for, say, up to 2 months afterwards. Now this would be *far* more useful, especially now that 2Mbit/s is starting to become the normal for UK broadband.

Is this really a feasible home appliance?

[ErpLand]

Let's make some calculations assuming that they're going to record all the DVB-T ("Freeview") content in the UK. I watch DVB-T in Spain using a MythTV [mythtv.org] box but the numbers should be roughly the same as for the UK.

45 mins recording of one channel = 1401390703 bytes
=> 1 hour = 1868520937 bytes
=> x 24 hours/day x 30.5 days/month = 1.37 TB per month per channel

Now there are about 30 freeview channels so we would need 41 TB of storage .... that's 82 500GB hard disks in RAID0! Which would occupy something like half a rack and use about 1kW of power ...

Even to record the 5 main channels would be nearly 7 TB - still a lot of noisy spinning hard disks to stick under the TV. This doesn't sound like a feasible idea with the size of today's hard disks.

Re:Seriously Doubt

[3CRanch]

Unless, however, they plan on recording it with enough reduced quality that maybe you could replay everything on your cell phone...

A bit of digging on promise.tv

[mustafap]

Web site source code says 'Promise.tv Ltd'
Companies house gives
http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/b09fe60fa8e4ad5f 3ea4d24014a52ce2//compdetails [companieshouse.gov.uk]

A quick search on the registered address gives
http://www.touchslough.com/business/list/bid/91560 0 [touchslough.com]

A TV repair centre in Ascot. At least these people will be able to repair the thing when it goes wrong :o)

hardwired torrent appliance, natch

[madeye the younger]

Lots of 'it can't be done' posts, but a simple solution occurs to me - a pvr with a hard wired torrent application, which will record a random channel. Sell a few thousand of them, all the channels get covered/seeded, and although what you want may not be *immediately* available, with a broadband connection it can be had reasonably soon.

Re:Timing

[dagenum]

I thought this was total bunkum just because of the storage requirements but after a few (very rough) calculations based on my experience with mythtv and recording freeview I'm not so sure now.

There are 30 channels, of these 21 are 24hr and I'll assume the rest are 12hr making 25.5 24hr streams.

There are 3 shopping channels so ditch them making 22.5 streams.

Recording on myth each of these streams is approx 1.3Gb/hr, if you don't care too much about the picture quality compress this to ~400M/Hr.

So, that's 9Gb/hr, 216Gb/day and 6480Gb/month. I don't think I'd be too far off by saying that 50% of all the shows are repeats that have been shown earlier in the day/week/month so cut that figure in half and you end up with a requirement of 3240Gb of storage which is "only" 11 300Gb disks.

It certainly looks like you could do this with a multiple backend myth setup with a DVB card for each multiplex (once you can record a whole multiplex at a time) so I'm not as sceptical as I was.

I'm not saying it would be particularly quiet or energy efficient though.

Re:There are hundreds of UK TV channels

[Anonymous Coward]

they could record BBC 1, BBC 2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5, but let's face it, most of that's now rubbish and the better stuff is on digital satellite

Bollocks.

Record Free to Air Net TV?

[Paraplex]

I'd be more impressed if it could record all the "TV" broadcast over the net.

Seriously. They think we want their channels of media?

Keep your "TV"
Keep your "Blockbusters"
Keep your "Idols"

You had control in the past, but now its shifted and not even Boxes capable of holding a *million* hours of reality TV and home renovation or "Trusted Computing" or DRM or "The next big Justin Timberlake" will bring us back.

RIP centralised media

compress/recycle commercials

[Anonymous Coward]

It might be possible if they used one drive for commercials and only recorded each unique commercial once. I don't know about the UK, but here in the states if you were recording regular tv and you could do this for cialis and capital one, you could probably fit a year on a floppy :)

Distributed System

[strongmace]

It seems to me that the best way to have a featureset such as the one they are boasting, is to have a distributed system. What I mean by this is that each customer would automatically download and hold several television shows at a time.

Using a buffer, shows could be streamed to customers from other customers as they select it from the menu. Granted this wouldnt work for areas where there is a limited amount of bandwith per month, but I cant think of anything better right now. It is too early in the morning :|

Re:Total BS

[Pxtl]

"Got thirteen channels of shit on the tv to choose from." -- Pink Floyd

I think back to that line, and look at how far we've come - more channels, same shit.

well say 4TB

[hsmith]

40GB x 100 = 3500 hrs of recording 24hrs day * 30 days = 720 hours you can record for a straight month 4.8 channels non-stop

Re:Is this really a feasible home appliance?

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt it's a home appliance. It's a service. You contract with them for cable service, and rather than deliver it over coax cable, they deliver it over DSL. The PVR sits at their end. They record (on your behalf) all of the channels you are subscribed to, which you can then stream whenever you like. Where they win is that for the second customer, they don't need to purchase hard disks or tuners for the channels the first customer subscribed to. By the 100th customer, they've got every channel covered already and are making a profit.

This sort of setup has been discussed before on slashdot: Rise of Internetwork [slashdot.org], and another article I couldn't find that discussed using C-Band Satellite and fiber feeds to neighbors.

Re:You just need one hardcore nerd per block...

[kyojin the clown]

hmm. i have found that "hey i have all of 'the OC'" or "yeah i have got the full series on of lost, including that one you missed" seems to work pretty well actually. try it.

Re:Is this really a feasible home appliance?

[perky]

I was at the talk, and that's pretty much exactly what they had done. There weren't any detailed tech specs, but the essence was that they had simply put a lot of big discs in a box the size of a fridge, added as many tuner cards as there are multiplexes (6?), and built some navigation software on top.