The DVR Debate

In the old days, DVRs needed hard drives...but if Cablevision has their way, nary a truck will roll out to your home to replace your ancient digital cable box with the latest and greatest DVR technology.

Cablevision (and I would imagine other cable companies) are planning to introduce "remote storage" DVRs. This will allow them to give cable TV subscribers DVR'ing goodness without ever sending a guy with all-too-low-slung jeans out to crouch behind your entertainment center and give your tube some new tech juice. Nope, they'll be able to do it with a flick of the switch (and a ka-ching to their pocket books since our droopy-jeaned cable guy will be stuck at home wondering if his fashion faux-paus caused his early retirement).

I've always kind of wondered about this. What if there was some large box in the sky that recorded everything and let you watch stuff when you wanted to? Well there is sort of. I had a friend back in the days of yore (well, I'm not THAT old) that worked at an operations center for a major cable company in Los Angeles. One evening, my buddies and I crashed the operations center with a box full of pizza and a ice cold beers to surprise our technically-entrenched friend. He gave us the grand tour and there it was. A computer the size of your kitchen. No, not your refrigerator, or your kitchen sink, but your ENTIRE kitchen. This bad boy ran some ancient version of Windows and held all of the TV shows for two whole weeks. He said the shows were delivered to this thing via sattelite and then doled out to some other gadgetry that turned them into dumb old analog signals for deliver to dumb old analog cable boxes and TVs. Think of it as a medieval Tivo in the sky, if you will.

With the advent of digial TV, there really is no excuse for not giving people whatever choice they want. I mean honestly, I pay my $20 per month for my two Tivos and my $40 for basic extended cable each month, why can't I watch what I want, when I want, where I want? Well it all comes down to the mighty and ever-persitent dollar. They'll make you believe that this technology is state of the art and will cost them more money than it would take to rebuild the sun and the moon if ever they fell out of the sky. In reality though, I've seen the kitchen-sized Tivo in the sky that held the key to all of this back when I was in college. I bet that thing is the size of a refrigerator now and costs less than your kid's college diploma to get going and load up with all of the world's TV shows. We could call it the TV fridge. I bet the guys publically crying about copyright and violation of terms of use are secretly patting each other on the back on how they're going to get a bigger slice of your paycheck, all because they can make you think that it's a really tough thing to make sure their TV fridge is plugged in and loaded up when in fact all it takes is a few college kids paid with late night pizza and ice cold beer.