Category: Home Theater

Reading Time: < 1 minutePhillip Swan of TVPredictions.com obtained a copy of the manual for the forthcoming R15 DirecTV Plus Digital Video Recorder. The DirecTV Plus DVR is going to be marketed instead of the DirecTV DVR with TiVo that’s currently being marketed by DirecTV. The sales and marketing switch-over is expected to take place…

Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit today invalidated Federal Communications Commission rules requiring the implementation by home theater equipment manufacturers of the Broadcast Flag which was intended to stop individuals from copying certain digital television programs from one storage device to another. The FCC ordered the…

Reading Time: 2 minutesReports are all over the Internet that Comcast and TiVo reached an agreement allowing TiVo to provide Personal Video Recorder software for Comcast’s existing settop boxes and network platforms. Such a deployment is expected to take until mid to late-2006 to hit the majority of the markets that Comcast serves. Most analysts…

Reading Time: 2 minutesThe other day a close friend of mine told me a story about his father. His father has hundreds of hours of video that he recorded on VHS tapes and wants to preserve these recordings for long term archival purposes. My friend said his father would like to convert these tapes to…

Reading Time: 2 minutesDid other Operation Gadget readers see the first episode of the third season of The Apprentice last night on NBC? The goal in the first episode was to promote one of six new hamburgers that Burger King has announced and sell it at one of the Burger King franchises in Manhattan. The…

Reading Time: 2 minutesChris Anderson writes The Long Tail, a blog that I added to my Bloglines feeds recently. A week ago, he started a posting a really interesting series of articles called Long Tail TV. These are reflections on television that’s available in the United States and some of the technologies we can use…

Reading Time: < 1 minuteToday’s New York Times reports that TiVo was in advanced negotiations with Comcast to become their Personal Video Recorder technology provider as late as the Summer of 2004, but backed out of a possible deal because the per-subscriber revenue they would receive was not high enough. This information came to light…