Items tagged with DVR
Well, this is disturbing. Russian security researcher Vladislav Yarmak is warning of a backdoor that exists in firmware for digital video recorder (DVR) and network video recorder (NVR) powered by HiSilicon system-on-chip (SoC) hardware. This is a zero-day vulnerability that could allow an attacker to gain root access to a compromised device, thereby giving them full control of the gadget. Yarmak says he discovered the vulnerability in firmware made by Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology, a Chinese firm based in Hangzhou. This is an unsettling trend with Xiongmai—back in late 2018, it was reported that over 9 million cameras and DVRs built by Xiongmail (and rebranded by several other companies)...
Read more...
Each year for the big game, hordes of people around the U.S. that care nothing about football watch the teams fight it out. The people aren’t watching out of some fascination with which team will win; they watch for the commercials. The big game is probably the only time people want to see commercials when watching TV. If you fall into the camp that cares nothing for the football game but want to see the commercials and you have a TiVo with SKIP enabled, you will love this. TiVo has a feature called GameSkip that will let you playback the recorded game and skip the actual game and only watch the commercials. GameSkip won’t show up until the game is finished and when watching that...
Read more...
Plex has confirmed a new feature has been added to its DVR system that cord cutters will really appreciate. The new feature allows the watcher to skip over all the commercials in a TV program and sounds very similar to the Dish AutoHop feature that drew rage and legal action when it debuted back in 2012. Plex's solution to end commercials can completely remove the commercials from the recorded program. Plex TV is big for cord cutters, but it isn’t eating up all the internet bandwidth in your home. The TV content is captured by an external antenna and the content is recorded via Plex and then fed out to your devices. That means you can watch free OTA content from broadcast channels in your...
Read more...
There has been an explosion of set-top boxes, streaming sticks, and media casting dongles over the past few years. To keep up with the times (and an ever growing field of competitors), TiVo has gone and refreshed its product lineup with a couple new DVR products, the Bolt Vox and Mini Vox, and a new TiVo Vox Remote with baked-in voice search functionality for looking up live TV, DVR, video-on-demand, and online streaming programs. The TiVo Bolt Vox comes with the new remote control. It is the flagship DVR in TiVo's lineup and combines the company's most powerful DVR with the popular online streaming services. Both it and the TiVo Vox Mini are largely unchanged from their non-Vox predecessors,...
Read more...
If you have FiOS service from Verizon, things just got a bit more interesting when it comes to your DVR content. Customers that have both Quantum TV and FiOS Internet service will have the capability to watch all of their received content outside of their home (as long as you have an active Internet connection). This is made possible thanks to recent updates to the FiOS Mobile App for Android and iOS. Verizon says that “nearly all” of your DVR content is available to stream outside the home, so we don’t know exactly in what circumstances that the company would forbid you you accessing certain reordered content. "The latest innovations of the FiOS Mobile app are how today's consumers want to watch...
Read more...
Attention binge watchers, TiVo invites you to "give commercials the finger" with its new Bolt set-top DVR. It's a play on words that describes Bolt's ability to skip entire commercial breaks with the single press of a button, at least in some cases. It's part of TiVo's new "SkipMode" feature, which allows Bolt to distinguish commercials during "certain recorded shows" from everything else. Combined with TiVo's new QuickMode, a feature that speeds up slow-moving programs, the Bolt allows for 30 percent overall faster viewing of recorded content. When engaged, QuickMode adjusts the pitch of audio so that voices and other sounds still sound natural. TiVo reckons QuickMode will come in handy during...
Read more...
Game consoles sure have evolved over the years. My earliest console was the Atari 2600, a comparatively simple machine to today's game systems with even simpler controls -- a joystick and a single red button. That's all you needed to play titles like Pitfall and Asteroids. Now we have consoles that not only play games, but purport to be in charge of the entire living room experience. That's fine and dandy, and while I love my Xbox One (second to my gaming PC, of course), it's missing one key function -- the ability to record video. Home consumers have been recording live TV on a mass scale since the advent of the VCR, so this isn't groundbreaking territory we're talking about here. And if current...
Read more...
Finally, there's a DVR to pair with that 100-inch television you've been eyeballing. It's the TiVo Mega and it matches the TV's obscene nature by serving up a massive 24 terabytes of storage space in a hot swappable RAID 5 configuration. There's enough storage in the TiVo Mega to record 26,000 hours of standard definition television, which would take you nearly three years to watch. Of course, why waste such copious storage on standard definition? If you just want to record your high definition shows and movies, the TiVo Mega will allow you to store 4,000 hours worth of HD content before needing to make some tough choices, such as whether to delete that show you recorded 166 days ago or the new...
Read more...
It’s hard to imagine what else the CEO of a company that makes streaming media boxes would say, but Roku CEO Anthony Wood boldly claimed that it’s just a matter of time before DVRs become a thing of the past. “To me, it's pretty clear that all TV is going to be streamed. It's either going to be streamed to a smart TV, a gaming console or a streaming player,” said Wood In a Q&A with the AP. “Things like DVD players are going to go away. Cable boxes are obviously going away, too. DVRs are just a stepping stone technology.” Roku streaming boxes He also said that he ditched the DVR when his broke--five years ago. He says in his house, all of their TV watching...
Read more...
Just yesterday, a report emerged that TiVo was laying off much of its hardware design team, leaving only a skeleton crew to support existing devices, and getting out of the hardware business altogether to focus on the cloud. According to comments made by TiVo VP of corporate communications Steve Wymer to The Verge, the notion that TiVo is abandoning hardware is false. “It's not right to say that TiVo's out of the hardware business. We're just as fired up as consumers are about the Roamio and we expect to deliver on that for years to come. It's one of our core businesses and our shining jewel." He did, however, confirm the layoffs, and those would indicate that something is changing dramatically...
Read more...
TiVo has been high on cloud technology lately, enabling its Roamio Pro and Roamio Plus DVRs to stream to mobile devices, talking up an initiative to put its Roamio DVR in the cloud with a Network PVR, and demonstrating its TiVo nDVR network DVR prototype at CES, and accordingly, its time as a hardware maker may be coming to an end. According to a Wired report, TiVo has laid off five of its industrial design team members, leaving just two people to man the division and lend support to current products and future third-party hardware. The source of the report also said that TiVo is moving away from making any hardware at all. That nDVR device, which is obviously technically hardware, won’t...
Read more...
This summer, Comcast announced a plan to run trials of a cloud-based DVR service called X2, which it is now doing, and there’s also a tweener option at play with the X1 mobile app. The app, which is available in the iTunes store, allows those with access to the X1 cloud DVR trial to watch their recorded content on their iPhones or iPads. According to Multichannel News, the app version of the cloud DVR service will officially launch next month and be called Xfinity TV. The service will allow users to stream live TV, DVR-ed content, and on-demand content to mobile devices. Presumably, the service will be available to more than just iOS device, although the timeline for that is unclear. When...
Read more...
Of all the wonderful entertainment-related technology that has emerged in recent years, perhaps none is better than the DVR. Being able to record and watch your favorite shows whenever you want without having to sit through commercials is a true game-changer, but TiVo, often the proprietary eponym for “DVR”, is pushing things further by letting iOS users enjoy their recorded content while on the go. Those with TiVo Roamio Pro and Tivo Roamio Plus DVRs can both stream and download content stored at home to iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches from anywhere with a capable Internet connection. TiVo Roamio "Now with a TiVo Roamio DVR, whether it's a hotel in Denmark, the waiting room at the...
Read more...
It only makes sense, really. Netflix has taken over the content world in many ways, even going so far as to fund original programming of its own and buck the usual trend by making entire seasons available at once. That journey has led it to an enviable position, but to date, getting to Netflix still requires something that many American households don't simply have by default. You either need a computer, a tablet, a game console, or a standalone set-top box. We're guessing that executives within Netflix have been asking themselves this question for a long while: "What would happen if Netflix access was built straight into an everyday DVR?" According to a new Wall Street Journal report, that's...
Read more...
Google is shaking up the ISP field in a big way with its Google Fiber service, and some of the fruit it has shaken loose pertains to AT&T launching a competing service in Austin, which Google has slated as one of the cities to get its gigabit Internet and TV service soon. AT&T is launching a 100% fiber network that promises gigabit speeds under its U-Verse brand (with GigaPower) along with high-end TV services that include HD-ready whole-home DVR (for up to 8 TVs), which is a step toward competing directly with Google’s Internet-and-TV package. AT&T is looking to beat Google to the punch, though; the service provider says that it will launch its U-Verse with GigaPower option...
Read more...
Those commercials for the Dish Network Hopper, the monster whole-home DVR service that lets users record up to 6 channels simultaneously and store up to 2,000 hours of content, make the whole thing seem too good to be true. In reality, it’s not, but the major networks certainly feel like it should be. Multiple networks have sued Dish Network over one feature in particular: AutoHop, which allows users to automatically skip commercials in recorded content. It may seem a semantic designation to carp about an auto-skip feature when users have always been able to simply fast forward through ads in DVR-ed programs, but the networks disagree. However, Dish keeps winning the court cases. This week,...
Read more...
Like it or not, the cloud is the future. So, you best get an Internet connection (and perhaps a data plan) to deal with it. While local storage will always have its place, being instantly accessible anywhere where there's an Internet connection obviously has its benefits. Now, the biggest name in recording television has debuted its Network PVR. The project will bring TiVo Roamio's DVR experience to the cloud. TiVo's Network PVR extends the TiVo Service and consistent user experience while enabling consumers to easily find, consume and socially share cloud delivered content through the TiVo user interface. In addition to moving the Roamio experience to the cloud, TiVo would be enabling operators...
Read more...
With most tech-related mergers and acquisitions, there's generally a bit of excitement surrounding the news. But there's also some amount of fretting. In a lot of cases, companies will acquire another and then immediately shut things down. Yahoo recently did this with task-management app Astrid, for example. But in some cases, companies just leave well enough alone. For example, Yahoo's leaving Tumblr as it stood, despite acquiring that company as well. But in the case of Boxee, it looks as if the ill-fated axe will indeed fall. Samsung snapped up Boxee for around $30 million, but those hoping that their Boxee Cloud DVR service would continue humming along will be in for an unfortunate surprise....
Read more...
Boxee has steadily added to its portfolio of streaming hardware and software over the last few years, from its quirky Boxee Box streaming appliance to the Boxee Cloud DVR (which are actually made by D-Link) to software that runs on a number of devices. Now, the company is reportedly being acquired by Samsung. Techcrunch reports that Samsung is paying about $30 million for Boxee and will bring over all 45 or so of Boxee’s employees. Boxee Cloud DVR interface With Boxee and its assets, Samsung has another valuable arrow in its quiver of streaming capabilities. The company already makes Smart TVs that allow users to stream from a number of services, including Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and...
Read more...
As we've talked about before, the cloud is a great innovation...so long as you have access to a solid and quick Internet connection. But for much of the world, offline needs are still very real, and when you're talking about hour-long programming in high-definition, one has to wonder if we're really and truly ready to migrate those recordings from a local HDD into the cloud. Nevertheless, Comcast has announced a next-gen DVR platform that would indeed store your recorded shows off in the cloud instead of on your local DVR. This new platform release, known as X2, will be available to customers later this year. According to Comcast, "the next generation of the X1 Platform will be even smarter and...
Read more...
TiVo has won more than its share of patent disputes pertaining to its DVR technology over the last few years, winning settlements from AT&T ($215 million), Dish Network and EchoStar ($500 million total), and Verizon ($250.4 million). The latest companies to lose against TiVo are Cisco and Google-owned Motorola Mobility. (Motorola made lots of set-top boxes for the likes of Time Warner Cable.) According to BusinessWeek, Cisco and Google (which inherited Motorola’s legal troubles when it bought the company) will have to fork over a combined total of $490 million to TiVo, with Cisco being responsible for $294 million of that amount. In the wake of the settlements, TiVo enters licensing...
Read more...
Hate ads? Wish you could just skip 'em all, the Super Bowl notwithstanding? Get ready for your DVR. DISH just announced nationwide availability of the all-new Hopper DVR with built-in Sling whole-home HD DVR functionality. Outside of being able to placeshift content anywhere due to the integrated Sling capabilities, users will also be able to tap into DVR'd content through the DISH Anywhere app. With these features customers can watch their live and recorded home television content on Internet-connected tablets, smartphones and PCs at no additional charge. It'll also let users download DVR content to mobile products, and with the free Hopper Transfers app, viewers can move recorded television...
Read more...
