# Watch out, Tivo: FiOS Media Server



## bmgoodman (Dec 20, 2000)

ZDNet is reporting that Verizon is planning to offer a wireless home media server to its FiOS customers:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/home-thea...l-off-set-top-box-with-home-media-server/5506

Tivo needs to up their game.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Coming around the end of 2012. I can get a 4 tuner TiVo right now. 12 months is a long ways off. And they only plan to use a 1TB hard drive for six tuners.
2TB isn't even enough for the four tuner Elite. 1TB will be nowhere near enough storage capacity for a six tuner box. 2TB should be the bare minimum for that many tuners.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

I can't even imagine what Verizon would charge for it.


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## davezatz (Apr 18, 2002)

innocentfreak said:


> I can't even imagine what Verizon would charge for it.


I think the current DVRs are about $15 with the current whole home functionality pushing it towards $20. I'd say they' drop the $20 model and slide this one in and/or price it at $25? What's RCN charging for the Premiere Elite/Q? And in theory, you'd save money on not needing more DVRs in the house and just have the small extenders. Assuming you hang a drive off the Media Server if it lands with only 1TB. (They told me at least 500MB, but looking like 1TB at this point.)


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## slowbiscuit (Sep 19, 2006)

aaronwt said:


> 2TB isn't even enough for the four tuner Elite.


For people that actually watch and not hoard video, it's plenty enough.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

davezatz said:


> I think the current DVRs are about $15 with the current whole home functionality pushing it towards $20. I'd say they' drop the $20 model and slide this one in and/or price it at $25? What's RCN charging for the Premiere Elite/Q? And in theory, you'd save money on not needing more DVRs in the house and just have the small extenders. Assuming you hang a drive off the Media Server if it lands with only 1TB. (They told me at least 500MB, but looking like 1TB at this point.)


RCN charges $29.95 which gets you the Q and a Preview and additional Previews are $9.95. The regular Premiere is $15 for the first and $13 for the second according to the dslreports forums.

Yeah FiOS charges $15 for the basic DVR or $20 for the DVR+Whole Home functionality. They also charge $9.95 per HD STB.

I just don't see them dropping the $20 since it is $5 for turning a feature on and not every home will want the 5 tuners. I could see them charging $30 for the Media Server or possibly $35 for a bundle of one Media Server and one extender. If the extenders don't have tuners I could see those going for $5.95-$7.95 a piece.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

slowbiscuit said:


> For people that actually watch and not hoard video, it's plenty enough.


Depends on how many people and how many shows you record and if you have kids since you then tend to save shows they watch over and over.

Also unless your family/household sits down and watches every show together you are always going to have shows at least one person who wants to watch that they haven't seen. This eats away at your space very quickly.


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## slowbiscuit (Sep 19, 2006)

Yeah, but 2TB is a HUGE amount of HD storage no matter how many tuners you have. What is that, 300+ hours? And it's not enough, knowing that you can offload to a PC if you need more?

Jeez, some folks here just like to archive everything. To each his own I guess, but I don't see how you can watch all this stuff.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

slowbiscuit said:


> ...To each his own I guess, but I don't see how you can watch all this stuff.


Hey, we're gettin' to it, okay?


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

slowbiscuit said:


> Yeah, but 2TB is a HUGE amount of HD storage no matter how many tuners you have. What is that, 300+ hours? And it's not enough, knowing that you can offload to a PC if you need more?
> 
> Jeez, some folks here just like to archive everything. To each his own I guess, but I don't see how you can watch all this stuff.


300 hours divided by however many people since not everyone watches the same thing.

Some of us also like to watch in marathons rather than single episodes.

For example I just finished watching season one of Justified. FX is rerunning it from the start before the new season starts up so I waited until it recorded all 13 episodes before starting. I usually wait till I have 4 or so episodes of a show before I start watching if it is a current show.

Having SD DirecTiVos with 500 hours a piece will spoil you and more than makes up for not having on-demand.


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## aadam101 (Jul 15, 2002)

innocentfreak said:


> 300 hours divided by however many people since not everyone watches the same thing.
> 
> Some of us also like to watch in marathons rather than single episodes.
> 
> ...


I don't really hoard but I have way more than 2TB of video in my house. I pretty much delete everything once I am sure everyone in the house has watched it who wants to watch it. It's a bit of a chore really.


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## Joe01880 (Feb 8, 2009)

Verizon has a history of planning and not implementing. The word "eventually" could mean "never" in the Verizon dictionary and would most definently mean "when and if they get around to it"; An example is FiOS 1.9 software update which started roughly a year ago and is still not fully deployed.
It all sounds nice but believe it when you see it from Verizon.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

slowbiscuit said:


> For people that actually watch and not hoard video, it's plenty enough.


I certainly don't watch everything I record, but I also like to have a variety of options when I sit down to watch TV.
2TB is alot for SD, but when you have families that mainly watch HD and with five or six members, 2TB will be used very quickly unless everyone in the family watches all the same content, which I've never seen.


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## ajwees41 (May 7, 2006)

bmgoodman said:


> ZDNet is reporting that Verizon is planning to offer a wireless home media server to its FiOS customers:
> 
> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/home-thea...l-off-set-top-box-with-home-media-server/5506
> 
> Tivo needs to up their game.


why Verizon doesn't offer service in our area, so this wouldn't make any difference to areas without Verizon service.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

I do watch everything I record and then some. I learned a long time ago that keeping a huge library of shows on a Tivo drive or HTPC is an invitation to disaster. I've lost entire seasons of shows due to hard drive failures. I've gotten to where I don't record more than I can watch in a single week, and I watch a lot of TV. If I find that I don't have time to watch everything I'll start cutting out season passes. Most of the time I find that I don't miss the shows I've cut from my schedule.

My only rationale for having a lot of recording capacity is because I travel on business, sometimes for weeks at a time. I never watch any of my regular shows while I'm traveling because hotel TVs are usually old 25" 4:3 CRTs in standard definition (i.e., they're crap). I may have two or three weeks' worth of shows backlogged when I return home. I actually look forward to a period when shows go into reruns because it gives me a chance to get caught up. I'll never run out of things to watch because I've got a 20+ TB unRAID server that's about 80% full of ripped Blu-Ray movies and DVDs and other miscellaneous torrent downloads of TV shows.

I can definitely understand why people with small kids would keep a lot of shows. My kids are all grown up and I just became a grandfather a couple of months ago so my kids were never really exposed to Tivos all that much. However, when they were both young they'd play the crap out of every Disney movie I had on VHS as well as a few other favorites. Keeping a library of kid's shows on a Tivo is a great idea because it's something they can easily grasp and understand how to use. One huge caveat is that if the drive dies the whining will be endless. I'd keep a backup of whatever shows they watch on a regular basis so you can restore them if a Tivo catastrophe occurs.


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## Johncv (Jun 11, 2002)

innocentfreak said:


> Depends on how many people and how many shows you record and if you have kids since you then tend to save shows they watch over and over.
> 
> Also unless your family/household sits down and watches every show together you are always going to have shows at least one person who wants to watch that they haven't seen. This eats away at your space very quickly.


Shows you watch over and over you buy on a DVD. The TiVo is NOT a storage device.


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## Johncv (Jun 11, 2002)

Joe01880 said:


> Verizon has a history of planning and not implementing. The word "eventually" could mean "never" in the Verizon dictionary and would most definently mean "when and if they get around to it"; An example is FiOS 1.9 software update which started roughly a year ago and is still not fully deployed.
> It all sounds nice but believe it when you see it from Verizon.


Keep in mind also the lawsuit Verizon brought against TiVo. Which everyone thinks Verizon, AT&T and Mirocrap are going to lose. In which case they will end paying TiVo load of money and licensing TiVos Technology.


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## innocentfreak (Aug 25, 2001)

Johncv said:


> Shows you watch over and over you buy on a DVD. The TiVo is NOT a storage device.


Only if they are offered on DVD.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

DVD? No DVDs here, only BDs. And then I don't watch from the actual BD, only from one of my servers over the network.



mr.unnatural said:


> I do watch everything I record and then some. I learned a long time ago that keeping a huge library of shows on a Tivo drive or HTPC is an invitation to disaster. I've lost entire seasons of shows due to hard drive failures. I've gotten to where I don't record more than I can watch in a single week, and I watch a lot of TV. If I find that I don't have time to watch everything I'll start cutting out season passes. Most of the time I find that I don't miss the shows I've cut from my schedule.
> 
> My only rationale for having a lot of recording capacity is because I travel on business, sometimes for weeks at a time. I never watch any of my regular shows while I'm traveling because hotel TVs are usually old 25" 4:3 CRTs in standard definition (i.e., they're crap). I may have two or three weeks' worth of shows backlogged when I return home. I actually look forward to a period when shows go into reruns because it gives me a chance to get caught up. I'll never run out of things to watch because I've got a 20+ TB unRAID server that's about 80% full of ripped Blu-Ray movies and DVDs and other miscellaneous torrent downloads of TV shows.
> 
> I can definitely understand why people with small kids would keep a lot of shows. My kids are all grown up and I just became a grandfather a couple of months ago so my kids were never really exposed to Tivos all that much. However, when they were both young they'd play the crap out of every Disney movie I had on VHS as well as a few other favorites. Keeping a library of kid's shows on a Tivo is a great idea because it's something they can easily grasp and understand how to use. One huge caveat is that if the drive dies the whining will be endless. I'd keep a backup of whatever shows they watch on a regular basis so you can restore them if a Tivo catastrophe occurs.


Storing the content in an array that can handle a drive failure is a godsend. Although personally in the last 15 years, and over 150 hard drives I've used at home, I've never had a hard drive die on me while in use. (any data I've lost has been user error, like in 2002/2003 when I had 3TB of storage for my OTA HD recordings and I ran a defrag on one of my drives by accident. It messed up a bunch of my HD movie recordings I had back then)

My TiVo Desktop stores my content in a 6TB RAID 5 array. Then I have thirty two TB of storage in an unRAId and fifty six TB of storage in my WHS for my HD content from my HD DVDs and BDs(as well as music, backups, etc). If a drive dies I will not lose any data.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

Johncv said:


> Shows you watch over and over you buy on a DVD. The TiVo is NOT a storage device.


You're going to have a hard time convincing a lot of Tivo owners that this is true. I'm always amazed when people declare that they have hundreds of hours of programs stored on their Tivo with little or no intent to purge them. One hard drive failure should nip that habit right in the bud.

I'm also no longer a fan of keeping a library of movies and TV shows on DVD and Blu-Ray disks. They just take up space and get damaged from mishandling (my family doesn't believe in using protective sleeves or jewel cases for storing optical discs. ) That's why I built an unRAID server with over 20TB of storage so I can stream all of my archived content to any TV in the house that's connected to a PC. It's convenient for everyone and there's no risk of damaging the hard copies. The server uses a parity drive so I can easily restore lost data if a single drive dies.



aaronwt said:


> DVD? No DVDs here, only BDs. And then I don't watch from the actual BD, only from one of my servers over the network.


Ditto for me.



> Storing the content in an array that can handle a drive failure is a godsend. Although personally in the last 15 years, and over 150 hard drives I've used at home, I've never had a hard drive die on me while in use. (any data I've lost has been user error, like in 2002/2003 when I had 3TB of storage for my OTA HD recordings and I ran a defrag on one of my drives by accident. It messed up a bunch of my HD movie recordings I had back then)
> 
> My TiVo Desktop stores my content in a 6TB RAID 5 array. Then I have thirty two TB of storage in an unRAId and fifty six TB of storage in my WHS for my HD content from my HD DVDs and BDs(as well as music, backups, etc). If a drive dies I will not lose any data.


We are of the same mindset when it comes to storing content. I have had more than my share of drive failures over the years. I just had the 2TB parity drive in my server die about a month ago. Fortunately, it was still under warranty so I was able to get it replaced rather quickly.


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## dwgsp (Aug 28, 2005)

While Verizon's announcement is interesting, it's not a game changer for the majority of current/perspective Tivo customers. FIOS is only available to a limited portion of the US market.


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

It will probably come out after after 1.9 rolls out to all their FIOS customers in 2030.


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## Sapphire (Sep 10, 2002)

dwgsp said:


> While Verizon's announcement is interesting, it's not a game changer for the majority of current/perspective Tivo customers. FIOS is only available to a limited portion of the US market.


Absolutely this. FiOS is irrelevant for most people.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Even for many people with FiOS it's irrelevant. especially since it's a year or more away from being released.


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## mr.unnatural (Feb 2, 2006)

I've been on FIOS for almost five years now and it doesn't interest me in the least. I've been able to do the same thing with my HTPC since I switched to Windows 7 and Media Center. The best thing about FIOS, aside from their internet service, is that they don't flag their programs as copy once. I can share recordings on any PC in the house without having to resort to extenders for remote playback. I just map the drive on my HTPC that contains my recorded shows and play them back on any other PC by streaming them over my network.


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## bradleys (Oct 31, 2007)

The FIOS future state isn't really any different then the TiVo future state - except that TiVo already has the hardware deploying...

Having a central server with remote extenders is absolutely the proper design and anyone wanting to remain competitive is going to have to move toward that architecture. And storage space with a central hub becomes even more important than that of a stand alone device.

But I guarantee that the devices are not going to come cheap from FIOS. A TiVo with lifetime will always be less expensive than renting long term from the service provider. (Especially with the resale value)


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## davezatz (Apr 18, 2002)

Raj said:


> Absolutely this. FiOS is irrelevant for most people.


Perhaps. But they are the 7th largest pay TV provider in the US - which isn't too shabby given their limited footprint, late start, and competition against the incumbents. But, speaking of irrelevance, check out RCN's small number.

http://www.ncta.com/Stats/TopMSOs.aspx


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Who is the largest provider that TiVo has made a deal with to provide Premiere DVRs like RCN is doing?

EDIT: I guess it is charter. With 4M+ subscribers, TiVo might have a healthy number of new subscribers if they embrace TiVo the way RCN has.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

aaronwt said:


> Who is the largest provider that TiVo has made a deal with to provide Premiere DVRs like RCN is doing?
> 
> EDIT: I guess it is charter. With 4M+ subscribers, TiVo might have a healthy number of new subscribers if they embrace TiVo the way RCN has.


The answer to that may depend on whether you count the Premiere-ish TiVo Virgin Media is using in the UK.


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

unitron said:


> The answer to that may depend on whether you count the Premiere-ish TiVo Virgin Media is using in the UK.


I was thinking USA. But yes I forgot about Virgin. They are projecting to have alot of new subscribers to TiVo over the next three years.


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