Real Remote Control Put on Pause
Ever wonder why our visions of the future never seem to match reality? Sometimes it’s as simple as the old networks of phone lines and power grids not being able to handle the really cool, life-changing stuff.
Take the Replay home recording system. Replay, like its major competitor TiVo, develops technology that lets consumers record TV broadcasts not on a tape but on a hard drive just like the one in a computer. This digital recording technology gives users some neat capabilities, such as being able to pause a live TV broadcast.
But--and this is the cool part--Replay has been promoting a new service called MyReplayTV that lets users program the recording schedule with any Web browser. This is a really killer application. It’s the sort of thing that people will break down doors to get, once they understand what it can do.
Get an unexpected dinner invitation and, with a few clicks of the mouse at your office computer, you can tell the equipment back home to record the TV shows you’ll be missing. That’s power. That’s what we’ve been promised.
But you ain’t getting it here, buddy, because the system hasn’t been implemented correctly.
MyReplayTV is a good example of how not to do something. As a proof of concept, yeah, it’s terrific. As a functional solution to a problem I trip over quite frequently, it’s a dismal failure. It’s yet another thing that’s waiting for the Internet and computers to become far more idiot-proof than they are today.
It’s also an example of how hyping a service that’s not quite ready for prime time can damage an entire industry. The truth is I was really excited about the MyReplayTV concept and was set to break down and buy the box. But now I figure I’ll just wait a bit until the thing I really want comes down the road.
The initial roll-out of MyReplayTV will only let viewers use the Web to program equipment to record the next day. That’s right, all this investment, all this engineering, all this technical support designed to accomplish a task that is, for the vast majority of users, pretty darn pointless.
This failure is due not to stupidity on the part of the system’s designers but to the weird, kludgey nature of today’s networking.
The way things work right now is every night at some unholy hour, the Replay unit in a consumer’s home uses the phone lines to dial up the mother ship on a toll-free number and update the box’s database. TiVo works exactly the same way. The programming setup using MyReplayTV via the Internet is downloaded at that time.
And because this all happens sometime between midnight and dawn--Replay boxes dial out at staggered times to avoid overloading the system with thousands of calls simultaneously--no one can use the system in the way that makes the most sense.
This seems like such a simple thing. Why doesn’t it work?
A Replay representative finally explained it to me. Because Replay makes the calls late at night, they’re extremely inexpensive. Making the calls between, say, 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. would cost Replay a lot more money.
And that, my friends, is why this thing just won’t do what it should. The folks at Replay say they’re working on a system that will allow the box to make a call in the early afternoon, but the economics of such a system make such a development unlikely in the short term.
Do not despair. Over the next few years, you’ll see Replay technology--or something quite like it--built into your cable TV box. And that box will also offer Internet connectivity at cable modem speeds. Letting a free-standing Replay box dial into your local Internet service provider over the phone line is a technological, security and support nightmare that the Replay folks have quite rightly decided to avoid.
But once you combine the Replay technology with an Internet-based communications channel, magical things begin to happen. Assuming, of course, that you’ve got adequate security and privacy features built into the system. My initial reaction: Don’t expect anybody to get that part right the first time out of the gate either.
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Inside
* Dave Wilson answers reader questions in Tech Q&A.; T9
