Toob: Personalizing Your TV

by Matthew York
June 2000

Watching TV is much more rewarding than it was just a few years ago. The explosion of TV networks allows viewers to choose from a greater array of programs than ever before. One of the newer TV networks, DIY! (Do It Yourself network) has a TV show called Caring for Gift Plants. For those viewers who have mastered the art of VCR programming, this is just one of thousands of programs to capture each week for viewing at a more convenient time. This is something that I refer to as VDL, or Video Delivered Later. For those early adopters of new technology who have a personal digital video recorder (DVR) like a TiVo or ReplayTV device, finding, recording and timeshifting programs is extremely easy.

We now have the ability to choose what to watch or record from thousands of programs that air during a given week. You can customize these DVRs so they search the airwaves and record only the type of shows that you are interested in. But in addition to the shows that broadcast each week, there are literally hundreds of thousands of potential TV shows (a.k.a. video programs) that exist that we don’t have access to because they aren’t offered over the air. For the most part they exist primarily on VHS tapes that we tend to purchase by mail or more commonly, rent from video stores.

Many entrepreneurs believe that the Internet soon will be able to deliver these videos to our living rooms. These ambitious innovators have launched companies that deliver video over the Internet. Real.com, Popcast.com, Atomfilms.com, Pixelon.com and Pseudo.com are just a few of the companies. Currently there are limitations that make the Internet impractical as an alternative to TV. A 30-minute video program requires an enormous amount of resources in order to be transmitted via the Internet. For you techies out there that translates to a full-screen, 640-by-480 image at 30 frames per second for 54,000 seconds (30 minutes). This requires a really fast Internet connection. The fastest connections today are cable modems and digital subscriber lines (DSL). But even these connections are still not fast enough to meet the requirements without some technical ingenuity.

Until recently, if you wanted to know what was on television, you searched the printed version of TV Guide®‚ magazine or the TV section of the newspaper. On-screen program guides are relatively new for searching programs to watch. They are convenient but they have limitations. The number of shows they display on a TV screen is far shorter than one page of TV Guide®. Web sites that provide TV schedules, however, are far superior since the searches are fast and a computer monitor can display a long listing of shows. It seems the living room is the best place to watch TV, but the computer might be the best place to decide what to watch.

What I’d really like to do is search for the video programs that I want while I am on the Internet and then go my DVR and watch what I’ve selected. I actually do search for interesting TV shows on the Internet, but then I have to print out the list and enter my choices by hand into my personal DVR. I look forward to the day that I can e-mail my choices from my computer directly to my personal DVR. By the way, if you’re not exactly sure what a DVR is or what it does, check out DVR Magic and Technology by Charles Bloodworth on page 40 of this issue.

The search tools on the Internet are getting more powerful. The MP3 search utility, Napster (www.napster.com) is a great example. Napster will only search for the highly specific item that you want, in this case an MP3 song. MP3 is a media format that stands for MPEG3 or Motion Picture Expert Group 3rd revision. This same format is used for storing and transmitting video. Soon I expect Napster-like programs to be able to search for individual online video programs.

But once you’ve found the video program you’re looking for, you still need a really fast Internet connection to receive the video, unless, of course, you’re not in a rush. Earlier I alluded to the ingenuity needed to get around this obstacle. With a PVR, once you’ve selected what to watch, it typically takes from a day up to a week to see the programs, remember this is VDL. One way to get around the Internet’s current bandwidth limitation is to download the video program over a long period of uninterrupted time, say for eight hours, while you are asleep. This slow trickle of bits of information is an excellent way to deliver a high-quality, full-screen TV program. I look forward to the day when DVRs like TiVo and ReplayTV are connected to the Internet and they can receive the video program while I’m sleeping. As of now, we can only achieve this with a computer and some tweaking of a few computer applications for "download timers".