OT: how smart cable TV works
Jay Ashworth
jra at baylink.com
Fri Dec 3 00:26:05 UTC 2010
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ryan Finnesey" <ryan.finnesey at HarrierInvestments.com>
>
> I have TWC in NYC. I see now I can restart most of the shows I watch.
> How is this done?
On digital cable systems, it's because your cable box is now really a
GoogleTV/Rokubox like thing that only looks like a "cable converter".
You tell it to pause, it allocates a channel for you, and -- courtesy of
a Supreme Court decision last year -- turns into a remote node for a massive
DVR in the headend. Same way they do all the on-demand stuff.
Is it the same MPEG encoding that came out of the station/network's MPEG
encoder? Almost certainly not.
Is it the same bitrate? Hell^no.
Cheers,
-- jra
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