EchoStar Planning Network DVR For Customer by End of Year
NEW ORLEANS -- Seeking to go down the same road as Cablevision, EchoStar is developing a new network-based DVR for a major customer that’s believed to be Dish Network. EchoStar Chief Product Officer John Paul said it plans to have the new nDVR ready for its first customer by the end of the year. He wouldn’t name the initial customer, but corporate cousin Dish Network has historically received first crack at any new products from the technology spinoff. EchoStar, which previously developed a family of set-top boxes that incorporate Sling Media’s place-shifting technology, also pitches its products to telcos and cable operators.
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Speaking at the TelcoTV Cloud Services Summit last week, Paul said the service will closely resemble the network-based DVR that Cablevision has been rolling out in parts of the New York metro area. That means the new EchoStar nDVR would store each individual program that a subscriber records, no matter how many other copies may exist, but won’t back up any of the data. As a result, if the box’s hard drive should fail, all of the customer’s recorded programs will be lost. “We have to replicate the [Cablevision] model because of the [Supreme Court] ruling,” said Paul, referring to DVR Plus, the name of Cablevision’s new court-approved remote-storage DVR service.
Paul said engineers “just hate” the idea of developing a system that stores individual copies of the same piece of content, because it’s far less efficient than delivering multiple streams of the same programming. But he said EchoStar officials think the concept will scale well and should prove economical. “If you run the numbers [on a network DVR] versus putting [storage] in the home, it works,” he said. “But most people don’t run those numbers.” He said EchoStar will make use of inexpensive storage drives to create even more favorable economics for customers, and the company has looked at deploying single appliances that can support up to 5,000 customers.
Despite some early bumps along the road, ESPN has no regrets about launching its new 3D-TV network last year, said Bryan Burns, ESPN vice president-strategic business planning and development. Speaking during another TelcoTV session, he said ESPN officials are still confident that consumers will embrace 3D technology in their homes over the next few years. In his keynote, Burns recalled ESPN’s experience with HDTV, which it also adopted early. He said some questioned ESPN’s decision to plunge into HD in 2002, when few consumers owned HDTV sets. Now, he said, roughly 70 percent of U.S. TV homes have at least one HD set, and 51 million homes now have access to ESPN HD and ESPN2 HD, and the total daily audience of the two ESPN HD networks has doubled over the past two years.