[132937] in North American Network Operators' Group
OT: how smart cable TV works
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jay Ashworth)
Thu Dec 2 19:28:05 2010
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2010 19:26:05 -0500 (EST)
From: Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com>
To: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <6EFFEFBAC68377459A2E972105C759EC032BFABD@EXVBE005-2.exch005intermedia.net>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ryan Finnesey" <ryan.finnesey@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
