26 ms·

How much does a cable box really cost? The industry would prefer you don't ask

120 points by ilamont 8y ago

rubatuga 8y ago
The ISP box in my home has a SFP cage, and fiber sfp adapter, with wireless ac and a nice OLED screen. Total cost is $130, but everybody gets a free rental.
- shawnz 8y ago
  Does it have video output though? We have a similar device as our modem (with Bell Canada) but still need set-top boxes at each TV in addition to the modem. The modem is given on a free rental, but the set-top boxes are not.
LanceH 8y ago
I would really like to buy a box that was sophisticated enough to cache which channels I have and what is showing on those channels. They all seem to do a very slow refresh every time I switch between menus. It's now a distant memory being able to switch between channels instantly. I should at least be able to page through the menus quickly.
- untog 8y ago
  If you have a cablecard based system you can often get a network tuner like the HD Homerun Prime and do away with the company's cable box altogether. It's what I did, and I'm pretty happy with the results - through Plex I have unlimited DVR and the ability to watch on any device. Channel switching is still slow, though...
  - cronix 8y ago
    I do the same, it's great! The cable companies are mandated by the fcc to supply subscribers with at least one cablecard free of charge so you can use your own equipment, like a TiVo. I have a HDHomeRun Prime and use 2 cards. The rental on the 2nd card is only $1.50/month, and I get 8 streams with it. I also bought a cablemodem for like $50. Other than the $1.50 cablecard rental, I don't rent anything from them except the service itself. Saves a boatload over years.
    - ascagnel_ 8y ago
      Comcast used to (circa 2014-2015) give me an $8 customer-provided equipment bill credit every month for using a CableCARD w/ a HDHRPrime.
  - BonesJustice 8y ago
    Last time I signed up for cable was about a decade ago, and at the time, I had a HD TiVo box with twin cable cards. Worked out to something like $1-3 a month for the cards, IIRC. Way more reasonable than what my parents were paying for their awful, laggy Comcast boxes. Of course, my cable provider had to make like three visits before they managed to scrounge up two working cards.
- captainmuon 8y ago
  I always thought about putting multiple tuners in the box, and just decoding multiple channels simultaneously. Then to switch a channel you would just "put another window in the front". You could have a predictive system that would decode the three most likely next channels and start decoding them. In the best case, this would move the latency of the first switch close to zero, and of subsequent switches to 1/2 or 1/3. To save energy, you could get one of these fancy remotes that they have for telefone conferences, that can detect when you pick it up. Once you lift the remote, start the extra tuners.
  - gowld 8y ago
    Doesn't this already exist, and that's how picture-in-picture works?
  - sjm-lbm 8y ago
    I have a (pretty old) TiVo that lets you do something similar to this - there's some button on the remote (I honestly can't remember what it is called) that lets you cycle between the tuners. It works pretty much like you describe - if a bit more manually - and has the added benefit of not requiring you to type a multi digit channel number every time you want to hop between your favorite channels.
    - wkearney99 8y ago
      Current models have six live tuners. All running a buffer for whatever channel is tuned on each. Works fantastically well. There's a "Live TV" button on the remote than cycles through them, or you can manually poke through a quick submenu to jump right to one in particular.
  - FooHentai 8y ago
    The 'EE TV' boxes in the UK work in this way. You pick your top channels (up to 4, I think) and it PVRs the lot continuously.
  - rasz 8y ago
    Afaik the delay is not in tuning per se, but in waiting for first decoded valid mpeg segment with I frame, and those are usually 1 per second? What could be done, on the cheap, Cable provider wide is authoritative server ready to give you arbitrarily generated I frames with 1/60 time resolution on demand, as most cable boxes nowadays are two way anyway (they need upstream link to transmit all the spyin^^^ channel usage statistics back).
shapiro92 8y ago
Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
- MatthewWilkes 8y ago
  This article should be switched to an alternative that doesn't have restrictive geofilters or removed.
  - esotericn 8y ago
    Agree. It's becoming rather farcical that I may have to use Tor to browse from ... a European IP.
  - dionidium 8y ago
    There's an assumption in this statement that doesn't survive scrutiny. This is original reporting. What makes you think there's an equivalent alternative? † † This perception is obviously a huge problem for papers like the L.A. Times (and for writers, in general). For better or worse, this is how people see it, now. If you don't like the source, then you just imagine substituting in another one, like you're buying pork futures (or whatever the opposite of original reporting is).
    - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
      The assumption may be that any worthwhile article will immediately be "reported on" (restated with no new information) by a dozen other sites. Edit: I'm not saying that's a good thing, guys. I agree with dionidium.
      - gowld 8y ago
        "rereported"
      - 8y ago
drblast 8y ago
I have the same reaction every time I read about any cable company, and that's, "WTF are you all still giving them your money for?!" They have a monopoly on a dying service you literally don't need at all, and most people hate having to deal with them. The pricing and contracts are antagonistic to customers. Is it just momentum at this point?
- ascagnel_ 8y ago
  In the US, cable companies are generally the only source of high-speed internet, and they sometimes charge a higher sticker price to provide internet-only service vs. bundling with TV service.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - mywittyname 8y ago
    I get cable internet for $55/mo with no cable packages at all. It's certainly overpriced for what it is, but it's still much, much cheaper than a complete package, which is easily twice that figure.
    - brianwawok 8y ago
      Comcast won’t sell me internet past 20MB without a TV package I don’t have hooked up to TVs. Super awesome.
  - rconti 8y ago
    Correct, I finally got tired of playing games with Comcast and I actually pay them more now for 250Mbps internet ($95) than I would for a TV+250Mbps bundle (I think the latter would have been $10/mo cheaper, at least for a year..)
    - soylentcola 8y ago
      This is exactly what I did. When I recently bought my first home, I was already aware that I would have to deal with Comcast if I wanted any semblance of high speed internet service. I could've gotten higher speeds for less (for a year before the price jump) and I could've gotten a lower price (for a year before the price jump) if I bundled cable TV... ...but between the so-called promotional pricing, the dicking around with another pile of box rental fees and assorted add-on costs, I just didn't have it in me. On some level I just decided that I would rather risk "missing out" on some minor bit of savings than buy anything more than the single thing I really needed to buy from Comcast. If I had any other real options I wouldn't buy anything from them. But they are the only option for something I definitely need. I'm not about to pay them for anything more.
esotericn 8y ago
I can't view this because I'm European, there's no box for me to even pay if I wanted to. So, yeah. https://outline.com/FGRxsT https://outline.com/FGRxsT
jasode 8y ago
I have a FiOS Motorola QIP7232 cable box with a builtin 320GB harddrive (circa 2013).[1] My last bill shows them charging me $21.99 per month for that box. (That's $263.88 a year not including taxes.) Last week, I called Frontier FiOS to cancel the cable TV but keep the internet. After the customer rep cancelled the tv, I asked if she was mailing out a shipping box so I could return the Motorola. She said she wasn't going to bother with it. So there's one anecdote to gauge how much the hardware is worth to them. (I do see that used ones sell for ~$50 on ebay.) [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=motorola+QIP7232&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=motorola+QIP7232&source=lnms...
- pasbesoin 8y ago
  You might want to hold onto it for a bit. I read the occasional "horror" stories about people getting big bills for "unreturned equipment" that they were previously told not to return. Or that was returned but never logged; suggestions are, for example, that if you return your Comcast box to one of their storefronts/offices, you make sure to get a receipt, preferably one having the equipment ID's on it.
  - chrisBob 8y ago
    Comcast had a deal with UPS Stores when I canceled 2 years ago. I just brought the cable box to the closest UPS Store franchise and got a receipt from them and they handled packing and returning it. That was a wonderful experience.
  - rconti 8y ago
    Agreed. Every time I try to return equipment to comcast, they ship me another unit because "we noticed you have cable TV service, but no cable box on your account!" But you know damn well if I ever lose that box in my attic, some day they're coming after me. I finally gave in and pay more per month for internet-only just so i don't have to store their damn box in my attic and I'm not inflating their TV subscriber numbers.
BonesJustice 8y ago
I'm reasonably certain the $231/year figure the author quotes is not the amount paid for a single set-top box (as he says), but the average total paid by a household for all their set-top boxes. That averages out to around ~3 boxes per household at rates similar to those quoted in the story, which is about what I'd expect. That said, the charges are still a ripoff, and just one of many reasons I do not miss paying for cable TV.
- treve 8y ago
  The average household has 3 set-top boxes? That sounds like a lot. Even median would be a lot. Who needs to be able to watch basic cable in 3 rooms in a house?
  - randomdata 8y ago
    No one needs to watch basic cable at all, but having a living room with a TV, a rec room with a TV, and a bedroom with a TV seems fairly common amongst my travels to different homes. Anecdotally less common in big city homes, presumably because space is at a greater premium.
  - BonesJustice 8y ago
    I think the average number of TVs used per household is something like 2.x a month. But many households probably have a set top box hooked up to a lesser-used TV (guest room, rec room, etc.) that they're paying for even when it sits unused. My parents are middle-class empty nesters, and IIRC, they have boxes in the kitchen, living room, home office, and maybe another in the master bedroom? Clearly they do not 'need' that many, yet they have them. This is just another way in which the rigid, inflexible model of legacy television generates excessive revenue: one cannot carry a TV and cable box around the house as easily as they can a tablet PC or iPad.
whalesalad 8y ago
On a slightly related note, I am highly disappointed with the Spectrum boxes and really miss my Comcast X1 box. Spectrum and Comcast both rely on the same third-parties to supply their gear but Comcast works with partners like Arris to build their own custom boxes. They have their own custom OS running on the box. They're really fast and have a very modern UI. For instance it'll open sidebars to show current sports games with realtime scores. They also have their voice remote feature which, at first was a total gimmick to me, but ultimately became really helpful. You rarely know what channel # you want but to say "go to TLC" or "go to the world series" is really handy. They also have a remote control with an accelerometer that will glow when it jiggles, unlike any competitor. This is very useful at night. Meanwhile my Spectrum box is virtually a thin client. For things like on-demand it's piping commands across the network to a remote host that is rendering what is displayed on your screen. The latency is horrible. I've cut the cord once or twice with services like Playstation TV and Sling... but none of them really shake a stick to a proper cable plan. I'm disappointed with this price hike and Spectrum's hardware but for folks (my wife and I) who grew up in the generation of cable TV it's a difficult habit to break.
- josefresco 8y ago
  I had X1, was very nice. We have one "mommy" box and a couple of the slimmer boxes (don't know what they call it) The mobile apps were very good as well. We have YouTubeTV now, but if I had, or wanted to spend the $ I'd go with X1 again.
- howard941 8y ago
  Do you have Spectrum on fibre? I have their Arris (Arriss?) box on coax in Largo FL and find it a lot snappier than Comcast's Scientific Atlanta box was in Sarasota. For me an even worse experience than either has been the Arris box Verizon/Frontier deployed to Sarasota. It performs like the thin client you don't like. It's slow as the 90s-vintage SciAtl Comcast box and doesn't have knobs to increase program information font size (amongst other UI negatives). I'm biding my 6 months on Frontier before I bounce back to Comcast despite the former's far greater program selection.
- HankB99 8y ago
giarc 8y ago
Anyone still renting should look to used markets for equipment. With the number of people cord-cutting, the market for used equipment is quite saturated. I own a DVR and 4 or 5 "satellite" type boxes, cut the cord and looked to see how much I could get from them. Basically wasn't worth my time with hundreds of people in the same boat as me in my city.
raverbashing 8y ago
Do you really wanna know how much it costs? Look at similar streaming hardware (think FireStick, Roku, etc) The hardware (heck, even the software) is the same or very similar for the most part. Smartphones made the hw price (and form factors) go down a lot. If your decoder is DTV or Cable there's an extra cost related to the receiver, but that has also getting cheaper as well. Long gone are the times of the first receivers where you had several ICs with dedicated functions and had to shuffle the data around in not so straightforward ways (the first DTV receivers had dedicated MPEG2 decoder ICs, I suppose DVD players had a similar architecture, then became integrated with time). Now modern smartphones decode more complex video streams with much less energy expenditure)
- crispyambulance 8y ago
  Yeah, the actual core of the device is going to be roughly something like a chromecast. Almost certainly no asics, so the cost is going to be dominated by commodity parts-- displays, audio-visual jacks and then there's the branded plastic case, graphics, labels. There's an iFixit teardown of the chromecast here: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Chromecast+2015+Teardown/50189 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Chromecast+2015+Teardown/501... Basically, 5 or 6 IC's and related trimmings--- BOM cost? I am going to guess around $35-- that's what google sells it for. Since they're making money not on the device itself but rather the online activity that becomes enabled from using the device, I expect the retail price would be roughly the BOM cost. A little more money if you're looking at a proper set-top, I guess, though I haven't actually seen a cable box in a long time. Are they roku-sized now, or just huge mostly empty boxes?
  - cr0sh 8y ago
    > Are they roku-sized now, or just huge mostly empty boxes? I haven't seen a new one in a while either, but the last time I used one (at a relative's house IIRC), it was the same-old, same-old: A box about the size of a DVD player, a bit larger (smaller than a VCR, though), mostly empty inside. Usually if it's a DVR, there's a hard drive, and the board is mostly a computer, generally running some kind of embedded proprietary closed-source RTOS. Occasionally you'll see linux, android, or some flavor of Windows CE. Beyond that - yeah, empty air. I know that some of the very simple cable boxes are about the size of a Roku, but I don't think any of them are like a Chromecast (that is, usb drive size).
oconnor663 8y ago
> After the Spectrum fee rises within days to $7.50 a month, that will translate to at least $120 million. Monthly. Or at least $1.4 billion a year. I agree with the overall "screw those monopolistic rent seekers" theme, but I hate seeing summaries like this. Is $1.4 billion a lot? If you told me it was $100 million per year, that would still sound like a lot, but apparently in this context that would represent not a lot? These are meaningless big numbers.
- nickpsecurity 8y ago
  Well, a $50 Roku boxI bought a relative streams HD from Netflix and other services. Way more than what a cable modem does. You'd have buy 28 million of them to hit $1.4 billion, but realistically they'd get volume discount. These companies sell less functionality for more money and keep charging after it's probably paid off. Does that put it more into perspective?
  - oconnor663 8y ago
    Yes, comparing the price of a set top box to the price of a Roku sounds much more reasonable. And I'm sure we could think of a dozen different comparisons besides. The point is that we should be making these comparisons instead of dropping gigantic numbers by themselves for effect :p
samcampbell 8y ago
I don't pay for cable, but there are similar economics in Internet routers/modems. Comcast used to charge me $10/month to lease their unit. After a few months of spotty WiFi (used cell data instead), I finally called. Service rep said that ~1/2 of the my specific router model were defective. Finally purchased my own [1], which will pay for itself after a year. This is one of the easiest ways to save money. [1] https://amzn.to/2Js5q3e https://amzn.to/2Js5q3e
- nickreese 8y ago
  Nice disclaimer on that affiliate link.
  - samcampbell 8y ago
    Good point- This is an affiliate link. I actually don't want the money from Amazon from the referral link, I signed up for Amazon Associates for the API access to their product catalog for a side project. Amazon requires a certain level of activity for this. So if someone happens to buy, you're supporting a side project.
    - simooooo 8y ago
      Sneaky
myrandomcomment 8y ago
I have not had cable or satellite since 2008 and I do not miss it. Amazon prime has tons of free stuff. Have a Netflix account. Have a proxy that lets me watch things like the BBC (hey BBC, you could make money if you allowed an online subscription for those not in the UK - I did pay for a TV pieces BTW as my address is register to a friend in the UK). There is also iTunes for things. Have Kodi with my local collection of DVDs ripped. What is missing is a roll up service. I want an application that has a list of my services and then presents me a uniform search box for all them! That would rock. Thought about writing one but it would just get shutdown for violation of the terms of service. Also a Kodi plunging for Amazon, NetFlix and XM would rock at some point.
- Consultant32452 8y ago
  With regards to a roll up service, this is something I want too. The best approximation I've seen is the media search on Roku. You can search for a movie or TV show and it will show you which Roku channels offer that content. It's of course not as seamless as a real roll up service could be, but I thought I'd suggest it. On your phone/tablet, you may appreciate the "Just Watch" app which lets you search the providers you select. FWIW I used to swear by Roku but then they started randomly adding channels to my screen. This was basically a paid ad, if you were a service provider you can pay Roku to force your channel onto the device. Once that started I chucked all my Roku devices.
  - myrandomcomment 8y ago
    Thanks. The “Ads” are the reason I looked at the Roku and then said no. I was looking at an AppleTV also (I would have to convert some of my videos, but whatever) however the lack of an optical audio out kills that as I want the music to go to a different amp. So PC with Kodi and TV apps for Netflix and Amazon. The quest continues!
    - PascLeRasc 8y ago
      Do you need 4K? The 3rd-gen Apple TV has optical audio out but it's 1080p only. Very nice interface though. If you already have a 4K TV, does it really not have optical out built-in? My Roku TV has it and it's about as cheap as 4K TVs get.
calhoun137 8y ago
Slightly off topic, Comcast actually stole my mom's modem that she bought from amazon! What happened is most likely the modem she bought was supposed to be returned to comcast by another customer, but that person instead just put it up for sale on amazon. Every so often a charge for a box rental would show up on her bill, she would go to the store in person to show them the receipt, get a refund and the charges would stop. Then 3 months went by and the charge appeared on the bill again. This went on for a year and a half. No one in customer service could help and at the end they said the only solution is just give us the modem and buy another one. Apparently in order to deal with stolen modems, comcast simply charges whatever customer has that modem regardless of whether or not the modem itself was supposed to be returned by another customer but never was. That is one hell of a way to get your stolen modem's back. Can you imagine if you went to the golf course and had your own clubs which you bought on amazon, but the course charged you for club rental every time you went, until they demand you hand over your clubs, and force you to buy another set to be allowed to play? That is how comcast harassed my mom for a year and a half, stole her modem, and tried to charge her rent for a different customers box.
- iguy 8y ago
  That sounds unpleasant for your mom. But how is this different to buying a stolen bicycle and having it confiscated back by its legal owner? I thought the law was clear that, even if you didn't know it was stolen, your purchase gives you no right to the goods.
  - calhoun137 8y ago
    fair enough. I guess the difference is that bike rental stores don't have automated systems which apparently have a bug where they charge the unknowing victims of a crime rent for previously rented bikes which were stolen and sold online.
- pkaye 8y ago
  Seems like she should make a claim with Amazon for selling her stolen goods.
- 8y ago
x3n0ph3n3 8y ago
Am I the only one here who still torrents all of their TV?
- Tactic 8y ago
  With a Usenet subscription, sabnzbd, and sonarr it's all automated. Subscribe to the shows you want and forget about the cable companies. Is it piracy to download shows broadcast on-the-air? Ultimately I view it like I did music... give me a reasonable way to access and pay and I'll do so. And when iTunes came out I deleted my 10 gigs of mp3's and paid for music. I'll do the same when the media company come to their senses and respect the cost of scale they now have. I can live with that.
- soylentcola 8y ago
  Even when I had cable I would use Popcorn Time behind a VPN for TV shows. No messing with DVR that may or may not actually record the show. Nice Netflix-style list of available programs and the ability to bookmark favorites and see if there were any new episodes. I'm sure if I had felt like setting it up, usenet automation + Plex server would have been even better but this was simple enough. Again, I had cable and I had a cable box but it was that much easier to watch streaming torrents that I still watched unlicensed recordings like that. Basically, if you are going to charge me a monthly fee to borrow some set top box, you need to make the set top box worth the expense. My only "legit" option was something that looked like a 1998 leftover that barely worked, worked slowly, and cost me almost $10/month to borrow. If I wanted one of the nicer boxes, I had to sign up for unrelated services like some "triple play" with phone service included. Not happening.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
Funny anecdote, before Java was Java, it was a way for appliances to abstract out the complexity of the embedded system and allow designers to write a UX that would work the same way on all the products. The 'demo' application was a set top box because SGI was making a lot of hay with doing 'video on demand' in Florida and how that was the new hotness for selling servers. So we had this demo that had Fang (the mascot) bouncing around in his virtual world where you could click on things to bring up different activities, and there were movie posters in this virtual world that if you clicked on them would bring up a screen letting you rent the movie or watch a trailer etc. Some excellent animations from an artist named Joe Palrang and it all ran on a Sparcstation 10. We knew of course that set top boxes (STBs) at the time were 8 bit micros (think Zilog Z80 or Motorola 6811's) and cheap but hey with this cool new UI cable companies would surely be moving upscale on the STB. So we asked a number of cable companies where they saw their set top box in five years. (which would put it at 1998) and they were saying, "Well we are expecting big changes there, we are probably going to spend $100 per box rather than the current $50 per box." That went over poorly since we needed way more oomph than that to host our fancy virtual world. And while there was a plan to keep the Java kernel small (45K bytes was the target) we didn't see a lot of hope with that cheap of a machine to run it on. As I recall that was around the time when Sun decided to cancel the whole thing. Cable companies, like any company that tries to extract value by delivering streamed copyrighted content to consumers, are always squeezed nearly out of existence by rights holders in an unending battle to keep all the pennies. It is quite depressing and convinced me I didn't want to be in the cable business in my career.
femto113 8y ago
The economies of scale are so great the margins are almost certainly fat. Other than cellphones I can't think of any electronic devices where that many identical units were being produced--millions and millions of indistinguishable boxes. About 20 years ago as a consultant in the EDA industry I got to tour of a set-top box manufacturing plant in Taiwan and it was fascinating. While the boxes were identical on the outside, on the inside they were doing everything possible to cut both component and manufacturing costs, including experimenting with paper based PCBs (apparently much cheaper than fiberglass?). I have to imagine they've only gotten better at cost optimization over time.
neonate 8y ago
http://archive.is/nbuUq http://archive.is/nbuUq
imagetic 8y ago
Cancelled my Comcast today. Price creep was the main reason, and it was just plain expensive for what it was. It was a liberating phone call though. I've been waiting for years to get out from under their cable/internet combo madness. AT&T just brought fiber to my neighborhood last month with a $40/mo 100mb/s plan. That's 3x cheaper than the > 100mb Comcast plan I was on that required me to have internet and basic cable. Both cap at 1TB and AT&T had no gear rental fees and a $10/out of contract monthly fee after a year. So far the only MAJOR downside is I can't use 1.1.1.1 for my DNS which took awhile to reverse engineer after I broke the internet...twice. A fix is coming, but I found 6 months of internet forums saying that. And I think 5 of my neighbors are about to make the switch too. The Comcast person on the phone started to make their scripted argument for how they could reduce my plan. I said $40 and no TV or save the oxygen for the next customer. In the end, it's probably just equally as evil but it works out far better for my bills.
tonyb 8y ago
There is a very big factor that the article missed - license fees. A good chuck of that fee is goes to licensing. The guide software, guide data, DVR, VOD, etc. often have per-box licensing fees the provider has to pay. The $250 also seams low to me. I’ve seen numbers in the $600-$900 range. Cable STBs are also much more expensive than IPTV devices because they have tunners, upstream modulators, MOCA (for whole home DVR), switched digital video, etc. vs a IPTV box that has an Ethernet port and basically just decodes mpeg4 multicast streams. The cost of STBs is one of the reasons MSOs like the idea of network based DVR.
sli 8y ago
Based purely on the dismal quality of these things, it cannot be very much. They don't seem to have gotten any better with time at all. Extremely laggy, awful UX, they run hot, they use a surprisingly high amount of electricity just to idle, and are generally just barely usable. Kodi on a Raspberry Pi performs better in pretty much all cases (except for, well, not having live TV -- usually), which is shameful on the part of these massive cable boxes. On top of that, why does it still cost an additional monthly fee to record locally to a DVR? Surely there is little to no additional cost involved in that, that isn't easily paid for by the standard monthly subscription price. And unless you've got one hell of a box, you're still limited to only two shows. It seems like if a monthly fee is involved, the DVR tech would be considerably better. Maybe something closer to just saving recordings as standard, personal on-demand media. My mother used to rent movies on demand, but she's gotten a refund every single time because they've been unwatchable. She's since stopped doing that, at least.
trelliscoded 8y ago
I used to work for a set top box middleware vendor, and at the time circa 2005-6 we had internal charge amounts of about a few hundred bucks for the mid range PVRs at the time. I just looked at a competitive analysis sheet I still have access to and it look like the total BoM for a modern PVR with all the bells and whistles like voice recognition and 4k is around $400-600 including a cheap AV rated drive to store the video. The lower end ones with cloud PVR look like they're crazy cheap, like a low end cell phone. I wouldn't be surprised if the IP only ones were $50 in Q10000. There's a bunch of implementation notes about fiddly expensive analog calibration for the terrestrial and docsis transceivers, but it looks like the two major ASIC vendors both ship turnkey calibration systems to help reduce manufacturing cost. One of them has a nice menu of prevalidated contract manufacturers that already have production lines ready to go once you sign.
Ziomislaw 8y ago
Site not avaliable in EU. First one I've seen

120 points by ilamont 8y ago

The ISP box in my home has a SFP cage, and fiber sfp adapter, with wireless ac and a nice OLED screen. Total cost is $130, but everybody gets a free rental.

shawnz 8y ago
Does it have video output though? We have a similar device as our modem (with Bell Canada) but still need set-top boxes at each TV in addition to the modem. The modem is given on a free rental, but the set-top boxes are not.

LanceH 8y ago

I would really like to buy a box that was sophisticated enough to cache which channels I have and what is showing on those channels. They all seem to do a very slow refresh every time I switch between menus. It's now a distant memory being able to switch between channels instantly. I should at least be able to page through the menus quickly.

untog 8y ago
If you have a cablecard based system you can often get a network tuner like the HD Homerun Prime and do away with the company's cable box altogether. It's what I did, and I'm pretty happy with the results - through Plex I have unlimited DVR and the ability to watch on any device. Channel switching is still slow, though...
- cronix 8y ago
  I do the same, it's great! The cable companies are mandated by the fcc to supply subscribers with at least one cablecard free of charge so you can use your own equipment, like a TiVo. I have a HDHomeRun Prime and use 2 cards. The rental on the 2nd card is only $1.50/month, and I get 8 streams with it. I also bought a cablemodem for like $50. Other than the $1.50 cablecard rental, I don't rent anything from them except the service itself. Saves a boatload over years.
  - ascagnel_ 8y ago
    Comcast used to (circa 2014-2015) give me an $8 customer-provided equipment bill credit every month for using a CableCARD w/ a HDHRPrime.
- BonesJustice 8y ago
  Last time I signed up for cable was about a decade ago, and at the time, I had a HD TiVo box with twin cable cards. Worked out to something like $1-3 a month for the cards, IIRC. Way more reasonable than what my parents were paying for their awful, laggy Comcast boxes. Of course, my cable provider had to make like three visits before they managed to scrounge up two working cards.
captainmuon 8y ago
I always thought about putting multiple tuners in the box, and just decoding multiple channels simultaneously. Then to switch a channel you would just "put another window in the front". You could have a predictive system that would decode the three most likely next channels and start decoding them. In the best case, this would move the latency of the first switch close to zero, and of subsequent switches to 1/2 or 1/3. To save energy, you could get one of these fancy remotes that they have for telefone conferences, that can detect when you pick it up. Once you lift the remote, start the extra tuners.
- gowld 8y ago
  Doesn't this already exist, and that's how picture-in-picture works?
- sjm-lbm 8y ago
  I have a (pretty old) TiVo that lets you do something similar to this - there's some button on the remote (I honestly can't remember what it is called) that lets you cycle between the tuners. It works pretty much like you describe - if a bit more manually - and has the added benefit of not requiring you to type a multi digit channel number every time you want to hop between your favorite channels.
  - wkearney99 8y ago
    Current models have six live tuners. All running a buffer for whatever channel is tuned on each. Works fantastically well. There's a "Live TV" button on the remote than cycles through them, or you can manually poke through a quick submenu to jump right to one in particular.
- FooHentai 8y ago
  The 'EE TV' boxes in the UK work in this way. You pick your top channels (up to 4, I think) and it PVRs the lot continuously.
- rasz 8y ago
  Afaik the delay is not in tuning per se, but in waiting for first decoded valid mpeg segment with I frame, and those are usually 1 per second? What could be done, on the cheap, Cable provider wide is authoritative server ready to give you arbitrarily generated I frames with 1/60 time resolution on demand, as most cable boxes nowadays are two way anyway (they need upstream link to transmit all the spyin^^^ channel usage statistics back).

shapiro92 8y ago

Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.

MatthewWilkes 8y ago
This article should be switched to an alternative that doesn't have restrictive geofilters or removed.
- esotericn 8y ago
  Agree. It's becoming rather farcical that I may have to use Tor to browse from ... a European IP.
- dionidium 8y ago
  There's an assumption in this statement that doesn't survive scrutiny. This is original reporting. What makes you think there's an equivalent alternative? † † This perception is obviously a huge problem for papers like the L.A. Times (and for writers, in general). For better or worse, this is how people see it, now. If you don't like the source, then you just imagine substituting in another one, like you're buying pork futures (or whatever the opposite of original reporting is).
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    The assumption may be that any worthwhile article will immediately be "reported on" (restated with no new information) by a dozen other sites. Edit: I'm not saying that's a good thing, guys. I agree with dionidium.
    - gowld 8y ago
      "rereported"
    - 8y ago

drblast 8y ago

I have the same reaction every time I read about any cable company, and that's, "WTF are you all still giving them your money for?!" They have a monopoly on a dying service you literally don't need at all, and most people hate having to deal with them. The pricing and contracts are antagonistic to customers. Is it just momentum at this point?

ascagnel_ 8y ago
In the US, cable companies are generally the only source of high-speed internet, and they sometimes charge a higher sticker price to provide internet-only service vs. bundling with TV service.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- mywittyname 8y ago
  I get cable internet for $55/mo with no cable packages at all. It's certainly overpriced for what it is, but it's still much, much cheaper than a complete package, which is easily twice that figure.
  - brianwawok 8y ago
    Comcast won’t sell me internet past 20MB without a TV package I don’t have hooked up to TVs. Super awesome.
- rconti 8y ago
  Correct, I finally got tired of playing games with Comcast and I actually pay them more now for 250Mbps internet ($95) than I would for a TV+250Mbps bundle (I think the latter would have been $10/mo cheaper, at least for a year..)
  - soylentcola 8y ago
    This is exactly what I did. When I recently bought my first home, I was already aware that I would have to deal with Comcast if I wanted any semblance of high speed internet service. I could've gotten higher speeds for less (for a year before the price jump) and I could've gotten a lower price (for a year before the price jump) if I bundled cable TV... ...but between the so-called promotional pricing, the dicking around with another pile of box rental fees and assorted add-on costs, I just didn't have it in me. On some level I just decided that I would rather risk "missing out" on some minor bit of savings than buy anything more than the single thing I really needed to buy from Comcast. If I had any other real options I wouldn't buy anything from them. But they are the only option for something I definitely need. I'm not about to pay them for anything more.

esotericn 8y ago

I can't view this because I'm European, there's no box for me to even pay if I wanted to. So, yeah. https://outline.com/FGRxsT https://outline.com/FGRxsT

jasode 8y ago

I have a FiOS Motorola QIP7232 cable box with a builtin 320GB harddrive (circa 2013).[1] My last bill shows them charging me $21.99 per month for that box. (That's $263.88 a year not including taxes.) Last week, I called Frontier FiOS to cancel the cable TV but keep the internet. After the customer rep cancelled the tv, I asked if she was mailing out a shipping box so I could return the Motorola. She said she wasn't going to bother with it. So there's one anecdote to gauge how much the hardware is worth to them. (I do see that used ones sell for ~$50 on ebay.) [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=motorola+QIP7232&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=motorola+QIP7232&source=lnms...

pasbesoin 8y ago
You might want to hold onto it for a bit. I read the occasional "horror" stories about people getting big bills for "unreturned equipment" that they were previously told not to return. Or that was returned but never logged; suggestions are, for example, that if you return your Comcast box to one of their storefronts/offices, you make sure to get a receipt, preferably one having the equipment ID's on it.
- chrisBob 8y ago
  Comcast had a deal with UPS Stores when I canceled 2 years ago. I just brought the cable box to the closest UPS Store franchise and got a receipt from them and they handled packing and returning it. That was a wonderful experience.
- rconti 8y ago
  Agreed. Every time I try to return equipment to comcast, they ship me another unit because "we noticed you have cable TV service, but no cable box on your account!" But you know damn well if I ever lose that box in my attic, some day they're coming after me. I finally gave in and pay more per month for internet-only just so i don't have to store their damn box in my attic and I'm not inflating their TV subscriber numbers.

BonesJustice 8y ago

I'm reasonably certain the $231/year figure the author quotes is not the amount paid for a single set-top box (as he says), but the average total paid by a household for all their set-top boxes. That averages out to around ~3 boxes per household at rates similar to those quoted in the story, which is about what I'd expect. That said, the charges are still a ripoff, and just one of many reasons I do not miss paying for cable TV.

treve 8y ago
The average household has 3 set-top boxes? That sounds like a lot. Even median would be a lot. Who needs to be able to watch basic cable in 3 rooms in a house?
- randomdata 8y ago
  No one needs to watch basic cable at all, but having a living room with a TV, a rec room with a TV, and a bedroom with a TV seems fairly common amongst my travels to different homes. Anecdotally less common in big city homes, presumably because space is at a greater premium.
- BonesJustice 8y ago
  I think the average number of TVs used per household is something like 2.x a month. But many households probably have a set top box hooked up to a lesser-used TV (guest room, rec room, etc.) that they're paying for even when it sits unused. My parents are middle-class empty nesters, and IIRC, they have boxes in the kitchen, living room, home office, and maybe another in the master bedroom? Clearly they do not 'need' that many, yet they have them. This is just another way in which the rigid, inflexible model of legacy television generates excessive revenue: one cannot carry a TV and cable box around the house as easily as they can a tablet PC or iPad.

whalesalad 8y ago

On a slightly related note, I am highly disappointed with the Spectrum boxes and really miss my Comcast X1 box. Spectrum and Comcast both rely on the same third-parties to supply their gear but Comcast works with partners like Arris to build their own custom boxes. They have their own custom OS running on the box. They're really fast and have a very modern UI. For instance it'll open sidebars to show current sports games with realtime scores. They also have their voice remote feature which, at first was a total gimmick to me, but ultimately became really helpful. You rarely know what channel # you want but to say "go to TLC" or "go to the world series" is really handy. They also have a remote control with an accelerometer that will glow when it jiggles, unlike any competitor. This is very useful at night. Meanwhile my Spectrum box is virtually a thin client. For things like on-demand it's piping commands across the network to a remote host that is rendering what is displayed on your screen. The latency is horrible. I've cut the cord once or twice with services like Playstation TV and Sling... but none of them really shake a stick to a proper cable plan. I'm disappointed with this price hike and Spectrum's hardware but for folks (my wife and I) who grew up in the generation of cable TV it's a difficult habit to break.

josefresco 8y ago
I had X1, was very nice. We have one "mommy" box and a couple of the slimmer boxes (don't know what they call it) The mobile apps were very good as well. We have YouTubeTV now, but if I had, or wanted to spend the $ I'd go with X1 again.
howard941 8y ago
Do you have Spectrum on fibre? I have their Arris (Arriss?) box on coax in Largo FL and find it a lot snappier than Comcast's Scientific Atlanta box was in Sarasota. For me an even worse experience than either has been the Arris box Verizon/Frontier deployed to Sarasota. It performs like the thin client you don't like. It's slow as the 90s-vintage SciAtl Comcast box and doesn't have knobs to increase program information font size (amongst other UI negatives). I'm biding my 6 months on Frontier before I bounce back to Comcast despite the former's far greater program selection.
HankB99 8y ago

giarc 8y ago

Anyone still renting should look to used markets for equipment. With the number of people cord-cutting, the market for used equipment is quite saturated. I own a DVR and 4 or 5 "satellite" type boxes, cut the cord and looked to see how much I could get from them. Basically wasn't worth my time with hundreds of people in the same boat as me in my city.

raverbashing 8y ago

Do you really wanna know how much it costs? Look at similar streaming hardware (think FireStick, Roku, etc) The hardware (heck, even the software) is the same or very similar for the most part. Smartphones made the hw price (and form factors) go down a lot. If your decoder is DTV or Cable there's an extra cost related to the receiver, but that has also getting cheaper as well. Long gone are the times of the first receivers where you had several ICs with dedicated functions and had to shuffle the data around in not so straightforward ways (the first DTV receivers had dedicated MPEG2 decoder ICs, I suppose DVD players had a similar architecture, then became integrated with time). Now modern smartphones decode more complex video streams with much less energy expenditure)

crispyambulance 8y ago
Yeah, the actual core of the device is going to be roughly something like a chromecast. Almost certainly no asics, so the cost is going to be dominated by commodity parts-- displays, audio-visual jacks and then there's the branded plastic case, graphics, labels. There's an iFixit teardown of the chromecast here: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Chromecast+2015+Teardown/50189 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Chromecast+2015+Teardown/501... Basically, 5 or 6 IC's and related trimmings--- BOM cost? I am going to guess around $35-- that's what google sells it for. Since they're making money not on the device itself but rather the online activity that becomes enabled from using the device, I expect the retail price would be roughly the BOM cost. A little more money if you're looking at a proper set-top, I guess, though I haven't actually seen a cable box in a long time. Are they roku-sized now, or just huge mostly empty boxes?
- cr0sh 8y ago
  > Are they roku-sized now, or just huge mostly empty boxes? I haven't seen a new one in a while either, but the last time I used one (at a relative's house IIRC), it was the same-old, same-old: A box about the size of a DVD player, a bit larger (smaller than a VCR, though), mostly empty inside. Usually if it's a DVR, there's a hard drive, and the board is mostly a computer, generally running some kind of embedded proprietary closed-source RTOS. Occasionally you'll see linux, android, or some flavor of Windows CE. Beyond that - yeah, empty air. I know that some of the very simple cable boxes are about the size of a Roku, but I don't think any of them are like a Chromecast (that is, usb drive size).

oconnor663 8y ago

> After the Spectrum fee rises within days to $7.50 a month, that will translate to at least $120 million. Monthly. Or at least $1.4 billion a year. I agree with the overall "screw those monopolistic rent seekers" theme, but I hate seeing summaries like this. Is $1.4 billion a lot? If you told me it was $100 million per year, that would still sound like a lot, but apparently in this context that would represent not a lot? These are meaningless big numbers.

nickpsecurity 8y ago
Well, a $50 Roku boxI bought a relative streams HD from Netflix and other services. Way more than what a cable modem does. You'd have buy 28 million of them to hit $1.4 billion, but realistically they'd get volume discount. These companies sell less functionality for more money and keep charging after it's probably paid off. Does that put it more into perspective?
- oconnor663 8y ago
  Yes, comparing the price of a set top box to the price of a Roku sounds much more reasonable. And I'm sure we could think of a dozen different comparisons besides. The point is that we should be making these comparisons instead of dropping gigantic numbers by themselves for effect :p

samcampbell 8y ago

I don't pay for cable, but there are similar economics in Internet routers/modems. Comcast used to charge me $10/month to lease their unit. After a few months of spotty WiFi (used cell data instead), I finally called. Service rep said that ~1/2 of the my specific router model were defective. Finally purchased my own [1], which will pay for itself after a year. This is one of the easiest ways to save money. [1] https://amzn.to/2Js5q3e https://amzn.to/2Js5q3e

nickreese 8y ago
Nice disclaimer on that affiliate link.
- samcampbell 8y ago
  Good point- This is an affiliate link. I actually don't want the money from Amazon from the referral link, I signed up for Amazon Associates for the API access to their product catalog for a side project. Amazon requires a certain level of activity for this. So if someone happens to buy, you're supporting a side project.
  - simooooo 8y ago
    Sneaky

myrandomcomment 8y ago

I have not had cable or satellite since 2008 and I do not miss it. Amazon prime has tons of free stuff. Have a Netflix account. Have a proxy that lets me watch things like the BBC (hey BBC, you could make money if you allowed an online subscription for those not in the UK - I did pay for a TV pieces BTW as my address is register to a friend in the UK). There is also iTunes for things. Have Kodi with my local collection of DVDs ripped. What is missing is a roll up service. I want an application that has a list of my services and then presents me a uniform search box for all them! That would rock. Thought about writing one but it would just get shutdown for violation of the terms of service. Also a Kodi plunging for Amazon, NetFlix and XM would rock at some point.

Consultant32452 8y ago
With regards to a roll up service, this is something I want too. The best approximation I've seen is the media search on Roku. You can search for a movie or TV show and it will show you which Roku channels offer that content. It's of course not as seamless as a real roll up service could be, but I thought I'd suggest it. On your phone/tablet, you may appreciate the "Just Watch" app which lets you search the providers you select. FWIW I used to swear by Roku but then they started randomly adding channels to my screen. This was basically a paid ad, if you were a service provider you can pay Roku to force your channel onto the device. Once that started I chucked all my Roku devices.
- myrandomcomment 8y ago
  Thanks. The “Ads” are the reason I looked at the Roku and then said no. I was looking at an AppleTV also (I would have to convert some of my videos, but whatever) however the lack of an optical audio out kills that as I want the music to go to a different amp. So PC with Kodi and TV apps for Netflix and Amazon. The quest continues!
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    Do you need 4K? The 3rd-gen Apple TV has optical audio out but it's 1080p only. Very nice interface though. If you already have a 4K TV, does it really not have optical out built-in? My Roku TV has it and it's about as cheap as 4K TVs get.

calhoun137 8y ago

Slightly off topic, Comcast actually stole my mom's modem that she bought from amazon! What happened is most likely the modem she bought was supposed to be returned to comcast by another customer, but that person instead just put it up for sale on amazon. Every so often a charge for a box rental would show up on her bill, she would go to the store in person to show them the receipt, get a refund and the charges would stop. Then 3 months went by and the charge appeared on the bill again. This went on for a year and a half. No one in customer service could help and at the end they said the only solution is just give us the modem and buy another one. Apparently in order to deal with stolen modems, comcast simply charges whatever customer has that modem regardless of whether or not the modem itself was supposed to be returned by another customer but never was. That is one hell of a way to get your stolen modem's back. Can you imagine if you went to the golf course and had your own clubs which you bought on amazon, but the course charged you for club rental every time you went, until they demand you hand over your clubs, and force you to buy another set to be allowed to play? That is how comcast harassed my mom for a year and a half, stole her modem, and tried to charge her rent for a different customers box.

iguy 8y ago
That sounds unpleasant for your mom. But how is this different to buying a stolen bicycle and having it confiscated back by its legal owner? I thought the law was clear that, even if you didn't know it was stolen, your purchase gives you no right to the goods.
- calhoun137 8y ago
  fair enough. I guess the difference is that bike rental stores don't have automated systems which apparently have a bug where they charge the unknowing victims of a crime rent for previously rented bikes which were stolen and sold online.
pkaye 8y ago
Seems like she should make a claim with Amazon for selling her stolen goods.
8y ago

x3n0ph3n3 8y ago

Am I the only one here who still torrents all of their TV?

Tactic 8y ago
With a Usenet subscription, sabnzbd, and sonarr it's all automated. Subscribe to the shows you want and forget about the cable companies. Is it piracy to download shows broadcast on-the-air? Ultimately I view it like I did music... give me a reasonable way to access and pay and I'll do so. And when iTunes came out I deleted my 10 gigs of mp3's and paid for music. I'll do the same when the media company come to their senses and respect the cost of scale they now have. I can live with that.
soylentcola 8y ago
Even when I had cable I would use Popcorn Time behind a VPN for TV shows. No messing with DVR that may or may not actually record the show. Nice Netflix-style list of available programs and the ability to bookmark favorites and see if there were any new episodes. I'm sure if I had felt like setting it up, usenet automation + Plex server would have been even better but this was simple enough. Again, I had cable and I had a cable box but it was that much easier to watch streaming torrents that I still watched unlicensed recordings like that. Basically, if you are going to charge me a monthly fee to borrow some set top box, you need to make the set top box worth the expense. My only "legit" option was something that looked like a 1998 leftover that barely worked, worked slowly, and cost me almost $10/month to borrow. If I wanted one of the nicer boxes, I had to sign up for unrelated services like some "triple play" with phone service included. Not happening.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

Funny anecdote, before Java was Java, it was a way for appliances to abstract out the complexity of the embedded system and allow designers to write a UX that would work the same way on all the products. The 'demo' application was a set top box because SGI was making a lot of hay with doing 'video on demand' in Florida and how that was the new hotness for selling servers. So we had this demo that had Fang (the mascot) bouncing around in his virtual world where you could click on things to bring up different activities, and there were movie posters in this virtual world that if you clicked on them would bring up a screen letting you rent the movie or watch a trailer etc. Some excellent animations from an artist named Joe Palrang and it all ran on a Sparcstation 10. We knew of course that set top boxes (STBs) at the time were 8 bit micros (think Zilog Z80 or Motorola 6811's) and cheap but hey with this cool new UI cable companies would surely be moving upscale on the STB. So we asked a number of cable companies where they saw their set top box in five years. (which would put it at 1998) and they were saying, "Well we are expecting big changes there, we are probably going to spend $100 per box rather than the current $50 per box." That went over poorly since we needed way more oomph than that to host our fancy virtual world. And while there was a plan to keep the Java kernel small (45K bytes was the target) we didn't see a lot of hope with that cheap of a machine to run it on. As I recall that was around the time when Sun decided to cancel the whole thing. Cable companies, like any company that tries to extract value by delivering streamed copyrighted content to consumers, are always squeezed nearly out of existence by rights holders in an unending battle to keep all the pennies. It is quite depressing and convinced me I didn't want to be in the cable business in my career.

femto113 8y ago

The economies of scale are so great the margins are almost certainly fat. Other than cellphones I can't think of any electronic devices where that many identical units were being produced--millions and millions of indistinguishable boxes. About 20 years ago as a consultant in the EDA industry I got to tour of a set-top box manufacturing plant in Taiwan and it was fascinating. While the boxes were identical on the outside, on the inside they were doing everything possible to cut both component and manufacturing costs, including experimenting with paper based PCBs (apparently much cheaper than fiberglass?). I have to imagine they've only gotten better at cost optimization over time.

neonate 8y ago

http://archive.is/nbuUq http://archive.is/nbuUq

imagetic 8y ago

Cancelled my Comcast today. Price creep was the main reason, and it was just plain expensive for what it was. It was a liberating phone call though. I've been waiting for years to get out from under their cable/internet combo madness. AT&T just brought fiber to my neighborhood last month with a $40/mo 100mb/s plan. That's 3x cheaper than the > 100mb Comcast plan I was on that required me to have internet and basic cable. Both cap at 1TB and AT&T had no gear rental fees and a $10/out of contract monthly fee after a year. So far the only MAJOR downside is I can't use 1.1.1.1 for my DNS which took awhile to reverse engineer after I broke the internet...twice. A fix is coming, but I found 6 months of internet forums saying that. And I think 5 of my neighbors are about to make the switch too. The Comcast person on the phone started to make their scripted argument for how they could reduce my plan. I said $40 and no TV or save the oxygen for the next customer. In the end, it's probably just equally as evil but it works out far better for my bills.

tonyb 8y ago

There is a very big factor that the article missed - license fees. A good chuck of that fee is goes to licensing. The guide software, guide data, DVR, VOD, etc. often have per-box licensing fees the provider has to pay. The $250 also seams low to me. I’ve seen numbers in the $600-$900 range. Cable STBs are also much more expensive than IPTV devices because they have tunners, upstream modulators, MOCA (for whole home DVR), switched digital video, etc. vs a IPTV box that has an Ethernet port and basically just decodes mpeg4 multicast streams. The cost of STBs is one of the reasons MSOs like the idea of network based DVR.

sli 8y ago

Based purely on the dismal quality of these things, it cannot be very much. They don't seem to have gotten any better with time at all. Extremely laggy, awful UX, they run hot, they use a surprisingly high amount of electricity just to idle, and are generally just barely usable. Kodi on a Raspberry Pi performs better in pretty much all cases (except for, well, not having live TV -- usually), which is shameful on the part of these massive cable boxes. On top of that, why does it still cost an additional monthly fee to record locally to a DVR? Surely there is little to no additional cost involved in that, that isn't easily paid for by the standard monthly subscription price. And unless you've got one hell of a box, you're still limited to only two shows. It seems like if a monthly fee is involved, the DVR tech would be considerably better. Maybe something closer to just saving recordings as standard, personal on-demand media. My mother used to rent movies on demand, but she's gotten a refund every single time because they've been unwatchable. She's since stopped doing that, at least.

trelliscoded 8y ago

I used to work for a set top box middleware vendor, and at the time circa 2005-6 we had internal charge amounts of about a few hundred bucks for the mid range PVRs at the time. I just looked at a competitive analysis sheet I still have access to and it look like the total BoM for a modern PVR with all the bells and whistles like voice recognition and 4k is around $400-600 including a cheap AV rated drive to store the video. The lower end ones with cloud PVR look like they're crazy cheap, like a low end cell phone. I wouldn't be surprised if the IP only ones were $50 in Q10000. There's a bunch of implementation notes about fiddly expensive analog calibration for the terrestrial and docsis transceivers, but it looks like the two major ASIC vendors both ship turnkey calibration systems to help reduce manufacturing cost. One of them has a nice menu of prevalidated contract manufacturers that already have production lines ready to go once you sign.

Ziomislaw 8y ago

Site not avaliable in EU. First one I've seen