Future TechnologyAugust 29, 2007 4:11 pm
HD Social Networking gets Boxed In
I’ve had a SONY HDR-FX7 for a couple of years and have been content to show videos to friends by connecting the camera to our LCD TV. Recently, I was delighted to find that I could connect wirelessly to my new Cisco (Scientific Atlanta) Explorer 9000 DVR for display either live or from playback. 
The DVR is OCAP enabled which means I can edit content on the DVR via a wireless keyboard. AVID have provided an optional on-screen editor that is embedded into middleware by way of the multistream card. DOCSIS capability provides functionality to register content to the centralized Cisco-managed social network called BoxedIn which is integrated into CableVision’s residential platform. The STB application supports native 1080i HD along with H264, MPEG2, MPEG4 and DivX and I believe that I could even print still-frame captures to a network printer if I could ever get the printer to work correctly. The live capture and split screen means I can have HD video conferences with family on the same system.
The DVR is OCAP enabled which means I can edit content on the DVR via a wireless keyboard. AVID have provided an optional on-screen editor that is embedded into middleware by way of the multistream card. DOCSIS capability provides functionality to register content to the centralized Cisco-managed social network called BoxedIn which is integrated into CableVision’s residential platform. The STB application supports native 1080i HD along with H264, MPEG2, MPEG4 and DivX and I believe that I could even print still-frame captures to a network printer if I could ever get the printer to work correctly. The live capture and split screen means I can have HD video conferences with family on the same system.
The on-screen editor allows standard transitions and wipes, filters, adjustments such as sharpen, surface blur etc and is presented as a standard A/B timeline. There’s also a still frame store, a limited selection of royalty-free music, plus the normal video tagging and categorization capability. Finally, Cisco offer a pay-per-view service with integrated checkout, billing and settlement where I can set the rates for individual content if I wish. All of mine is free at present, but maybe one day I will charge 50c.
Conceptually, BoxedIn is a distributed YouTube on the cable platform for family and favorite videos and as a service it has mushroomed enormously in popularity over the past year as standard definition television has died away and Social Networking Overlay Gateways (SNOG) for the lounge has taken off. SNOGing has been responsible for increasing sales of multistream cards, especially as many hotels have systems enabled to accept third-party cards for redirection of personal DVR content across cable/IP platforms. My present service is free as long we select and view 30 targeted commercials each week, otherwise it’s $9.95 a month. Our video content resides on our DVR and is available via a peer-to-peer arrangement, based on a variant of the Limewire system but managed by the DVR provider, Cisco. All video content is streamed from the DVR to the requester, unless more than one request is active at any time, or the system determines that an individual video has a high popularity rating, in which case it is uploaded to a centralized server for distribution. 
ILM processes control the availability of the content over time, but the original content is always under the control of the DVR owner. If I erase my Bahamas vacation from the DVR then it is deleted centrally as well.
ILM processes control the availability of the content over time, but the original content is always under the control of the DVR owner. If I erase my Bahamas vacation from the DVR then it is deleted centrally as well. DVR storage devices have become huge business in the past 2 years as HD content has proliferated and STB developers eventually enabled network attached storage for overflow and provided simple user services to allow an integrated systems approach to home content management. TiVo should have had this section of the market covered with their 3 year lead on the social aspects of DVR community connectivity, but their lack of progress in commerially developing the community and finding a cable company willing to develop an integrated plan with them forced a policy of integrating via IP connectivity rather than the native platform, which reduced their footprint considerably.
Several firms have sprung up recently in an attempt to bridge the traditional walled-garden architecture of cable companies and make content available to all DVR users, regardless of cable service supplier. But progress has been slow, mainly due to the traditional reluctance of cable companies to provide an operational interface.
BoxedIn is just one of the communities developed in the past year along with those from Neulion and Motorola. Each of the competing vendor communities has encouraged the development of interest-based individual contributors (IBICs). I added tags to our recent Bahamas vacation and found that there were many others who had visited the same hotel. BoxedIn allows me to vote on the location and add comments for other users to search. Now I’m looking at all London vacations that have the full 5 star recommendations which adds up to 17 hours of content to review.
