Community Comments on Google's Acquisition of SageTV

[nycjoe]

Originally Posted by brainbone

We'll likely see a version of it that will work over any broadband connection

Will we, now?
Let's meet back here in 24 months and see how likely this is...

[Brent]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

As long as Brent@GeekTonic (who lives in KC) is happy, Jeff is happy.. :-)

That.... is pretty funny Fuzzy! I definitely was beyond thrilled when I realized I was going to have access to Google Fiber and even more excited when I realized that meant I was getting access to the next generation/evolution of SageTV via Google FiberTV. But Jeff's biggest concern right now is a successful launch of Google Fiber TV in KC. What comes next should prove to be interesting although I don't know when or what that next thing might be. All I know is SageTV is very much alive and being improved upon for this KC experiment.

Originally Posted by wayner

He used to be one of the most frequent posters here but he has been kind of MIA for the last little while.

I've taken a pretty drastic step back from my online time. That includes mostly stepping away from the GeekTonic blog and this forum. I still check here pretty often though.

[Rob]

Originally Posted by Brent

All I know is SageTV is very much alive and being improved upon for this KC experiment.

Which means it is dead (or maybe just dormate) for 99.99% of the world.

[Brent]

Originally Posted by Rob

Which means it is dead (or maybe just dormate) for 99.99% of the world.

For the moment.... Dormant, yes

[panteragstk]

The good thing about the KC experiment and Google's plan for "our" sagetv is that no matter what the speculation is, we have no clue what's going to happen. People may think they know, but unless they work for Google, they don't really know anything more than the rest of us.

[Dargason]

I looked at the google fiber website yesterday, and it looks like a pretty big deal... gigabit internet access? A terabyte of cloud storage? And it's a pretty safe bet that there will be android streaming apps, remote control, etc.

It sounds like it has the potential to do a lot of cool stuff. I think the main thing is how 'open' it is to community development. The old 'out of the box' SageTV is nice, but it's the add-on's that really make it awesome.

But before anyone brings it up -- no, I don't expect we'll ever get comskip working, and it will probably remain a 'closed' recording format. Content providers simply won't go for it otherwise.

[Brent]

I can't be sure on this... but I expect most if not all of the add-ons to work on Google Fiber TV. I'll confirm next summer when I have it installed in my loft hopefully. I have however wondered if the commercial skip thing will slip through or if they will block it somehow.

[cncb]

Originally Posted by Brent

I'll confirm next summer when I have it installed in my loft hopefully.

That makes it sound like a year or more until they will be "done" with the KC rollout so when they might be ready for this mysterious "next thing" I wonder how many people will still be using SageTV at that point?

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by Brent

I can't be sure on this... but I expect most if not all of the add-ons to work on Google Fiber TV.

I have to agree with this for the simple fact that there is no way that Jeff and co. have coded an absolutely brand new product in a year. Granted, they could have closed (or omitted) that functionality so it won't be possible, but it would be pretty sweet if we could have a GF system running SRE and comskip. Not to mention all the UI mods out there.

[Brent]

Originally Posted by cncb

That makes it sound like a year or more until they will be "done" with the KC rollout so when they might be ready for this mysterious "next thing" I wonder how many people will still be using SageTV at that point?

The KC rollout will continue throughout all of 2013 and likely beyond that. Who knows what happens next or when.

PS: I personally don't know what the "next thing" will be. Nothing but pure speculation on my part that there will be something there. I just have serious doubts that Google has invested so much in the fiber and the TV thing to not use it beyond our nice city of Kansas City. It's possible the experiment ends here, but wow would that have been a lot of $ for one community.

It's a bit ironic that there is more real talk of Google Fiber here than there is in the "Google Fiber" forum thread that has evolved into something different.

[Brent]

For perspective of what the fiber rollout involves in terms of timing in KC.

The two portions of KC that are included in the first rollout are these two areas noted in green. Kansas City, Kansas begins first and is being installed now through early next year. Central Kansas City, MO (where I live) is next and begins early next year.
See all of those gray areas? Those aren't even included in this rollout yet. They supposedly get to sign up for pre-registration soon but I imagine their timing will be late 2013 to early 2014. And even those don't include all of the large land areas of greater Kansas City.


My neighborhood is River Market which is #26 in Kansas City, Missouri. Slated to begin installs in Summer 2013 as noted on this list https://fiber.google.com/cities/kcmo/#header=check

By the way. Next time you fly into Kansas City... you are in Missouri, not Kansas. Much of the Kansas City you hear about and see on TV including the airport, All Star Game, the Chiefs, Royals, Country Club Plaza, etc, etc. is all in Missouri. It's a common misunderstanding that people assume it's a Kansas thing and since I'm embarrassed for Kansas most of the time I don't like that misunderstanding

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Brent

For perspective of what the fiber rollout involves in terms of timing in KC.

The two portions of KC that are included in the first rollout are these two areas noted in green. Kansas City, Kansas begins first and is being installed now through early next year. Central Kansas City, MO (where I live) is next and begins early next year.
See all of those gray areas? Those aren't even included in this rollout yet. They supposedly get to sign up for pre-registration soon but I imagine their timing will be late 2013 to early 2014. And even those don't include all of the large land areas of greater Kansas City.


My neighborhood is River Market which is #26 in Kansas City, Missouri. Slated to begin installs in Summer 2013 as noted on this list https://fiber.google.com/cities/kcmo/#header=check

By the way. Next time you fly into Kansas City... you are in Missouri, not Kansas. Much of the Kansas City you hear about and see on TV including the airport, All Star Game, the Chiefs, Royals, Country Club Plaza, etc, etc. is all in Missouri. It's a common misunderstanding that people assume it's a Kansas thing and since I'm embarrassed for Kansas most of the time I don't like that misunderstanding

These timelines are exactly why i don't foresee much for the non-KC folks for a LONG time. Sadly, that is likely long enough for something like nPVR to come up to a usable level - if the dev feels he wants to. I certainly don't think that it would be worth moving to a new 'bottled-up' sagetv system, over an 'open' nPVR/XBMC+DVR/Plex+some recorder system.

[CanadianEh]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

These timelines are exactly why i don't foresee much for the non-KC folks for a LONG time. Sadly, that is likely long enough for something like nPVR to come up to a usable level - if the dev feels he wants to. I certainly don't think that it would be worth moving to a new 'bottled-up' sagetv system, over an 'open' nPVR/XBMC+DVR/Plex+some recorder system.

Yeah, it looks like an XMBC+nPVR solution is in the works, but very much alpha (I think the solution has existed for a whole 4 weeks, if I'm not mistaken). I'm waiting to see how that plays out for functionality. Until then, I'm using MediaPortal, which has been rock-solid for me, but I do occasionally miss some of the advanced recording features of SageTV - but not enough to go back. Honestly, MediaPortal's recording server has been 1000% more stable with my HD-PVR boxes. The one gotcha I've not been able to address is MediaPortal + HD-PVRs do not use the logical channel number in the guide, it's simply however it added them into the database. So, DirecTV CNN - 202, could very well be Channel 2142 in the database. I've overcome this by naming the channels display name as "202 - CNN" (and hiding the channel number it THINKS it is) so it's all sorted correctly in the guide, but that means I have to use the guide to change channels. The up/down buttons could lead you anywhere

Aside from this glitch, I've been really happy with MediaPortal, but always keep my eyes open for other solutions as they develop.

[Fuzzy]

I have no intention of moving from sagetv to npvr/mediaportal/whatever. I was just saying that if Sage 8 turns out to be a full-on google closed solution, I am much more likely to either stay with v7, or move to something else. Google is definitely giving the others time to get their products up to speed before they release anything.

[osx-addict]

Sub (aka the NPVR main guy) seems to be fairly well focused on making the XBMC+NPVR work as a team -- albeit he's not particularly happy about the plugin API limitations and the fact that some of the closed-source/commercial developers managed to get the API 'bent' to their liking and leaving the rest of the open-sourced backend developers scratching their heads -- ALL at the very last minute before they locked-down 'Frodo' which is the next flavor of XBMC (current stable release is 'Eden' -- aka XBMC 11.0).. So, there are some annoying limitations of the 'live-tv' API including it being focussed on RTSP streams and limiting HTTP streams (which is what NPVR uses) -- so things like pausing live TV is not supported using that XBMC plugin.. Doh! Major shortcoming IMHO but not the fault of any NPVR guys. IMHO I think it would be a good idea to get all of the OSS/Non-profit Live-TV peeps together to work out an API that would benefit all of them with the respective needs addressed to allow XBMC's LiveTV architecture to flourish instead of being bent to a few company's whims (MediaPortal I think was one of them IIRC).

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by Brent

I can't be sure on this... but I expect most if not all of the add-ons to work on Google Fiber TV. I'll confirm next summer when I have it installed in my loft hopefully. I have however wondered if the commercial skip thing will slip through or if they will block it somehow.

What they've done is rewritten large portions of the the STV and made extensive enhancements to Sage.jar. This means that any plugin that modifies the STV will need to be updated. Complete STV replacements should continue to work because the Sage.jar should be backwards compatible.

So to get Commercial skipping to work the community would have to adapt the existing "comskip playback" UI Mod for the new STV. I'm pretty sure the CommercialDetector plugin (which launches comskip.exe) will continue to work out of the box.

Of course all of this assumes Google will allow plugins at all. That's the big question to answer.

[wayner]

Do we have anyone here who is in the first phase of the rollout? It could be interesting for some of our more experienced folks to get a look at one of these boxes and see what makes it tick and how similar it is to Sage.

[Brent]

Originally Posted by wayner

Do we have anyone here who is in the first phase of the rollout? It could be interesting for some of our more experienced folks to get a look at one of these boxes and see what makes it tick and how similar it is to Sage.

I'm looking for someone in the first phase. I'll report back if/when I find that person.

Anyone else wonder if this KC thing is just a testing ground for an actual TV product for the rest of the world? The product doesn't necessarily HAVE to have super-fast internet to work as we all know. Why would Google throw so much money into TV contracts and facilities like this just for their Fiber product?
http://www.google.com/about/datacent...24/CBF_002.jpg

I'm just wondering out loud, but what if the TV thing is something they planned to do separately anyway and the Google Fiber project just gave them the perfect place to do some initial testing before making that the new Google TV.... Hmm.......

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Brent

I'm looking for someone in the first phase. I'll report back if/when I find that person.

Anyone else wonder if this KC thing is just a testing ground for an actual TV product for the rest of the world? The product doesn't necessarily HAVE to have super-fast internet to work as we all know. Why would Google throw so much money into TV contracts and facilities like this just for their Fiber product?
http://www.google.com/about/datacent...24/CBF_002.jpg

I'm just wondering out loud, but what if the TV thing is something they planned to do separately anyway and the Google Fiber project just gave them the perfect place to do some initial testing before making that the new Google TV.... Hmm.......

Google will always primarily be an advertising company. In the past, they could care less about TV advertising, because it's market force has been dropping for decades. The only way to bring the price of television advertising back up, is to improve it's targeting. The only way to do that is to get accurate tracking information from the actual viewer (not just a barely representative nielson group). To do so, Google has to have information on WHAT and WHO is watching what. That is why they are now moving into tv. Simply building the sagetv style box, would, yes, improve their marketing information, if they aren't the actual carrier, they aren't the ones selling the advertising time. This is why they need to also be the carrier. Otherwise, all they could do is sell their marketing info to the advertisers, much like nielson has done for decades, but at a higher value than nielson's.

[brainbone]

Originally Posted by nycjoe

Will we, now?
Let's meet back here in 24 months and see how likely this is...

2 years is a bit optimistic, but it is more likely to happen than not. I'm sure Google doesn't want to miss out on this chance to increase advertising revenue and behavior modeling. It will do what it takes to make it happen.