Category: Entangle

Project Entangle

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Reach Out and Touch Someone (…or your TV). Thoughts on ATSC 3.0 broadcast apps.

Broadcast television has traditionally been a  prix fixe affair. A bunch of people shoot some video, slice it, stich it, and present it to you on your large screen TV to sit back and savor. If what appears doesn’t suit your palette, well, you can change the channel. Traditional broadcast TV has also been a largely lean back, consumptive experience without any chance to interact with or steer the program.

All that could change with ATSC 3.0 (aka NextGen TV). Continue reading “Reach Out and Touch Someone (…or your TV). Thoughts on ATSC 3.0 broadcast apps.”

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Breakthrough in DVR Storage and Time Shifting Rumored

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (AB)  Koherence Labs, the R&D arm of consumer electronics consulting firm Koherence, LLC,  is rumored to have made a breakthrough in content recording. Dubbed “InfiniDVR,” the new technology allows  an effectively unlimited recording capacity and permits viewing of all shows that have ever been or will be broadcast.

Continue reading “Breakthrough in DVR Storage and Time Shifting Rumored”

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On the Road to ATSC 3.0

Yes, we’re still alive!

Since CES we’ve been on the road to ATSC 3.0, heading out to Phoenix to sample the Pearl model market, Las Vegas for NAB, and made several diversions to Santa Barbara to work with NPG’s broadcast.

Depending on who you ask, ATSC 3.0 will be the greatest revolution in television since digital television (i.e. ATSC 1.0), or – being incompatible with the current ATSC 1.0 broadcast standard and embracing web and streaming technologies perhaps a little too much – its  greatest boondoggle.

ATSC 3.0 has a great many features for broadcasters, such as the opportunity for targeted advertising and content protection.  But what does it have for the average consumer? Continue reading “On the Road to ATSC 3.0”

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ATSC 3.0: CES 2019 & The Catching Waves Trip

Another CES has come and gone with its usual fill of dazzling tech, good dining, and blistered feet. And while I’m sure there was a 500″ 5G-connected 16k smart OLED TV with AI-imbued visual enhancements and a deep learning content recommendation engine, ATSC 3.0 was notably absent from the show floor. This isn’t too much of a surprise as the standard was completed just a year ago and it takes a bit of time for products to arrive and broadcasters (and their vendors) to gear up. While no products were on the show floor there was still plenty of activity going on in the background. As in previous years, Sinclair had its ATSC 3.0 test broadcast running from Black Mountain. CES 2020 will no doubt be an exciting show for 3.0.

In the meantime, the annual pilgrimage to M&M’s World trip to CES in Las Vegas provided an excuse to peruse the ATSC 3.0 airwaves and capture some bitstreams. I’d been working with 3.0 from a specification standpoint for much of 2018 with an eye to retrofitting Project Entangle. And with an Airwavz TV RedZone Receiver in hand it was time to start tearing into real broadcasts.

Continue reading “ATSC 3.0: CES 2019 & The Catching Waves Trip”

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Revisiting SSDs in DVRs

Previous posts at in-koherence have been rather skeptical of using SSDs as recording storage in DVRs. SSDs have a lifespan that is largely dictated by the amount of data written to them. This may not be much of a problem if you record one or two shows a day. However many users set up recordings for series which they might watch (but for some reason never find the time to…or maybe they decided it wasn’t such a great series after all, but who has time to cancel the subscription to the series?) This is amplified if multiple members of the household set up recordings on the DVR. The next thing you know it your four-tuner DVR is recording 20 hours of shows a day. For all its faults, the good old mechanical hard drive is superior in having a write limit that’s so high that it’s generally not considered.

But with rapidly falling prices, larger capacities (with correspondingly higher endurance ratings), and the increasing difficulty of finding non-SMR 2.5″ hard drives, the time has come to give SSDs a harder look. So we took a mid-grade SSD and ran the first SSD-based Project Entangle through its paces.

Continue reading “Revisiting SSDs in DVRs”