MediaMall this week introduced PlayLater, a new software DVR for online video, allowing users to record online streamed content from Hulu, Netflix, or from almost any other website, storing unlimited content on your personal computer for later viewing.

PlayLater is being marketed as a companion to the company’s first product — PlayOn, which streams virtually any video format to television sets and portable devices like smartphones and tablet computers.

MediaMall’s products directly target pay television “cord-cutters.”  By serving up unlimited video content from web video providers — recorded or live — to television sets and portable devices, there may be more than enough to watch without paying for hundreds of cable networks you don’t care about.

PlayLater works easiest with its built-in online program guide, listing programming from the various “channels” the service supports.  Already “built-in” is listings for online content from Hulu, Netflix, Amazon’s Video On Demand, Pandora, YouTube, CNN, Fox News, TNT, and at least a dozen other networks.  Third party “plug-ins” extend the number of “channels” to other video content websites.

Viewers simply find the show or shows they want to record through the guide and press the “record” button to begin the capturing process.  Shows are quietly recorded in the background, and small pop-ups alert you when various recordings are completed.  The resulting files, recorded in a secure DRM Windows Media format, reside on your hard drive for later viewing.  You can record as much as your hard drive can accommodate, and beta testers quickly found they often amassed hundreds of recordings over a month — providing more content that most cable DVRs can handle.

When combined with MediaMall’s PlayOn, PlayLater viewers can take the show on the road, watching their stored shows over a television set in the next room or in another state, remotely streamed over your broadband connection.  You can also watch on Android or iPhone smartphones, or on tablet computers like Apple’s iPad.

MediaMall products come with a 14-day free trial, but after that you have to pay to keep watching.  The company intends to sell the packaged suite of PlayOn and PlayLater for $7.99 a month, or $69.99 per year.

Stop the Cap! has been using PlayOn at our headquarters for a few months now, and we’ve been very impressed with the results.  PlayOn effectively streams virtually any video file format we throw at it over to our Roku box.  It has largely replaced our first generation Apple TV running Boxee software, which has gotten progressively more troublesome with age.  The picture quality over our wireless N network has been excellent, and the accompanying Android app has also worked well streaming shows over Verizon Wireless’ 4G LTE network or Wi-Fi.  With Time Warner Cable’s 30/5Mbps DOCSIS 3 broadband service, PlayOn’s picture quality remains excellent even when streamed to remote televisions.

PlayLater is an interesting concept, but we’re not as impressed with MediaMall’s newest endeavor, for these reasons:

Android Phone PlayOn Media Player

MediaMall has no official partnerships with any of the content producers supported by the product.  After covering other product innovations that offer consumers increased viewing convenience, we’re certain content producers will adopt the same hostile response to PlayLater they have with other recording software that allows viewers to store a digital copy on their home computer.  That response could come in lawsuits or through technical adjustments to try and block access to PlayLater.  The company says the legality of their software DVR should not be an issue, considering consumers can already record shows on cable company DVRs and home video recording units.  The biggest “risk” for MediaMall is the fact it allows users to record and save shows from services like Hulu, even after their “online viewing window” expires (typically after a month).  You could theoretically build a season-long collection of shows with PlayLater, a concept that violates Hulu’s terms and conditions.

While the concept of a DVR for online viewing allows for convenient time-shifting, most of the shows available to record are already available “on-demand.”  It makes little sense to record a show you can launch and watch anytime you want.  MediaMall says their product will appeal most to travelers who find themselves without an Internet connection, either because they are flying, driving, or visiting relatives without Internet access.  In these cases, watching pre-recorded shows may make sense. We think the concept of automatically recording shows from live video streams (or from Slingbox, cable or satellite TV) would be more helpful.  Those of us who would like to keep cable but dispense with overpriced DVR rental fees would thank you.

The PlayLater application currently works only on Windows-based computers.  A Mac version is reportedly in development.

Remote viewing requires the PlayOn companion application, which means leaving two software programs running continuously.

Recordings are DRM-protected and technically rely on a “screen-recording” approach, albeit one that takes place in the background.  Recordings occur in real time, and the video quality suffers slightly from the transcoding between the original media format and the DRM-protected video file eventually produced and saved on your computer.  Tests showed some occasional screen glitches when busy websites suffered from traffic congestion.  We also found very slight audio sync problems from time to time, but were barely noticeable.

You can’t currently move the video files and watch them on another computer or device — they either have to be watched on the original computer, or streamed with PlayOn to another device.

The package may be too expensive for some viewers’ tastes.  Without PlayOn, PlayLater sells for $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, but that ties your viewing options down.

Overall, PlayLater will probably be most attractive to those who find themselves uncomfortably without their Internet connection and looking for something to watch.  If you install the software on a portable laptop (left on to handle recordings), watching on the computer itself may prove to be the most convenient way to watch.  But we’re not impressed with the restrictive DRM making it impossible to simply transfer recordings between devices without streaming, and the concept of recording on-demand programming that can be watched whenever one wants anyway is not going to convince a number of people to pay $50 a year for the software.  PlayOn has proved far more useful to us than PlayLater probably ever will.  But one benefit we did appreciate with PlayLater — the ability to easily skip the increasing commercial load found on Hulu.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/PlayLater.flv[/flv]

An introduction to PlayLater.  (1 minute)

Charter Cable told a Howell, Mich. family that lost everything in a major house fire they owed the cable company $1,600 for cable equipment, remote controls — even the batteries — that were consumed in the blaze.

Kerry Cacchione, her three children and her husband Jeff lost every single possession they owned in the fire seven weeks ago.  The Cacchione family, like many home renters, neglected to purchase all-important renter’s insurance, and without it, all of their furniture, clothing, and other valuables were gone for good.

When the family returned home to see the property, undergoing repairs paid for by their landlord, they were confronted with an enormous bill from Charter Communications, their cable company.

“$1,600, and they [charged us] for every remote, every battery, every modem, every cable box, and every DVR box,” said Cacchione.

The Cacchione family took the bill to Charter Cable and begged for forgiveness, telling employees there was no way they could afford to pay that cable bill.

Kerry reports Charter was unsympathetic and refused to waive the charges, leading her to ask WXYZ’s “Call for Action” to intervene.

With the threat of more bad publicity on the 6 o’clock news, Charter Communications decided to wipe out their bill.

Charter is among the most intransigent cable companies when it comes to demanding compensation for cable equipment destroyed or damaged in fires.  The company always relents when confronted with the prospect of bad publicity, such as when a customer service representative told one tornado victim in Alabama she would wait on the phone while she searched through debris in the neighborhood for lost cable equipment.

Every renter should always have renter’s insurance, which typically will cover damaged cable equipment. It’s very affordable and protects renters from losses. Many consumers believe landlords carry insurance which will protect them in the event of a natural disaster or fire, but those insurance policies protect the landlord’s property, not renters’ possessions. The peace of mind afforded by renter’s insurance can make all the difference in a major loss like the one experienced by the Cacchione family.

[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WXYZ Detroit Losing It All 8-31-11.mp4[/flv]

WXYZ in Detroit comes to the rescue of yet another family falling victim to an enormous cable bill from equipment lost or damaged in a house fire.  (3 minutes)

Despite the loss of more than 128,000 video subscribers, Time Warner Cable more than made up the difference with rate increases on equipment, programming, and broadband to score a 23 percent increase in earnings in the second quarter of 2011.  For the period of April-June, Time Warner earned a profit of $420 million, nearly $80 million more than the same quarter last year.

Cable Television

Time Warner CEO Glenn Britt continued to blame the loss of video subscribers on the housing crisis and economy, suggesting the cable operator’s prices have gotten too high for some customers to handle, and they’ve disconnected cable television service as a result.  Britt also continues to downplay the impact of online video allowing for consumer cord-cutting, suggesting instead that increased competition from phone companies and satellite providers are creating a problem online video isn’t.

As a result, Time Warner is refocusing its efforts on marketing packages to three segments it particularly wants to attract — the very well-to-do, the Latino community, and the income-challenged.

Time Warner officials noted that many of their customers have continued to pare back their packages to cushion against the company’s rate increases.  For the last few years, consumers have cut premium movie channels and extra tier add-ons.  Now customers are targeting Time Warner’s DVR service as a route to a lower cable bill.  Many are returning their DVR boxes to save money, or are not keeping the service as a promotion expires.  Time Warner often bundles DVR service into new customer promotions for no additional charge.

For these income-challenged consumers, Time Warner is promising to develop new packages of services at reduced prices.  That likely means the expansion of the company’s “budget tier” — a package of selected basic cable networks, excluding expensive sports programming, currently testing in two markets for around $50 a month.

But the company is also reporting success with its wealthier customers, many who are adopting Time Warner’s super premium Signature Home service, from which the company collects an average of $220 per month per customer.  Time Warner is also ramping up promotion of its cable services to Spanish-speaking audiences in the Latino community — customers it may have under-served in the past.

The company also reported declines in video-on-demand revenue, principally adult pornography pay-per-view content consumers are now watching on the Internet for free.

Broadband

Among the brightest stars for Time Warner Cable continues to be broadband service, which is increasingly important… and profitable for the nation’s second largest cable operator.  With “pricing strength,” Time Warner has successfully adopted a series of rate increases for Road Runner service, increasing revenues along the way.  The company also reports success with its DOCSIS 3 rollouts, now reaching 60 percent of its cable subscribers.  CEO Britt says the cable company expects to complete DOCSIS 3 upgrades nationwide by the end of 2012.  A noticeable percentage of customers are upgrading to premium-priced, faster speed tiers as a result.

Despite the investment in DOCSIS 3, Time Warner Cable continues to slash the amount of capital it is investing in its network.  So far this year, capital expenditures are down 7.4 percent to $1.36 billion.  Chief Operating Officer Rob Marcus predicts Time Warner will spend no more than $3 billion on its systems in 2011, despite plans to continue broadband upgrades and convert their cable systems to all-digital operations.  So far this year, Time Warner has earned over $2.2 billion from its broadband division alone, up 9 percent from last year.  The company attributes most of that growth to rate increases and customers upgrading their service.

Other facts:

• Time Warner’s wireless mobile broadband has failed to spark much interest from consumers, perhaps because they realize it comes from Clearwire, a company Time Warner CEO Glenn Britt seemed unimpressed with in today’s conference call.  He made a point of telling investors the cable company is under no obligation to invest anything else in the venture;
• Time Warner Cable is taking a new interest in Wi-Fi, deploying networks in New York and Los Angeles, in the hope the company can boost interest in a “quad-play” of cable, phone, Internet, and wireless broadband/Wi-Fi that consumers have taken a pass on thus far;
• The company’s new super data center in Charlotte, N.C., will provide a national “head-end” for IPTV video, currently supplied from a facility in Denver.  This will principally benefit iPad users using the company’s app to stream online video.  The company hopes to eliminate regional and local distribution efforts as a cost-savings measure, consolidating national distribution through Colorado and North Carolina;
• The company’s next version of TWCable TV — the aforementioned iPad app, is due out in a few weeks and will include text searching for individual shows.  Whether it corrects the ludicrous inability for the app to consistently stream video is another question;
• Competition for new customers has been responsible for a number of disconnects.  One satellite provider is pitching Time Warner customers on a $30 a month video package that includes the NFL Sunday Ticket for free.  Verizon FiOS has increased its marketing of Time Warner customers, offering its own triple-play package for $99 a month.  AT&T U-verse has their own triple play packages as low as $89 a month, with a substantial mail-in rebate offer good for over $100.  But Britt warns the lack of change in the “average revenue per subscriber”-numbers from competitors probably means consumers are paying substantially more thanks to fine print-surcharges and fees;
• Time Warner is still trying to sign agreements for its TV Everywhere project, particularly for HBO Go, but the terms are evidently still not acceptable to the cable company.

Our earlier coverage, seen below, covers Britt’s remarkable comments about usage-based pricing.  He was certainly off the usual industry playbook today, even going as far as telling investors what we knew all along: bandwidth costs bear almost no relationship to the prices charged for broadband service.  That’s one we’ll tuck away and remember.

Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt highlights the results from the second quarter, covering cable-TV, broadband, and other products. July 28, 2011. (6 minutes)
You must remain on this page to hear the clip, or you can download the clip and listen later.

Dish Networks' ViP722: Leaving on a 60-watt bulb 24 hours a day uses just a tad more than the ludicrous power consumption of this set top box: 55W while active and 52W while in standby.

The average pay television subscriber is spending at least $4 a month in hidden electricity costs thanks to the small set top boxes found on top of many television sets across North America.  That’s more than you are paying to run a modern refrigerator.

That stunning revelation comes from a study by the Natural Resources Defense Council, financed by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Costs for residents in the northeastern United States, where electricity rates are often higher, can reach $10 per month for customers with a DVR in the living room and a traditional set top box in the bedroom.  That’s up to $120 a year in hidden charges.

The pay television industry, which has driven the set top box into millions of homes, has never paid much attention to energy consumption of their equipment, if only because they don’t pay the power bills of their customers.  The NRDC found that many boxes even attempt to fool consumers into believing they are running in a reduced-power mode, by programming them to slightly dim the front clock when the box’s “power button” is switched off.

In reality, most set top boxes use nearly as much power “shut off” as they use left on.

The cost of these little power demons to North America’s power grid exceeds 18 billion kilowatt hours. More than seven power plants could not sustain that level of power, even if running 24/7 every day of the year.  The combined electric use of Alberta and British Columbia in a year would still not match the power consumption of every set top box in North America.

These revelations have led the U.S. Department of Energy to lay the groundwork to regulate the power consumption of set top equipment.  Once again, the United States would be a follower.  Europe cracked down on excessive power consumption of electronic equipment years earlier.  In the United Kingdom, for example, satellite providers include a box that can achieve a standby status that only consumes a handful of watts.  The trade-off is that consumers have to wait up to 90 seconds for the box to re-boot every morning when the television is first switched on.  Consumers have the ability to choose different power states as a menu option on the devices.

Some cable operators program their DVR boxes to spin down internal hard drives overnight, assuming no recording is scheduled at those times.  But many of these initiatives were designed to spare the longevity of the hard drive, not reduce power consumption overall.

Popular Science dug through the data and uncovered the best reasonable options subscribers have for boxes that at least snort their way onto your monthly utility bill, as opposed to pigging out at the trough (your wallet):

If You Have Comcast

In terms of energy efficiency, Comcast comes out as the lesser of several evils, but not by much. Comcast’s most energy-efficient boxes tend to be slightly more efficient than their equivalents at Verizon, Time Warner, and the satellite companies, and they also offer more choices in terms of hardware. The NRDC’s data picks the Motorola DCH70 as the best standard-def box (sucking down 10W while active, and 10W while on standby), the Pace RNG110 as the best high-def box (13W active, 12W standby), and the Motorola DCX3400 as the best HD/DVR (29W active, 28W standby).

I spoke to a Comcast representative who told me that typically, the company installs whichever box they want, but that if you request a specific box that they have in stock, they’ll happily install that one for you. They won’t order you a box from elsewhere, and this kind of hardware rotates in and out of availability fairly quickly, but at least you might have the option to choose.

If You Have Verizon FiOS

Verizon’s most efficient boxes are just okay, while its least efficient are some of the worst of any surveyed. Even worse, Verizon gives the customer absolutely no option about which box they get–you can’t request a specific box at any point. That doesn’t matter too much for the non-DVR boxes, as the NRDC’s findings only turned up one standard-def and one high-def box, but there’s a big gap in efficiency between the company’s best and worst DVRs. The most efficient is Motorola’s QIP7216, at an unremarkably 29W active and 28W standby, but the older Motorola QIP6416 clocks in at a lousy 36W active and 35W standby.

If You Have Time Warner Cable

Time Warner has a smaller selection of set-top boxes than either Verizon or Comcast, with only one averagely (in)efficient DVR and one startlingly inefficient standard-def box. For a high-def, non-DVR box, the Cisco Explorer 4250HDC is the most efficient, at 19W active and 18W standby, but Time Warner told me that that’s an older box that might be tough to find. The Time Warner rep was (surprisingly, given the company’s lousy reputation here in New York) quite helpful, and offered to try to track down one of the 4250HDCs if that was what I wanted.

If You Have DirecTV

Here we get to the satellite folks. DirecTV’s offerings are only slightly less efficient than Comcast’s or Verizon’s, with the (currently only) standard-def box coming in at 12W active, 9W standby, the best HD box (the DirecTV H24) at 16W active, 15W standby, and the best HD/DVR (the DirecTV HR24) at 31W active, 31W standby. The DVR is pretty lousy, efficiency-wise, but that’s nothing compared to the Dish Network’s craziness.

If You Have Dish Network

I don’t know what is happening inside the Dish Network’s DVRs. Given the energy usage, they might well be powering nuclear reactors. The “best” DVR Dish offers, the ViP922, uses 43W while active, and 40W while in standby–but the worst one, the ViP722, uses a ridiculous 55W while active and 52W while in standby.

If You Use Internet Video Streaming

Many are ditching traditional cable services for online services like Netflix and Hulu, and luckily, there are a whole bunch of gadgets that can play that content (and more) on a TV. They are also invariably more efficient than a cable box, to a startling degree. The Apple TV (reviewed here), which streams Netflix and plays music, movies, and TV from Apple’s iTunes store, uses a mere 3W while active and 0.5W while in standby. Roku‘s XR-HD, which streams Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video, and a whole bunch more, uses only 7W while active and another 7W while in standby. The Boxee Box, a curiously shaped media streamer that uses the open-source, ultra-powerful Boxee software, can play Netflix, stream video from other computers on its network, play media from a hard drive or thumb drive plugged into one of its USB ports, and stream from lots of apps (with Hulu hopefully to come soon). It was tested by an Ars Technica commenter whose measurements probably differ from the NRDC’s, but roughly estimates that it uses 13W while active and 13W while in standby.

[flv width=”640″ height=”388″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CBC TV boxes guzzle power 6-27-11.flv[/flv]

CBC TV took a closer look at the pay television set top box: a real power guzzler.  (2 minutes)

A Cincinnati-area man found a DirecTV promotion from his local phone company promising a full package of television programming with a DVR box for just $30 a month.  A month later, that “bargain” literally emptied his checking account of more than $400.

Cincinnati Bell, like several other telephone companies, tries to compete for “triple play” customers accustomed to one bill for phone, Internet, and television service.  But where the company’s fiber network does not extend, customers can only get telco-TV by signing up for a DirecTV satellite television package.

Gary Gideon of Westwood learned the hard way that phone company promotions promising attractive prices are often tempered with paragraphs of fine print which make savings elusive.  In this case, the trouble began when Gideon thought he was receiving the standard DirecTV DVR that was included in the promotion.  Instead, the company supplied him with an HD DVR that carries a hefty additional charge, turning his $29.99 price he was originally promised into $49.85 instead — nearly $20 extra a month.

When Gideon complained about the surprise charges, he was offered a DVR downgrade, if he was willing to pony up an expensive deposit he was never asked to pay for the more deluxe model.  The installer responsible for Gideon’s setup promised he could walk away and cancel the package without any harm done.  But a month later, DirecTV deducted nearly $400 from his checking account to cover “early termination fees.”

Despite the assurances Gideon received, the satellite company’s customer service agents refused to budge on waiving the termination fee for just a few weeks of service, telling Gideon “nobody” has the power to waive such fees.

[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WKRC Cincinnati Unexpected Satellite Cable Fees 6-2-11.mp4[/flv]

Nobody except the media or an empowered customer service representative.  WKRC-TV in Cincinnati covered Gideon’s nightmare and found DirecTV only too willing to reverse the early termination fees they refused to refund earlier.  They said it was “good customer relations” to do so.  It’s also good public relations on the six o’clock news.

When dealing with satellite providers delivering service on behalf of a phone company, always carefully review the fine print for equipment and installation fees, contract terms and obligations, and disclosures for any additional charges.  If the equipment does not match what the offer provided, refuse it.  Remember that the truck plastered with DirecTV logos that appears in your driveway to handle the installation is probably an independent contractor — one that usually cannot make promises on behalf of the satellite company.  (2 minutes)