"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Digital Video Recording Changes TV For Good
Special to the St. Paul Pioneer Press
No revelations here: TV is an intellectual wasteland. But this is the digital age, so hold on. Something interesting is afoot.
Digital video recording technology is now available on Minneapolis' side of the river as a digital Time Warner Cable package (but not yet on St. Paul's side as part of an AT&T; Broadband package for reasons explained below).
I've been subscribing since December, paying about $65 a month. Let me tell you, this changes things.
Time Warner's DVR service is a simpler take on noncable digital-recording systems like TiVo and ReplayTV. Both consist of devices that let viewers record shows onto hard drives for later viewing, and even to pause and rewind live TV.
In any form, DVR pushes television forward by making it possible to mimic the immersive experience of reading.
Roger Fidler, director of the Cyberinformation Institute at Kent State University, has performed lab experiments to gauge how people mentally process digital video. He has reached a similar conclusion.
"We've found," he says, "that (digital) video clips take on a lot of the characteristics of text for people."
How? Say someone is reading a book on physics. If really motivated, that reader can take time to slowly absorb the text. Difficult passages can be read and reread. The reader can simply put the book down and mull over the information's implications. Unlike TV, there's no sense of blink, and you miss it.
Now, with DVR, this finally is true for TV.
"The ability to play back easily and conveniently certainly begins to give digital video some of the advantages that print has," Fidler says. "Viewers feel more in control over the medium."
There's a button on my DVR remote that rewinds broadcasts in precise five-second bursts.
There also are more traditional VCR-styled rewind and fast-forward buttons that track backward or forward as far as you want, and there is a pause button.
Because DVR is digital, these features work equally well with programs you've recorded and with live shows.
I really noticed the power in this a few weeks ago, while sitting through eight hours of Sir David Frost's landmark 1977 interviews with Richard Nixon. Now, obviously, eight of hours of Tricky Dick won't win any ratings competitions, but I'm something of a presidential history buff and felt compelled to watch.
Fortunately, I didn't have to chain myself to the television. Programming the DVR to record shows, I have found, is very simple. And mind you, I never did figure out how to program a VCR to tape stuff days in advance.
Still, eight hours is a long time to watch television, even with frequent breaks. The mind wanders. The phone rings. Nature calls. Spouses want attention. The cat gets hungry. For the first time in my experience, technology helped me overcome these pervasive obstacles to comprehension.
I found myself often stopping the program, rewinding it to look again at certain sections.
I could think through what Mr. Nixon really was saying and scrutinize specific statements such as the Nixon classic, "If a president does it, it's not illegal."
I could absorb body language and other nuances, things that usually go unperceived watching regular TV.
By the time I'd finished, I felt as if I had "read" at least a slim volume of Nixon memoirs, annotated by Frost's sharp commentary. I felt I had studied Nixon, not just passively and half-attentively gazed at him for eight hours. A huge difference.
Now this comprehension-enhancement stuff is great, but don't expect to see it trumpeted in any digital-cable marketing campaigns. (Digital TV -- it makes you brainier!)
Time Warner, for one, seems more interested in pushing DVR's time-shifting functions -- "Watch what you want, when you want!" -- and its instant-replay and slow-motion features. But this is nice gadgetry, too, especially if you're the type who likes to review freeze frames of, say, bad refereeing in NFL games.
DVR really isn't all that new. It combines the VCR with the Internet. In fact, to get DVR you must rent a set-top box -- mine's from Scientific Atlanta. It isn't much more than a specialized computer for storing and playing video.
I've already described the VCR similarities. Where DVR collides with the Internet is its ability to "cache" video. This is the key.
Notice on the Internet how your media player pops up well before you actually see video you've requested? As you wait, a message usually appears somewhere saying the player is "buffering." "Caching" is another word for that. When it finishes caching, the video plays.
What's happening is that several seconds of video preload into your computer before it launches. It's "getting ahead of itself." That's because individual chunks of video flow disparately in "packets" over thousands of interconnected phone lines on the Internet.
Think of it as sending a fleet of trucks transporting sections of a disassembled house to some distant town to be rebuilt, but sending each truck on a different road. They don't all arrive at once. Neither does Internet video. Without caching, Web video would play only in fits and starts.
DVR also caches video, but here there's an important difference. TV cable possesses so much raw bandwidth that video signals arrive in real time and play instantly, without interruption. So in a sense, DVR flips Net video on its head -- it automatically stores stuff you've already watched.
That's why you can pause live video or rewind it. Everything is automatically stored. (The cache is, however, erased the second you change the channel. If you want to keep stuff longer, you have to click the RECORD button.)
What's more, unlike a VCR, pausing or rewinding doesn't stop fresh video from arriving into your set-top box.
If you've paused or rewound a segment but want to catch the remainder of the show, everything is there, stored in the DVR cache. You can either let it play on from the point where you stopped, or you can hit the "LIVE" button and jump back to the present.
I've shared the good news. Now, the bad news. You won't find DVR available through your St. Paul digital cable provider.
Time Warner Cable offers this service in Bloomington, where I live, and in most of the western metro communities where Time Warner controls cable franchises. But AT&T; Broadband, St. Paul's cable provider, does not.
AT&T; Broadband, soon to known as Comcast, offers basic digital cable and video-on-demand, but has set no date for rolling out DVR capabilities, according to Dave Nyberg, the company's St. Paul manager for franchising and government affairs.
Nyberg said the company is upgrading its system, and sometime this fall it should be able to identify a timetable for an eventual DVR rollout.
That will be a good day. After 50 years of dumb television, DVR is an intelligent, important and welcome step forward.
Kevin Featherly is a Bloomington writer specializing in politics and technology. He wrote most of this article on his now-infamous iBook laptop.
Originally published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Jan. 7, 2004.
About Kevin Featherly