More news from the Cable-Tec Expo and this time it's from SeaChange -- although we'd all probably love to have this in our home, the RS-DVR is 108 TB and is designed to service 500 subscribers, while taking up 7 racks of data center space. The system would probably work nicely for operators like
Cablevision who plan to replace the DVR sitting under your HDTV with a network based version -- especially since SeaChange claims the total cost of ownership is only $100, which apparently is less than a third what DVRs are currently costing providers. The RS-DVR can record 4,000 SD shows at once, which might just be enough since Hollywood is requiring cable companies to record one copy of each show per customer. It can also serve up content to portable devices while still letting you resume where you left off later on your HDTV. No word if there's been any takers, or even a price though.
posted Oct 29th 2009 7:07PM
I'll take two
Recording one copy of a show per customer is pretty straight-forward. You just have to... erm... "optimize" your filesystem to "compress" certain groups of files with similar "characteristics" in common.
I believe they call it "hard linking" :)
Holy crap I discovered that site a couple of weeks ago after I was playing around with the diagnostic screen on my dvr if I had know the diagram above was news I would have sent it in to engadgethd weeks ago
Are you sure you mean 7 RACKS of equipment and not 7 Rack Units, i.e. 7 x 1.75" or about a foot of rack space? Those are kind of different things.
7 RACKS of equipment to serve 500 users wouldn't be much denser than just piling the DVRs in there. Plus at $100 a user for 500 users it would only be $50,000 for 7 racks of equipment, which seems kind of light for Seachange... It would be under $200 per RU.