July 21, 2003

In an article, the New York Times describes both the features and missing features of personal video recorder (PVR) manufacturer ReplayTV's new 5500 model. It states: ReplayTV's new 5500 model, which will go on sale next month, will no longer be able to skip entire commercials automatically without recording them or to send recorded programming over the Internet to other ReplayTV users outside a home network. The recorders will, however, still be able to store large libraries of programming indefinitely and allow users to skip manually through recorded commercials in 30-second increments. The 30-second skip is a standard, through undocumented feature on machines made by ReplayTV’s competitor TiVo. ReplayTV clearly hopes that my dropping the automatic ad sharing and program sending features the manual ad skip and other features that result in fewer people watching commercials do not draw the attention of the media companies and result in it getting sued again. 10:15:48 PM

In an other DSL related announcement, Bell Sympatico has dropped the upload/download bandwidth caps on its regular and ultra high speed service and upgraded the speed of the regular service to up to 1.5 Mbps download and up to 320Kbps upload, which are up to 50 and 100% increases. resumably they were feeling competition from Rogers; Shaw and other cable based high-speed providers that did not have download caps. 10:13:51 PM

In a major win for Canada’s smaller telephone companies the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has ordered the larger phone companies to allow their compteitor’s residential customers get high speed DSL based Internet service from the larger companies while retaining their current telephone provider. The CRTC found that the larger companies’ monoply on high spped internet by telephone was hurting competition. An an article in the Globe and Mail uses the example of Call-Net: Call-Net said in a filing to the CRTC that 17 per cent of its customers who cancelled their service said they did so because they couldn't get DSL service with Bell. Also, 11 per cent of potential customers told Call-Net that they declined to switch their phone service from Bell because they would not receive DSL service. 10:12:20 PM