Bell Fibe PVR recordings expire after 60 days.

[Kisai]

 

Summary

 Bell (Canadian ISP, Television service provider, and content licensor to other Television services) is now going to delete your cloud PVR recordings after 60 days.

 

Quotes

Quote

 The telecom giant has notified users of its Bell Fibe cloud-based personal video recorder that on May 1 it will begin deleting their recordings after 60 days.

 

My thoughts

 Given that it's direct competitor in the market, Rogers, has a 1 year expiry, Telus has 90 days, why is there an expiry at all? So the ISP can free up disk space? So they can force their users to watch the VOD version of the same show they don't have all the episodes to? To force people to watch Netflix or CraveTV if they want to watch the entire series?

 

Like I've long since complained about Telus's complete incompetence about having any shows on their VOD service. You might click a TV show and you might have the most recent episode and one episode from 2 years ago, and nothing else. The ISP's VOD services are absolutely worthless because they want you to pay for CraveTV, because they directly profit from that.

 

Given that ISP's no longer even offer local PVR's and you can't buy PVR's that hook up to HDMI (legitimately) is this yet another attempt and destroying media?

 

Sources

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/pvr-pullback-bell-to-delete-viewers-saved-tv-shows-and-movies-after-60-days-1.6834904

[OhioYJ]

Are you all in Canada like us here in the US in regards to Cable companies? (They are monopolies, you don't have a choice in companies)

[da na]

Are companies too fucking cheap to put a 5400RPM laptop hard drive in a cable box anymore? 

[Bananasplit_00]

11 minutes ago, da na said:

Are companies too fucking cheap to put a 5400RPM laptop hard drive in a cable box anymore? 

See that costs *something* instead of nothing so that is reducing profit

[manikyath]

10 minutes ago, da na said:

Are companies too fucking cheap to put a 5400RPM laptop hard drive in a cable box anymore? 

meanwhile, my ISP is regularly under fire for "forcing it's users" to have a settop box with a terabyte of spinning rust to hold all their recordings.

 

it'll even do several recordings simultaniously, while you're still watching TV or another recording.

[da na]

3 minutes ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

See that costs *something* instead of nothing so that is reducing profit

Well it seems cloud storage is also very expensive. 

500GB is a pretty common PVR capacity. If every of the 2.65 million Bell TV subscribers in Canada filled that 500GB on the cloud, that's 1325 petabytes.

That is an absolute shitton of data and past a point (which has clearly been reached),it's cheaper to put a bunch of HDDs in people's set-top boxes than host millions of users' recorded videos in the cloud.

[da na]

2 minutes ago, manikyath said:

meanwhile, my ISP is regularly under fire for "forcing it's users" to have a settop box with a terabyte of spinning rust to hold all their recordings.

 

it'll even do several recordings simultaniously, while you're still watching TV or another recording.

...?

Do people want to own nothing and be happy? 

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, da na said:

...?

Do people want to own nothing and be happy? 

people want to get upset about how expensive their service is.. so they switch to another ISP to get worse service for more money. it appears to just kind of be "cool" to hate them.. despite their offerings being absolutely shocking to people abroad.

at will, i can walk into their shop and:

- swap out my modem for whatever the latest model is, free of charge.

- swap out my settop box for whatever the latest model is, free of charge.

- add or remove modems and settop boxes from my plan, with only the monthly cost addition or removal, no setup fees.

- take a new device home and plug it into the wall myself, without having to pay an activation fee or *have* to get a technician to do it.

- ask a technician to do it anyways, and get a tech visit free of charge

 

oh and when your wifi absolutely sucks ass, they have a service that -for a flat fee- comes and install access points all over your house. (the fee is essentially the value of said wifi devices, and it is not even close to paying for the tech's time)

 

oh, and here's a shocker too.. they actually guarantee their speeds.. none of that "up to" nonsense.

[da na]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

people want to get upset about how expensive their service is.. so they switch to another ISP to get worse service for more money. it appears to just kind of be "cool" to hate them.. despite their offerings being absolutely shocking to people abroad.

at will, i can walk into their shop and:

- swap out my modem for whatever the latest model is, free of charge.

- swap out my settop box for whatever the latest model is, free of charge.

- add or remove modems and settop boxes from my plan, with only the monthly cost addition or removal, no setup fees.

- take a new device home and plug it into the wall myself, without having to pay an activation fee or *have* to get a technician to do it.

- ask a technician to do it anyways, and get a tech visit free of charge

 

oh and when your wifi absolutely sucks ass, they have a service that -for a flat fee- comes and install access points all over your house. (the fee is essentially the value of said wifi devices, and it is not even close to paying for the tech's time)

 

oh, and here's a shocker too.. they actually guarantee their speeds.. none of that "up to" nonsense.

You are living in a fairytale.

That is incredible.

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

why is there an expiry at all?

It might be the content owners. I know with the ATSC 3.0 spec here in the US they added DRM for DVR's. The DVR has to be able to download a license from the internet and they can set an expiration date on the recordings. All because big media are greedy. That might be a big part of it. Possibly like you said, they might not want to store all that content long term.

[jagdtigger]

One more reason to cut the cord permanently? Also watch the same buttheads cry about piracy rising again........

[wanderingfool2]

41 minutes ago, da na said:

Well it seems cloud storage is also very expensive. 

500GB is a pretty common PVR capacity. If every of the 2.65 million Bell TV subscribers in Canada filled that 500GB on the cloud, that's 1325 petabytes.

That is an absolute shitton of data and past a point (which has clearly been reached),it's cheaper to put a bunch of HDDs in people's set-top boxes than host millions of users' recorded videos in the cloud.

Not how it would really work though.

 

You can pick and choose the start and end time for a particular show...so there are 6 possible options for a particular TV show.  If you have 1000 customers you don't need to save the 1000 VOD's for an individual show, instead you just need to store the 6 possible ones.

 

Ultimately they could actually do something where they keep all the shows broadcast cached and still likely be under that limit....and honestly a few petabytes wouldn't cost too much considering their revenue and profit stream

[Donut417]

5 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

One more reason to cut the cord permanently? Also watch the same buttheads cry about piracy rising again........

As long as you buy physical media. But there is a cost to drive to store all the data, more if you want high resolution/HDR content.

 

Even streaming providers are fucking up. They are all stumbling over the password sharing, all are trying to push ads or make you pay more. They are literally giving me more reason to just go with out their product.

[TetraSky]

2 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

Are you all in Canada like us here in the US in regards to Cable companies? (They are monopolies, you don't have a choice in companies)

We usually at least have 2 choices in most places (not fake choices where they pretend to serve an area for the FTC when they only have connectivity to a single house in the entire block, like what we hear about US ISPs).

Along with third party resellers who resell the same packages for slightly cheaper in exchange for less support.

 

 

Honestly I'm just surprised you could keep a cloud recording for that long in the first place. Personally, I haven't had a TV service in my home for the past 4 years. Haven't felt the need for it, everything is available on the internet anyway.

[jagdtigger]

36 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

But there is a cost to drive to store all the data, more if you want high resolution/HDR content.

With the current fragmentation and greed issue (neither will get fixed ever) makes it financially more viable to own a bunch of media and back them up to a NAS.......

[Donut417]

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

With the current fragmentation and greed issue (neither will get fixed ever) makes it financially more viable to own a bunch of media and back them up to a NAS.......

Thats all cool if you want to take the time to rip your media and have money for drives.

 

For me it kinda sucks because I can hear the NAS drive spin up and down when Im sleeping. My dad sleeps with the TV on, and so he doesnt burn thru our data allotment for the month he watches plex. Cant move the NAS easily because running Ethernet in our home is not easy, at least due to my folks owning the house. If I had my choice I know a good way to run the cables but they wont let me.

[jagdtigger]

6 hours ago, Donut417 said:

have money for drives

If you can throw a couple hundred bucks per year out the window for streaming/cloud service fees id say you wont have much of an issue spending the same amount of money on drives. Also id wager in the long run the upkeep cost is less than what you would pay for the mentioned services.

Edited April 6 by jagdtigger