HBO Go, which requires a subscription, is only available to users who get HBO from their cable provider, so it’s not a solution for cord cutters to simply pay for à la carte HBO programming separate from cable or satellite. But it’s a boon for HBO subscribers who want to access the provider’s backlog of content: HBO Go makes every episode of every season of every HBO show available to subscribers.

Apple has been reportedly in discussion with U.S. cable companies, including Time Warner, for many months about ways to bring cable content to its set-top box. The news that HBO Go could arrive by mid-2013 is the most significant sign yet that the two are making headway in the negotiations.

This would not be the first time Time Warner has made HBO Go available on a set-top: it’s already on Roku set-top boxes and on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console. Neither is it a first for Apple customers. HBO Go has been available as an app on the iOS App Store since 2011.

But it would be a possible selling point for Apple as it continues to figure out its television strategy. Though the company sold two million set-top boxes during the final quarter of 2012, the company’s leadership won’t commit publicly to what the future holds for the device. CEO Tim Cook has moved from calling Apple TV a hobby to “an area of intense interest.”

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Showcased Monday at the Cable Show in Boston, TiVo Stream enables users of TiVo Premiere or Premiere Q digital video recorders to view video from their multichannel subscription on devices including the iPad on iPhone.

The transcoding product is similar to EchoStar’s Slingbox, but differs in that it streams or downloads programs to multiple mobile devices without disrupting living-room viewing.

In addition, TiVo also unveiled a new IP set-top box that allows Premiere Q users to view live or recorded TV from any room in the house.

TiVo will debut both products at retail, or through partnerships with multichannel TV service providers including DirecTV, Charter Communications, Suddenlink and the UK’s Virgin Media, later this year.

The offerings come as TiVo has finally re-captured some of its long-lost momentum. Infused by its Virgin deal, the company posted a net gain of 387,000 subscribers using its boxes and DVR interface in 2011, its first usage uptick in several years.

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At the core of the issue is whether cable companies should be allowed to encrypt their basic cable programming, something that existing regulation doesn’t allow. Unencrypted signals can be used by tuners built into most modern TV sets as well as equipment like Boxee’s live TV tuner to access these basic cable channels straight from the coax cable that comes out of your wall, without the need for any set-top box.

Cable companies have asked the FCC for waivers to these restrictions, arguing that encrypted channels would reduce piracy and that encrypted cable connections can be remotely serviced, eliminating the need for many service visits. The FCC is currently hearing all sides of the issue as it contemplates whether to do away with the restrictions and allow all cable companies to encrypt basic cable. Boxee has filed multiple letters with the commission and met with its staff last week.

On Wednesday, the startup wrote on its blog:

“[The cable companies’] real motivation is to prevent you from being able to connect the cable from the wall directly to your TV or Boxee Box. You will need to rent a set-top box from your cable provider, pay an extra $5–$15 per month and it will no longer work with your Boxee Box or similar devices. The cable companies are losing subscribers every quarter. If they want to reverse that trend they should look into building better products, reducing prices and improving customer service, not going to the government asking for rule changes to force consumers into spending more money and blocking start-ups from competing.”

Boxee’s position has been shared by Public Knowledge as well as the Consumer Electronics Association and consumer electronics manufacturers like Hauppauge, which makes the Boxee dongle. The cable companies, on the other hand, have been getting support from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) as well as some municipalities, including Miami.

Altogether, more than 80 documents have been filed with the FCC on the issue. Many of these filings from both sides make it clear that this is about not only what is going to happen to those basic cable channels but also the role that consumer electronics manufacturers, cable companies and startups like Boxee will play in the future of pay TV.

Consumer electronics makers have long favored a new standard called AllVid that would provide a new interface among traditional pay-TV services, online competition and connected devices. Cable companies opposed the standard; Boxee, on the other hand, came out in favor of AllVid in the presentation to the FCC last week, stating on one of its slides that “AllVid holds exciting potential for development of new consumer devices delivering integrated entertainment experiences.”

Check out our video review below to see how Boxee’s live TV tuner works:

Image courtesy of Flickr user familymwr

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So what makes it work? The set-top box, which the company calls Parker internally, takes advantage of the new DLNA Premium Video platform that allows for whole-home networking of multiple devices. In theory, that means any DLNA-certified device — whether it be a PC, tablet, connected TV or other gadget — will have access to all the same programming you can watch on the TV through the set-top box.

At CES, for instance, Comcast representatives demoed a Samsung tablet and Windows desktop playing back live TV, as well as pre-recorded shows from the Parker box’s DVR. This means that subscribers may no longer need a DVR for every connected TV in the home, as they’ll be able to access the new, cloud-based Xcalibur user interface wirelessly instead.

It doesn’t exactly kill off the set-top completely — you still need that one Parker box in the home to enable streaming throughout. But it does massively reduce the complexity of connecting multiple TVs throughout the home. That’s good news for Comcast, as it could decrease the number of truck rolls for installation of new services every time a subscriber wants to add a TV to another room in the home.

It also opens up the ability to support a much wider range of new devices without additional investment. For consumers aching to use their tablets, mobile phones and other gadgets to access the same content that they get on their TVs, the new capabilities unlocked by the Parker box will add a tremendous amount of value to their cable subscriptions.

Of course, Comcast isn’t the only operator looking to limit or minimize the number of set-tops and DVRs that need to be installed in user’s homes. Verizon is looking to roll out a multimedia gateway that will enable subscribers to wirelessly access live TV throughout the home from multiple devices. And Samsung and DirecTV have partnered to enable “set-top boxless” access to the satellite provider’s program guide and video.

The Parker set-top box is currently in limited deployment in Augusta, Ga., and Comcast plans to widen availability later in 2012. Once it does, consumers could find themselves with new ways to access their content.

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Thanks to a combination of peer-to-peer networking and big data algortihms, cable or satellite providers could significantly reduce the costs of serving content while also improving the accuracy of personalized recommendation — and it relies on the omnipresence of set-top boxes.

Opera employees working under the team name Media Moguls developed the model as part of the company’s annual Opera Open challenge, in which employees compete to create the best product that utilizes the company’s analytics technology. Media Moguls won the competition.

How it works

According to team member Carmine Mangione, chief software architect at Opera, the problem facing most providers of streaming video is one of choice vs costs. While they might want to provide the largest libraries possible, that’s a very expensive proposition. In order to provide an effective streaming experience and provide features such as rewinding, Mangione explained, content needs to be served from memory rather than on slower, but cheaper, hard disks. On average, a single server could effectively serve about 100 people watching the same movie at the same time.

That’s not too bad a ratio if a provider is hosting a small libary, but Mangione said it gets exponentially more expensive as providers try to address the long tail of subscriber interest. More content doesn’t just mean adding more servers, but it means adding enough servers to maintain performance levels even in the case of unexpected traffic, thus drastically reducing the number of viewers each server actually supports.

In an email, Andrew Grant, Akamai’s senior manager for entertainment industry marketing, described the problem to me as in this manner:

For VOD content, as content libraries get larger – i.e. As more and more of the ‘long-tail’ of video content is made available for consumers to enjoy – the system must be architected to support a projected average amount of streaming per title, and then over-provisioned to support the unpredictable traffic associated with an outlying event. Think when Michael Jackson died and suddenly traffic for old concert footage suddenly spiked. Building a system to support this level of ‘flash crowd’ traffic would require leaving a large amount of server capacity under-utilized a large part of the time.

By Mangione’s math, a 100,000-movie library would cost about $1.4 billion a year to operate, as opposed t0 about $10,000 for a 10,000-movie library. Akamai’s Grant noted that his company’s CDN (which is one of several that serve Netflix’s streaming service) is built in part to adjust to such spikes by adding capacity as needed. Akamai’s services, of course, aren’t free either.

Mangione realized that cable providers could actually save themselves infrastructure costs and add more content by leveraging the CPU and memory present in their set-top boxes. By creating a P2P network of subscribers’ boxes, providers wouldn’t have to build as much infrastructure because their servers would get hit a lot less. Once subscribers downloaded movies, their set-top boxes and Internet connections would handle most of the subsequent downloads from other subscribers.

But there’s a problem with such a simple approach: Movie files are large, and P2P networks can be slow because traffic might have to traverse multiple network hops. Even if they offer fewer titles, streaming services such as Netflix might look more appealing because their use of CDNs allows them to deliver content so much faster.

Enter big data

The solution to this problem, Mangione decided, is to determine subscribers’ particular interests and then create geographically logical clusters of subscribers who share the same interests. The benefits to this approach are twofold:

1. It decreases the chances of having to hit a provider’s central server because the chances are higher that someone (or multiple people) in a user’s cluster has that title.
2. It improves the accuracy of recommendations because the system primarily analyzes what people with the same interests are viewing and doesn’t have to filter through as much noise from the overall subscriber base.

Such private networks scale to about 10,000 users, Mangione said.

Aside from classifying users into groups based on what they watch, Media Moguls captain and Opera principal scientist Frank Elliott noted the system also could determine the genre of movies more accurately based on who’s watching them. Ideally, the algorithms would maximize P2P traffic and minimize server load by accurately pointing subscribers to new content they want but don’t have, and that’s on other set-top boxes in their clusters.

Opera does have some clout when it comes to talking about recommendation algorithms: A team that included several Opera employees came in second place in the Netflix Prize competition in 2009, although it and the winning team finished in a statistical tie.

Is it viable?

It is, of course, up to cable or satellite providers to determine the viability of Opera’s model and implement it, but the signs point to that happening. For one, Opera CEO Arnab Gupta said his company’s plan is to commercialize the technology through a media-industry partner that already has the data, infrastructure and distribution plans in place. Ideally, that would be a cable or satellite provider (Dish Network is ramping up its streaming service), but conceivably could be an Internet-only device that has adequate hardware specs.

And although set-top boxes might be relics of the past as new boxless viewing methods come into existence, mainstream ubiquity could be a way off. Adopting the Opera method would let providers leverage their existing networks of set-top boxes in the meantime, and its relevancy might well carry into future viewing methods. Whether customers are streaming content from other devices (e.g., game consoles, Roku, etc.) or straight through their TVs, providers still have to worry about the backend costs of storing and delivering all that content.

In any case, licensing content is also a hurdle, but all the hubbub about the Stop Online Piracy and Protect-IP Acts might end up proving to be a blessing in disguise. If the public outcry against these bills is enough to kill them in the House and Senate, it might well serve as a signal to content owners to focus on new, legal distribution channels rather than on lawsuits. Something like this, done through existing cable or satellite partners, could be one good option.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user PascalSijen; other images courtest of Opera Solutions.

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The pact was made possible in part through both companies’ participation in the RVU Alliance, a consortium formed to work on advanced remote user interface (RUI) technology. But DirecTV isn’t the only operator able to make use of Samsung’s “set-top boxless” technology — since it’s embedded the tech in all of its connected TVs, other partners could potentially deliver multi-room viewing with only a single box in the home.

The Samsung and DirecTV joint announcement follows a number of other operators that have moved toward software-, rather than hardware-based options for channel navigation and video distribution to the TV. Whether it’s Verizon’s introduction of a multimedia gateway that will stream live TV to tablets, gaming consoles and other devices, AT&T teaming up with Microsoft to let consumers control their TV through an Xbox, or Comcast’s reimagining of an electronic programming guide in the cloud, the trend is clear: Operators are looking forward to doing away with costly hardware that can be replaced with software-based solutions.

As more connected devices hit the market and more operators get comfortable with creating IP- and cloud-based solutions, that trend will only continue. And for anyone who’s had the same crappy box sitting in their living room for the last five years, that’s good news indeed.

Photo courtesy of (CC BY 2.0) Flickr user Tanjila Ahmed.

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