Official MOXI Discussion Thread

Hello to everyone at DBStalk.COM and a big DBStalk.COM welcome to everyone joining use from the www.scottsviews.com/moxi.html (http://www.scottsviews.com/moxi.html) website!

Here is THE place to discuss MOXI!

Post your questions and comments here and we will be sure to answer them as soon as possible.

We are hoping to have folks from Moxi stop by sometime soon to answer questions.

Again welcome to everyone!

Scott

Hi Scott, thanks for your site!

I have a question...

If I have something recorded on the moxi unit and am watching it in my bedroom and someone in the living room wants to watch the same show do they h ave to wait for me to finish watching it before they can view it?

And is there any way to password protect a show so that I can record something that I would not want anyone else in my house to see?

Thanks for the questions!

The way the MOXI is designed all 4 people should be able to watch what you have recorded and they should be able to pause rewind etc with no effecting any of the other TV's

As far as the second question goes I am not sure, but remember since MOXI is running a version of UNIX it is a computer, and it should not be too hard to add password protection to shows. Its a good one never thought of that one.

Thanks again for your question!

Scott

I think the moxi is a good idea but won't it be too expensive and complicated for most people? How do they expect to make any money?

Hi Welcome to DBStalk!

To answer your question on how Moxi will make money the following is taken from their FAQ

35. How will you make money?
We have a flexible high-margin software business model. We sell licenses for our platform and basic
applications to the network operators per home deployed.

I am wondering myself what kind of patents (if any have been filed for MOXI) I would assume that they would have something in place to prevent others from offering the same kind of software.

Scott

Hi Scott. Congrats on the page and thanks for putting it up.

The issue of patents was brought up and I recalled reading about it in one of the many stories published over the past few days. You had asked how many or what kind....I don't know the kind but the number is 57 according to an article written by a Mr. Shim at Cnet.

Here's the quote...

"Moxi Digital employs 117 people and has 57 patents pending."

I hope that helps. J

www.forbes.com/2002/01/10...ntech.html (http://www.forbes.com/2002/01/10/0110tentech.html)

Nice site Scott....

I like watching TV (sports) while listing to myh music, with moxi can I watch a show and listen to my music collection at the same time?

Nice site!

H

Thanks Everyone.

I am glad to hear that Patents have been filed for MOXI, it would be a shame for someone to steal the idea away.

Rking thanks for the Article, I found this paragraph to be interesting.

The first TV system operator to say it will use the Moxi box is Echostar Communications (nasdaq: DISH - news - people), which will offer the boxes to its Dish Networks customers. This seems a better alternative than selling the box directly to consumers. Given all it's supposed to do, the price couldn't help but be high.

Looks like the Boxes will be rented from Dish and not purchased, looks like they may be available via the Digital Home Plan. Not a bad idea the thing they need to watch out for is people customizing their boxes.

HankG
I read somewhere that MOXI will let you watch on things and listen to audio at the same time. I am also someone who has the TV on but does not pay attention the the audio.

Thanks everyone for visiting DBStalk.COM I hope you will visit us again and again and again and...... (You get the idea!)

Scott

LEASE MOXI FROM DISH.......grrrrr!! :(
Just read your post Scott.......*sigh*

Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, but I really would rather buy it. I wonder now what the cost of Moxi is, must be pricey.

Am I the only one that feels this way ??

John

John it really depends on two things. First is how you feel about leasing and second upon Scott's interpretation.

Leasing equipment isn't a bad thing. I did so with Primestar for years and had no problems whatsoever. People always said "With Primestar you rent but with DTV or E* you own". Yep people sure did. Once their warranty ended they were stuck with those units too and then forced to buy new ones when they found them too expensive to have fixed. In this day and age of crap receivers I would much rather see the rent alternative be provided.

Secondly Primestar technically rented you the equipment BUT the total monthly bill was still LESS than that of DTV or E* for comparable programming. My point is that renting doesn't necessarily equate to higher monthly fees though I'm quite sure that it will if it comes from Charlie.

Last but not least I interpretted the quote differently than did Scott. I see the quote as saying that Perlman is taking a different approach by going through other companies to provide his product rather than the expensive route of providing it AND boxes as he did with WebTV.

Perlman and company never made a profit with WebTV and one of the largest reasons for that was due to selling the units for much less than they cost to build and subsidizing the companies that provided the units. Moxi is a departure from that model and IMO an extremely smart move on Perlmans part.

That being said I have questioned how Charlie is going to feel about losing $5 per month on additional receiver programming since Moxi alleviates the need to buy a new receiver and pay the additional monthly fees with a simple add-on. J

I've read the Forbes article a couple of times and think there is some confusion.

The quote "This seems a better alternative than selling the box directly to consumers" I don't think refers to Echostar not selling to customers, but rather Moxi not selling directly to customers.

Moxi's business plan calls for leasing the technology and software to satellite and cable companies for manufacture. As the profit for these companies is in the service and not the hardware, they often sell the hardware at or near cost.

I could be wrong but that's the way I understand it. Anyone hear a release date yet? I read somewhere May for us Echostar customers but that seems way to early.

Anxiously awaiting it,
Rob

While many of us would like to buy the box outright, I expect the price of the unit to be over $1000 to the consumer. Out of the gate the Box is $350 and thats before one chip is placed into the box.

You figure in the costs and you can see how it could be much more then $1000. Wiresless Networking itself is at least another $200 added to the box. And we havent talked about CPU, Tuners, Memory, Output Displays, Wired Network interfaces, firewire ports etc....

I wouldnt mind if they would not see the extra units for the other rooms instead leased these units for $5 a month for the extra sets.

I would love to own mine as well.

I just thought of something....
If you noticed they are only interested in selling this software to cable box and satellite box companies.

All the above lease the equipment to the users (its more common then selling boxes especially in cable TV)

Perhaps they dont want end users owning the boxes in the fear that users will try opening the boxes and hacking the Unix in order to do other functions or defeat copy protection. I wouldnt be suprised if these boxes have security precautions and tamper switches.

It now is clear to me why Dish Network may not want to see these units!

Does that make sense?

Scott

Scott- you mentioned earlier in this thread that moxi will be based on unix. I'm wondering if you know what flavor of unix (linux, solaris, etc)? thanks!

I believe Linux.

I have been thinking more and more about Dish Not selling MOXI units to the end users and it all makes sense to me now.

If MOXI wanted to get in the consumer electronics business they could have easily sold the software to Tivo or Reply. In selling the software to cable companies or satellite providers who agree to only rent the units to customers keeps their business alive.

Could you imagine someone hacking the Hard Drive on the box and figure out how to disable the DVD Copy protection, it would be a nightmare for MOXI and all kind of lawsuits could errupt.

If they made the boxes with tamper switchs that would say blow a fuse somewhere if you tried getting under the cover this would keep the secrets in the hard drive safe. And because the customer does not own the equipment they can not open the MOXI box as that would be considered distruction of property.

Again one of the big reasons Moxi has all the expansion ports on the outside of the box is so that people do not tinker with the inside of the box.

And because people do not own the boxes they must rent them with some kind of programming package this could cut down on the amount of satellite hacking going on out there.

All around it IS a great idea for the satellite provider as they make out in the deal, MOXI makes out and the end users makes out as they dont have to lay out more then a thousand bucks for a receiver to watch TV.

I REALLY want to hear some comments on my idea above. I feel like I found a missing piece of a puzzle.

Scott

Hi Scott. So far Linux has been mentioned in a couple of articles so it appears that is in fact going to be the OS. I would however like to point out that various companies, including one device company, did in fact copyright proprietary extensions made to the OS. According to the very video footage you are providing on your site I would assume based upon Perlman's comments that he will be doing the same.

About the renting vs. purchasing issues I do have to disagree.

Perlman didn't start Rearden/Moxi to compliment other PVR services. He created the company in order to provide an offering that is both innovative yet broad but most importantly HIS.

What is the best way to do that? To provide your product to EXISTING groups of consumers/subscribers. Don't rule out a CE product just because that isn't how they are approaching it initially. The DishPlayer would be the best example to illustrate that.

WebTV/E* promoted the DishPlayer to their existing communities. At that time I believe WebTV was at approximately 750,000 subscribers and Dish Network around 4 million. What happened? In a year and a half they sold 180,000. A more stable and more capable product yet based upon DP coding is the UTV unit. It is a true CE unit and by last count hadn't sold more than 30,000 units despite a massive ad campaign that wasn't provided the DP.

I'll grant you that UTV hasn't even been out a year yet but it's pretty clear that going the subscriber route as opposed to the CE route was better for the DP and will be for Moxi.

Additionally I don't find the prospect of Perlman licensing Moxi technology to ReplayTV or TiVo very likely. First of all aspects of HIS technology would take second place. You simply aren't going to see that happen whether it be OpenTV, ReplayTV, or TiVo. This is Perlman's baby and it WILL be the featured software NOT the also-ran.

I simply believe that he finds adoption within satellite and cable companies to come much easier than the CE route, that it is more cost effective and a better initial strategy to do so, and that ultimately it WILL be featured in CE devices when all but the more tech savvy and early adopters are more willing to accept such technology, which btw they currently are not.

Let me quote from the rest....
"Could you imagine someone hacking the Hard Drive on the box and figure out how to disable the DVD Copy protection, it would be a nightmare for MOXI and all kind of lawsuits could errupt."

Actually breaking DVD encryption has already taken place and wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility in ANY device including dedicated DVD players.

"If they made the boxes with tamper switchs that would say blow a fuse somewhere if you tried getting under the cover this would keep the secrets in the hard drive safe. And because the customer does not own the equipment they can not open the MOXI box as that would be considered distruction of property."

Scott drop over to linux-hacker sometime, NOTHING is safe. If someone wants to get at something they will find a way plain and simple. As for rented equipment dissuading hacking....It hasn't and won't stop people from saying "F*** it" accepting the commonly assessed fees for keeping and or tampering with equipment.

"Again one of the big reasons Moxi has all the expansion ports on the outside of the box is so that people do not tinker with the inside of the box."

In a way yes. The biggest reason is to better demonstrate the versatility and expandability of the product. You will find that the next generation of units will ALL have better efforts made towards expandability as well as connectivity with the pc. It's been a clear direction for nearly two years now but only now are we starting to see some of those directions come to fruition.

"And because people do not own the boxes they must rent them with some kind of programming package this could cut down on the amount of satellite hacking going on out there."

Not to sound like a broken record here but hardware will NEVER keep up with hackers....EVER.

"All around it IS a great idea for the satellite provider as they make out in the deal, MOXI makes out and the end users makes out as they dont have to lay out more then a thousand bucks for a receiver to watch TV."

Ok the issue of price. First of all I am quite sure that this is going to be a costly product. That being said I don't believe for an instant that it will be sold to consumers/subscribers for anywhere near $1000. Will it cost that much to build? Not likely....probably closer to $800.

We don't have one word on the specs. Until that is released and until we know who provided the reference design, who is building the device etc then we won't have a very clear picture. Still we do know the following.....

It will require at least a 400 MHz processor because that is the recommendation for driving DVD. Processors have dropped in price and DVD drives have dropped considerably. It will require a good amount of memory but since 128 MB of SDRAM can be found by consumers for less than $23 it's really a nonissue. Ports aren't expensive at all. Likely the two most expensive pieces of the device will be the casing and the hard drive and mass producing devices cuts down significantly on the prices in those areas.

Licenses of course do play a role. In so much as that is concerned it is factored into the licensing fee imposed by Moxi as THEY are the ones that have contracted licenses with Real Networks and Macromedia.....two companies I might add that DO have a good relationship with Perlman.

E* has raised rates again yet have made profits in the past two quarters(if I recall correctly) and likely will for the last. They can afford to take a hit on the hardware and make it back in programming unlike companies like WebTV and others.

BTW Scott it's not that I don't agree that renting isn't a bad idea I just don't find it likely. J

Ok folks, I am glad we got some discussion going on this.
I have received 2 emails from folk who claim to be in the know (Note one email address was from Hotmail the other from Yahoo so I don't know how reliable these folks are but again the claim to be in the know.)

Each of them both deny my above idea, although one of them does say at the initial roll out to end customers the first people to get them WILL be people on Digital Home Plans. After production of the units ramps up then they boxes will be made for sale to consumers.

The person pointed out that Dish Network did the same thing when the 501 was first made available.

Both people also said that they HOPE the boxes are ready in time for Christmas. With that being said I don't expect to see them on sale anytime soon.

So I guess for now I should not cancel my order from Dish Depot for the 721. But when MOXI is available expect to see a 721 for sale in the classified forums.

Scott

I had Dish here installing my 2nd DISH for 61.5 and I was talking to the installer from DISH and we got on the topic of receivers. I was telling him that I cant wait until the 721 comes out, for the 2 tuners and added capabilities. The Installer said why not wait for the 921 which he said in an internal DISH memo he got will have 4 Tuners and a large Hard Drive for whole house distribution. Looking Good I guess.

Has anyone seen this yet?

www.echostar-int.com/b2c/home/home.asp (http://www.echostar-int.com/b2c/home/home.asp)

Its a C/KU Band Satellite Receiver made by Echostar (The parent company of Dish Network)

What makes this receiver interesting is that it has many of the features of a MOXI Unit!

Check out these features!
40 Gbyte Low Noise Audio/Video Hard Disk Drive
5,700 Channels, 100 Satellites, 1,300 Transponders
6 Week EPG (Stored on Hard Disk)
8 Favorite Lists for each Mode (TV, Radio, DVR, MP3)
Digital Audio Output (Dolby Digital Compatible)
Digital Audio/Video Recording with Slow Motion, Pause, FF, Rew
EchoNav Multilingual Advanced User Interface (12+ languages)
Integrated High Power Positioner (36 Volt, 5 Amp.)
MP3 Player, 500 Songs (typ.)/USB Port
Multiple Scan Modes (incl. Update Scan)
Pause Live Video
Powerful Channel Sorting and Grouping
Software Updates via Internet/Satellite (OTA)

Looks impressive! And WOW a 6 WEEK guide?
Scott

Man, I wish I still had my old C-Band dish. That would be a fun toy to play with.

I don't know what to think about the new Bi-sexual receiver named MOXI

She's got to be bi-sexual cause she goes both ways.
:)

^bump^

All is quiet on the MOXI front. It is great that everyone is so excited about it.

I have received a few emails from the folks at MOXI. (I was even offered a private showing of the MOXI technology at MOXI's headquarters in California. (Problem is I Have no plans to travel to CA anytime soon)

I am sure things will be quiet for awhile but I expect in Late Q3 or early Q4 the MOXI engine will start reving its motors again.

It should be fun.

Scott

Did everyone see Moxi in Business Week, or in Anchordesk? Basically says Moxi isn't what it's cracked up to be. It will be much more expensive, they lied/exaggerated their "deal" with Echostar, and they have severe cash problems, little prospects for future investment, a new CEO that has been called "clueless" and who has a dubious record of failures with Microsoft TV.

I guess the guy who wrote the article always writes like that, I guess it's h is style.

I have been in contact with a few folks from MOXI, I am told that while there have been some changes behind the scenes MOXI is still alive and well.

I do hope that we do see a MOXI unit from Echostar in the future, I know I will buy one.

One thing concerns me however, the Demo units had both Component outputs for HDTV and DVI outputs for HDTV, now the units they are working with have DVI only, which will not work with my HD set.

www.techtv.com/products/c...31,00.html (http://www.techtv.com/products/consumerelectronics/story/0,23008,3366931,00.html)

Unless this has changed since CES, MOXI seemed to convey that the units would indeed be for sale and at a significantly lower price point than what you are discussing.

As of CES, they targeted $450.00, which isn't all that unrealistic if you consider that their planning release of late Q4. Plenty of time for Moore's law and P5 release to drop chip prices.

See link above.

[dtoldave]

Any one figure out how to pull data off the hd of the unit? or what you can do with any of the 4 usb ports or the ethernet port? I leased mine and I am itching to open this sucker up and just look inside. it dosent have the DVD player, but i bet it has the spot to hook up a ide dvd drive :-) any one have a 9022 or the fireware? i bet its not hard to reflash it.

this thing is too cool to just leave alone. any one else nearly as intrested?

-dave

[Nick]

Welcome, Dave. :wave:

We haven't done much Moxi talk here in a while and I haven't seen any discussion of Moxie for a couple of years now, so I don't expect you will get much response but we're glad to have you here anyway.

Have you checked out the HT spot http://www.hometheaterspot.com/htsthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/686791/an/0/page/0