On Monday, Time Warner Cable unveiled a service in the San Antonio area the company has dubbed 'Start Over'.
The service allows subscribers to Time Warner's digital television service to pause and rewind live TV via a standard non-PVR set-top-box at no additional cost. Call it a poor mans PVR. Better yet, just call it a PV because there's no actual recording of shows anywhere to be found.
The service does not give users the ability to fast forward in any capacity, so there's no hope of skipping through commercial, which is personally my favorite thing about PVRs.
The feature that gives 'Start Over' its name and the feature that Time Warner seems to be touting the most is the option to press a single button at any point in the show and restart the show from the beginning.
For some reason, that doesn't sound all that cool to me.
I typically have the 30-second skip activated on my TiVo. About once a week during the stormy season my power will cut out temporarily erasing the 30-second skip from my TiVo.
Of course, I don't always realize this and when the first commercial break arrives during a show, I'll hit the skip button twice and find myself back at the beginning of the television show I was watching. This frustrates me horribly, but luckily I can just punch in select, play, select, 3, 0, select and continue skipping forward until my hearts content.
A button dedicated solely to starting a show over would infuriate me since I have a tendency to mash random buttons while fumbling with a remote in the dark. With no fast forward function, would I be forced to watch the entire show over from the beginning if I wanted to get back to my stopping point?
There's probably a work around for this scenario, but if the answer is yes, I'd rather take an intimate bath with the set-top-box while it's plugged in.
In general, I just can't think of many instances where I'd use this particular part of the service, save walking in while the credits to Karate Kid were rolling, deciding I wanted to watch it, and starting it over.
That may be kind of cool, but apparently for now, only a portion of Time Warner's programming will even work with this service so it might not even be an option at this point.
I'm not so sure there's a demand for this service, and I think it will simply leave customers yearning for a full-featured PVR, but at a going rate of $0.00 dollars, it remains a pretty good deal.
