Digital Home Thoughts: Shaw Launches New Mega-PVR: Six HD Tuners!

"In Calgary last week, without any fanfare, Shaw Cable launched the Shaw Gateway made by Arris which offers Shaw digital cable customers a Whole Home High Definition Personal Video Recording (HD PVR) solution. At the heart of the system is the Gateway, a digital set top box type device which connects to the cable coming into your home and acts as a server or central hub to the rest of the system. Inside the Gateway is all the processing power, hardware necessary to deliver and store high definition video signals plus a phone terminal for digital phone service, a DOCSIS 3 modem for internet service and a battery backup. Inside the Gateway is 500GB of storage and Shaw's says you'll be able to add external hard drives to the system for an additional six terabytes of storage."

If you live in Western Canada, I can confidently say you've probably seen the Telus Optik TV commercials. Telus has made significant inroads with IPTV over the past couple of years, and their new Optik TV system is based on Microsoft's MediaRoom platform. Shaw Communications has had basically the same PVR platform for almost a decade now - the user interface and functionality on the Motorola PVR I have now (I'm a Shaw customer) is virtually unchanged from the very first one they launched so very long ago. Quite frankly, that has made me rather grumpy as a customer - I've watched, somewhat enviously, as Telus has promoted Optik TV features I've love to have.

Shaw has fired back with the Gateway, their new PVR made by ARRIS. You might know them from their MOXI PVR product. The Gateway is one heck of a solution with six HD tuners, an integrated DOCSIS 3 cable modem, and a voice modem for VOIP solutions. The only thing that's curious is the meagre 500 GB hard drive. You can expand the storage via external drives, but when you consider the box costs $598 from Shaw, I'm surprised they didn't give it 1 TB or more of storage - 500 GB will get used up fast with the ability to record six HD shows at once.

Lastly, one of the long-awaited features this new hardware brings is the ability to have whole-home TV. For $150 a pop you get a small box that connects to another TV and gives you full functionality for watching and recording TV. That sure beats the current Shaw solution, which I have: two different PVRs on two different TVs with no ability to watch on PVR #2 what's been recorded on PVR #1. This is finally a system worth of being called modern.