"Start Over" feature on cable TV (Time Warner)

[crazychicken]

I'm talking about the feature where you can tune to a channel half way through a show and press "Start Over" to return to the beginning of the show.

How does this work? There are only 2 tuners on a DVR, so there is no way all of the channels are being buffered locally. Are they recording everything they broadcast and treating it like "on-demand" but then deleting it after the end of the hour (so they don't have ridiculous amounts of data to store)? Once we decide how it works, hopefully it will automatically explain why you can't fastforward/rewind inside of this "Start Over" mode. Any scenario where you could watch the content seems to me that you could also skip through the content (just as you can on streaming video on the internet).

Does anyone know of any good guides/tutorials about how this works (google turned up nothing useful, at least with my search terms)? Or can someone explain it a bit?

Thanks!

David

 

[Throckmorton]

I don't know how it works but I would think the reason you can't fast forward is so they can force you to watch the ads.

 

[crazychicken]

But they allow you to fast forward through the ads when you record a show with a DVR, so it seems like this should be an identical situation?

 

[Aluvus]

IIRC they record a select set of shows centrally (*not* everything they show), and if you select that it essentially uses the same system as their on-demand system.

Not letting you fast forward may indeed be to prevent skipping ads; since it's a free service, increased ad revenue may be how they intend to finance it.