GrandSlam MDU by Silicondust is designed for apartments, condos, and multi-dwelling units that demand reliable, Live TV service – without extra work for property managers.
sweet, I was wondering what I was going to do with the extra 16k in my wallet.. lol
still good to see them working on new products.
Most people today have no idea there are even OTA stations left. Also, who watches network television anymore? I only watch OTA stations for NFL and the occasional NBA game. Basically nothing else. Not to mention the fact that those sports are headed to the pay streaming services slowly but surely.
Also wondering what use it'll be if the DRM thing stands and there really is no market left for local stations. I'm convinced the OTA world will disappear if the DRM isn't removed, and it may anyway since it seems like they could simply use the internet instead of expensive towers.
I see rough times ahead for SiliconDust and similar companies.
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Also, who watches network television anymore?
My wife and I watch more network TV than streamed content. I'll be the first to admit that the audience is dwindling though. Many young people don't even own TVs.
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This is an interesting feature:
On Demand Viewing
Every show on every local channel is recorded and available on demand. Residents can watch any program from the past 14 days at their convenience
So it must have a tuner for each physical channel, constantly saving to a disk. I wonder if they will eventually see a legal challenge from broadcasters? But maybe the customer base will be too small to be relevant.
Remember the Omniverse IPTV debacle in 2019? Silicondust sold a "premium" TV service but, as I recall, the provider turned out to not have rights and everyone got sued. So yea, it's not out of the question for SD to make a bad decision, but I doubt it this time.
I wish they would explore adding the service again without the shady IPTV provider this time, and at a reasonable price. I suspect legal TV and decent price are a ridiculous thing to wish for with the current state of the media cartels, however.
Another thing... there's no such thing as a "customer base too small to be relevant" if you happen to be an IP lawyer.
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I'm curious how it works, but not $16k curious.
How can their server deliver on demand and live tv to 250 users simultaneously?
Figuring an average bitrate of 8 Mbps x 250 users = 2 Gbps
Raid drive array (SSD's?) and 2.5 or 10 Gbps ethernet ports?
And if users are watching all the local OTA channels live it would need a lot of tuners.
Maybe a HDHomeRun TECH5-16US-4×4 in there.
It doesn’t provide live tv. Only on demand. So essentially it uses the tuners to just constantly record everything on the major channels, making them available to pick from, from a library.
Right, just like a TiVo where every tuner is always recording to disk. Except this unit keeps recording all tuners for two weeks.
But when you tune to a live channel it's like watching a Channels DVR recording in progress.
So you can watch live, it's just that you're watching the recording in progress.
Most likely they're recording the full mux from each tuner and doing PID filtering on playback.
Anyway, I was just curious about the specs and contents inside the unit.
I'm assuming it uses ATSC 1.0 tuners since ATSC 3.0 DRM would be an issue.
Most likely spinning rust surveillance hard drives, like WD Purple or Seagate Skyhawk
This way only 9 HDHR quad tuner devices is all anyone needs to record all channels in US all the time. In most of the markets this number is even lower. In my market I have 22 live channels used (including LoVHF)
Check how much Netflix is pushing out of their servers.
Serving 100 Gbps from an Open Connect Appliance
https://netflixtechblog.com/serving-100-gbps-from-an-open-connect-appliance-cdb51dda3b99
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In my market the most I could possibly receive are 25 RF channels.
10 of those are major networks, so 10 RF channels.
I'm assuming their product doesn't give you the sub-channels.
So I did some quick math to see drive size required and how much is recorded in 2 weeks and 1 year.
I'm guessing they're using surveillance drives, probably striped or in a raid array and doing PID filtering to only record the major networks on each RF channel.
v# RF CALL NETWORK
10 36 KXTV ABC
13 25 KOVR CBS
58 23 KQCA CW
44 12 KRJR-LD Daystar
40 22 KTXL FOX
29 21 KSPX-TV ION
3 35 KCRA-TV NBC
6 9 KVIE PBS
19 18 KUVS-DT UNI
64 26 KTFK-DT UniMás
Drive rated at 180 TB/year (1,440,000,000 Mbit/yr)
If not supplying sub channels, then record filtered PIDs @ ~8Mbps/~10Mbps
19.4 Mbps * 31,557,600 secs/yr = 612,217,440 Mbit/yr x 10 RF channels = 6,122,174,400 Mbit/yr
10 Mbps * 31,557,600 secs/yr = 315,576,000 Mbit/yr x 10 RF channels = 3,155,760,000 Mbit/yr
8 Mbps * 31,557,600 secs/yr = 252,460,800 Mbit/yr x 10 RF channels = 2,524,608,000 Mbit/yr
19.4 Mbps * 1,209,600 secs/2wks = 23,466,240 Mbit = 2.93328 TB in 2 weeks x 10 RF channels = 29.3328 TB
10 Mbps * 1,209,600 secs/2wks = 12,096,000 Mbit = 1.5120 TB in 2 weeks x 10 RF channels = 15.120 TB
8 Mbps * 1,209,600 secs/2wks = 9,676,800 Mbit = 1.2096 TB in 2 weeks x 10 RF channels = 12.096 TB
They probably also use S3 or S3 compatible storage 
The strange thing for me about this email is how, or why was I targeted for obvious enterprise type hardware?
The way things are going I'll not even have a use for the Flex anymore. As soon as the major North American sports are all streaming I'll have zero use for it.
I wondered the same thing.
I guess they just blasted it to everyone in the mailing list.
Figuring our word of mouth advertising would get the word to their targeted audience.
Do they seem desperate? This whole ATSC 3.0 thing turned out to be a big fiasco and accelerated OTA demise. FCC should have added the new codecs to the ATSC 1.0 spec and call it a day. Instead, everybody was subjected to deceptive marketing for the last 10 years which just didn't take.
Internet killed the TV star.
Your post was my initial thought about the whole thing. Shame really. Lots of small companies are about to be squeezed out of existence by the media cartels.
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