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The Next Generation of PVR has no Hard Drive
William Kucharski sent us a story about the next generation of PVR (Tivo) device. This time there will be no hard drives. Instead the content will be stored at your cable company and streamed in real time to the reader. The upside is that this effectively removes many of the limitations of existing PVRs and could make all media available on demand all the time... eliminating the concept of "Channels" entirely. The main downside is that control is moved out of your home, returning PVR users to the dark ages where they had to watch commercials.
I suspect this will be a commercial failure.
I think the days of money-making PVRs are seriously numbered, because this is one of the few areas where either a Free Software or Open Source alternative will eventually kick all the commercial products asses from a usability standpoint. Instead of just being an abstract political thing, it will be a concrete user interface and feature issue.
With certain types of applications, such as word processors, closed software isn't really at any significant disadvantage to Free Software, because there isn't any commercial pressure to make the product suck. In fact, a commercial developer wants (and is encouraged to) make the product as good as possible.
But as soon as you get to media-reading-related products, the developers start to be pressured by outside influences to compromise the quality of the product. We have already seen this with web browsers, with the recent story about MSIE's "Smart Tags" being a good (but not the only) example of that sort of thing.
You can also see the problem with DVD players. The hardware appliance DVD players don't have Firewire ports, the software players can't capture still frames, etc. Some users expect these features because they are natural things that someone would want to do. Eventually, unlicensed players (which, due to bad legislation, will tend to be developed by decentralized teams, and that encourages open source) will be so more feature-rich than DVDCCA-licensed players, that users will have a significant incentive to use them.
And you can see the problem with the most popular existing PVR, Tivo. Tivo is a fine product IMHO, but it also has some flaws that aren't caused by bad programmers or lack of vision, but rather, they are caused by Tivo's desire to have a good relationship with its partners. For example, there's no "30 Second Skip" and there never will be, and the fast forward intentionally over-corrects to encourage the user to watch the end of a commercial. There are also rumors that future Tivo releases are going to have new disadvantages that the existing software doesn't have. (Something is going to eat up some additional disk space, but we don't know what that is yet. But you can bet your ass that it's going to be something that users aren't asking for, and that it's related to Tivo's partners.)
A PVR that is developed free of commercial interests, will have none of these disadvantages. Right now, the components for building one on Linux are (allegedly) very primitive (I haven't even gotten it all working yet, but that's my fault), but they'll get better. Eventually they'll cross a quality threshold that the commercial PVRs are not allowed to cross, and will be so much easier to use and more capable, that users will prefer the open/free ones.
So if you're going to bet the farm on a commercial PVR and you don't have any good means to suppress open development (DMCA combined with Hague is your best bet right now), then you're not going to be a farmboy for very long.
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"The upside is that this effectively removes many of the limitations of existing PVRs"
By reintroducing all of the limitations and annoyances of existing cable TV (commercials, network outages, etc.).
Is right here:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/VCR-HOWTO.html
All you need is a cheapo $50 winTV card and the patience to get it all set up.
Other alternatives include using bttv-grab and mpeg2encode, rather than vcr and avifle+divx as outlined in the howto. I have yet to get it all working quite the way I want it to, but I expect it will be done in a week or two.
If there's no way to fast-forward through the ads, no one will buy it. They'll have to pry my Replay from my cold, dead fingers.