Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV

Thomas Hawk writes "Cory Doctorow is posting over at Boing Boing about some technology that he apparently saw this weekend at London's Open Tech conference. According to Cory, this new technology from Promise TV takes the form of a home-built PVR with lots of high-capacity hard drives and claims to be able to record every show on every channel being recorded in the UK for an entire month. 'Why program a TiVo to get certain shows for you when you can record every single show on the air, all at once, and then use recommendations, search, a grid, or any other means you care to name to figure out which of those thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of programming you want to watch.' The company seems somewhat cryptic with a simple website that appears to be collecting your email addresses for an announcement in August. "

Comments

Re:Timing

[Goth Biker Babe]

Insightful? Hah!

Capture cards? 30 feeds? Don't be so analogue and old school. It only needs to save the multiplexes. Which on terrestrial digital is about eight including all the radio stations.

Right assuming it's digital only, it needs as many 'frontends' as there are multiplexes. Modern day silicon (non can/discrete component) tuners are pretty cheap and rather small. You'll also need the demodulators to go with them. All of which would fit easily on a single PCI card. Then you just process each of the multiplexes' transport stream enough to remove the redundant data such as the NITs and record the rest on to the harddrives as a stream.

Something like a Sky box already does this with two transport streams. One is recorded for the 'trick mode' pause live TV etc and one for recording a program. It will also play back a third stream from the disc. A more powerful PC based machine could easily cope.

Re:You just need one hardcore nerd per block...

[Cervantes]

Before you trot out all your legal objections, just let me say that you now have a legitimate reason to talk with the cute girl three doors over you've never met.

Dude, if I have my own T1 line and a cute girl 3 doors down, I'm not going to talk to her, I'm going to use my T1 to stream hidden webcams from her house and charge $29.95/month for membership to the site.

Talking to a cute girl := 1% chance of something that could be called success.
Selling pics of a cute girl to pervs and collecting $$$ := 100% chance of buying a russian bride.