Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV

Posted by timothy on Tuesday July 26, 2005 @12:20AM from the no-prior-restraint dept.

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. "

1 of 264 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Is this really a feasible home appliance? by ErpLand · 2005-07-26 00:40 · Score: 5, Interesting

Let's make some calculations assuming that they're going to record all the DVB-T ("Freeview") content in the UK. I watch DVB-T in Spain using a MythTV box but the numbers should be roughly the same as for the UK.

45 mins recording of one channel = 1401390703 bytes
=> 1 hour = 1868520937 bytes
=> x 24 hours/day x 30.5 days/month = 1.37 TB per month per channel

Now there are about 30 freeview channels so we would need 41 TB of storage .... that's 82 500GB hard disks in RAID0! Which would occupy something like half a rack and use about 1kW of power ...

Even to record the 5 main channels would be nearly 7 TB - still a lot of noisy spinning hard disks to stick under the TV. This doesn't sound like a feasible idea with the size of today's hard disks.