New DVR drops jaws in London
By Daniel Terdiman
News.com
http://news.com.com/New+DVR+drops+jaws+in+London/2100-1041_3-5807107.html
Story last modified Wed Jul 27 11:44:00 PDT 2005
When Cory Doctorow visited last weekend's OpenTech conference in London, he
was stunned to see a box about the size of a 1990-era VCR boasting some
pretty forward-looking capabilities.
The box was a prototype of a digital video recorder from Ascot, England,
start-up Promise TV that can record and index an entire week's worth of
British digital-television programming.
To Doctorow, an editor of the popular culture blog BoingBoing and the
Electronic Frontier Foundation's European outreach coordinator, Promise TV
has broken impressive new ground with its DVR, which it plans to unveil
next month.
"There wasn't a jaw in the room that wasn't scraping the floor during (the)
demo," he said. "It was genuinely futuristic."
Dominic Ludlam, Promise TV's lead developer, said the project was
commissioned by the BBC and uses commodity PC hardware, including a bank of
hard drives totaling 3.2 terabytes.
At week's end, new programming overwrites previous programs, although those
recordings can be archived on separate storage devices.
"This method of recording transmitted television completely removes the
need for viewers to preselect programs they wish to record or watch," said
Ludlam. "This could well herald a change in the way we watch television. No
longer need there be any peak viewing time or head-to-head competition
between channels."
Not everyone is as impressed as Doctorow, however. Chris Rowen, a research
analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey Capital Markets, said Promise TV
sounds like little more than a souped-up TiVo personal recording device.
"They're compensating for the fact that they don't have advanced listings
by recording everything and then indexing it after the fact," Rowen said.
"That obviously is not going to work in an 80-channel environment. So
they're not bringing anything new to the table on indexing."
But Doctorow remains floored by what he saw. He said that not long ago, the
notion of TiVo recording 15 hours of television was revolutionary. And now,
he said, technology has reached the point where it's possible to imagine
recording 30, 60 or even 90 days of programming.
"It becomes like a Wayback Machine for television," he said.
================================
George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes at uh dot edu
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