Their time has yet to come. There’s Sky+, but it’s quite expensive and tied to a Sky subscription. Freeview does now have a 7 day EPG which is an essential part of the mix, but the boxes are unsubsided so still pricey.
So they need to come down in price (you can buy a VCR at Richer Sounds for less than £30 just now). But what I hadn’t realised until today was that one of Sky’s reasons for increasing the capacity of their next genereation Sky+ boxes was to allow the box to record Sky Box Office movies whether you want them or not, and then charge you when you unlock them and watch them video on demand style.
But lets take this one step further. The price of hard disks keeps falling, and instead of 80MB or 160MB disks we end up with terrabytes of data. And multiple tuners (to handle the different multiplexes). Why not have a box that’s recording just about everything all the time, on either a 24 hour or 7 day rolling bassis? Then, when you’re in work the next day, and someone asks if you saw Trouble At The Top last night, and you realise that there isn’t an imminent repeat, you can just turn on your box when you get in and watch the programme.
This is probably a little way off but not far. And it removes the need for bandwidth hungry streaming.
A more immediate question is why Sky doesn’t yet let you control your Sky+ box remotely. Surely it’d be simple for users who are out and realise they’re not going to back for tonight’s Eastenders, to log into a secure area of Sky’s website. There they’d be able to send a signal over the Sky satellite system that let their box know that it should record BBC1 between 7.30 and 8.00 this evening. You could text your request in too if you’ve pre-registered. Premium texts would earn Sky some cash (I hate premium texts in principle, but it’s a possiblity nonetheless). All completely doable I’d have thought.
In the meantime, I read this article in Salon yesterday, but have so far been unable to get Buttress (at time of writing, it’s not working) to work at home. The idea is that you marry together RSS feeds from your favourite TV torrent websites with an intelligent search filter that looks for your favourite shows. That way, they get downloaded without you doing anything. Great idea, but as I say, so far I haven’t got it working.