Jaws drop as UK device records a week's TV

When Cory Doctorow visited last weekend's OpenTech conference in London, he was stunned to see a box about the size of a 1990 VCR boasting some pretty futuristic capabilities.

The box was a prototype of a digital video recorder from Ascot start-up Promise TV that can record and index an entire week's worth of 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 totalling 3.2 terabytes.

At the end of the week, new programming overwrites previous programmes, although those recordings can be archived on separate storage devices.

"This method of recording transmitted television completely removes the need for viewers to preselect programmes 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.