About 12 months ago I read in the newspaper that some manufacturer was coming out with a machine you could connect between your tv and signal source, and it would, among other things, continually store and release any program you wanted to watch so that your viewing would lag behind real time by about 15 minutes. It wasn’t a tape delay; rather, the recording medium was either a hard disk, or electrical storage (can’t remember which). The point of having this thing was that the machine would automatically cut out commercials. The article quoted a few people in advertising, manufacturing and commercial television, who all denounced it as a threat to free TV as we know it blah blah. Since then I have heard nothing about it. Does anyone else remember reading/hearing something about this and know what happened? I wish I could be more specific. I’m suspiciously wondering if the advertising industry somehow got it taken off the market.
The devices are Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) or Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) or digital VCRs (kind of an oxymoron). They are on the market. Here’s a discussion of the commercials issue:
DVRs: Freedom from commercials?
Here are some reviews:
TV on Your Terms
ReplayTV: The Ultimate Couch Potato Tool?
ReplayTV, TiVo Similarities
ReplayTV
Other Models
My friend highly reccomends TiVo