A decade ago, video on demand was big news. You’d pull up a schedule of programs on your TV screen, choose the show you wanted to see and watch it at your convenience. Unfortunately, it didn’t get much further than beta tests, one of which involved a bank of VCRs at a centrally located ?server? ? a library of videotapes and a few harried employees roller-skating around swapping tapes. Now two new VCR-killers have arrived on a wave of hype. TiVo offers ?personal video systems,? also known as digital video recorders (DVR), and a complementary service that allows TV viewers to pause and rewind live television by recording video streams to the device’s hard drive. The company’s service also allows viewers to customize TV schedules and specialized content. TiVo has teamed with iFilm Network to provide TV access to movies previously available only on the Web. ?People have been talking forever about convergence- well, this is it,? said Kevin Wendle, iFilm’s chief executive. ?We’re taking content created directly for the Internet and bypassing broadcast television and distributing directly on the TiVo box. It’s really a new distribution paradigm.?



Like TiVo, the Replay2020 device is essentially a hard drive for your television ? it specialises in taking broadcast content and spoon-feeding it to couch potatoes (that?s you and me). Each night, ReplayTV 2020 dials into its network and downloads program information for your area and type of service (cable, antenna or satellite dish) ? all at no cost, unlike Replay’s arch competitor. You browse the schedule and click the remote control once to record a show one time, twice to automatically record it each time it airs. ReplayTV 2020 stores 20 hours of programming ? automatically replacing old shows with new ones when the drive gets full, unless you specify otherwise. It also has slow-motion and frame-by-frame modes, and the redesigned universal remote control can operate other media devices in your living room. ReplayZones, meanwhile, can categorize shows by genre, and provides keyword searches make finding program times easier.