NDS is the company that is majority owned by NewsCorp and previously replaced TiVo to create the DirecTV PVRs. While these PVRs have not had the best of times, NDS has today announced some very innovative IPTV products.The first is what NDS call the "Distributed DVR" which allows users to use hard drives from anywhere on a home network instead of being restricted to a hard drive on a single PVR. This itself is brilliant and will give users a lot more freedom when it comes to storing content.
The second is ShareTV where users can share content stored on their PVRS with other subscribers over a P2P network making the world's first Peer to Peer PVR (from what I'm aware of).
It sounds like the recordings will be protected by DRM and only available to other subscribers to the IPTV service, but it does sound like you will be able to download TV shows that you haven't even recorded.
This effectively allows you to get huge libraries of videos and TV shows, which you can then store anywhere on your home network. I very much like the sound of this.
I wonder if this will end up being rolled out as a DirecTV service given the close ties NDS has with DirecTV already.
1. The problem with using drives on the network for recording is that you need to make sure your home network can sustain the throughput for reads and writes - especially writes. And network issues can ruin your recording or playback. It is safer to record to a local drive and then transfer that recording, using the local drive as a buffer to ensure no issues with write performance.
As for P2P - remember RelayTV 4000, 4500, and 5000 series models have the SendShow feature that allows them to share shows with other models P2P over the Internet.
It sounds like the NDS system is a lot more restricted, just the IPTV content and only to other subscribers. It really sounds like a way for the IPTV company to save bandwidth so they don't have to have everyone download from them to catch old shows, etc.
If content providers wised up, they'd allow DVRs in general to share content, even if only on a limited basis. Heck, add a tag and make it so someone has to pay $1 to share a show with a friend.
Posted at 9:18AM on Jan 29th 2007 by MegaZone