My Sky

My Sky is a new service from Sky TV that allows you to record tv shows directly to their new decoder/recorder. You can fidn out how to use it at http://www.skytv.co.nz/myskydemo/index.html where "bert the Badger" takes you through a cheesy demonstration in Flash. PVRs (Personal Video Recorders) are becoming all the rage, allowing you to record TV shows to a digital set-top hard drive and then play them bacxk at your leisure. The more sophisticated ones will actually record entire series of shows for you, strip out the ads, recommend similar shows you might like, and so on. In America, TIVO is probably the leading PVR service. You can find out about TIVO at http://www.tivo.com/0.0.asp Although TIVO isnt available in New Zealand, Kiwi TIVO enthusiasts have set up a website at http://www.nztivo.net/index.php/Welcome_to_NZTivo which explains how to buy a TIVO box online and configure it manually to work in New Zealand.
If you're a REAL geek, you might want to check out some Linux projects like MythTV (http://www.mythtv.org) and Freevo (http://freevo.sourceforge.net). These are free, open-souce, software-based PVR systems you can use with a Linux PC. Right now I'm building my own media management system using Ubuntu Linux (http://www.ubuntu.com). I can scan a barcode from a DVD case, the system will look up all the details from amazon.com and store them in a database, and then I can search for and play the relevant DVD from the hard drive.

Check it out...