Video-on-demand and ReplayTV


Video-on-demand and ReplayTV

My current ReplayTV has the ability to receive programs from other devices over the LAN or over the internet. Why hasn’t someone started a video-on-demand service for it?

Well, one could probably argue that there isn’t enough penetration in the market to support such a service, but lets leave that aside for now since I don’t know the numbers. I do know that there are services like Poopli that let arbitrary users trade programs just by asking for them on their website. The problem with this is that it is incredibly slow to transfer 800M programs over the tiny upload cap of most DSL/Cable modems. A commercial service that allowed you to buy content and then receive that content on your replay device directly would not be so limited.

ReplayTV could jumpstart this business by producing a encoder that produces ReplayTV compatible programs… Has anyone seen such a thing? I have all the technology to go from ReplayTV to any arbitrary format, but I have never seen anyone going the other way and producing the other associated index files that you need.