Daily Archives: June 17, 2002

So if you believe that people do want to watch whatever they want whenever they want, you need a massively distributed system. Which brings us to “file-served television” and that TiVo board meeting. Having a PVR’s really big hard disk in many living rooms creates a massively distributed system: Instead of relatively few hard disks owned by the cable operators, you have hundreds of thousands of hard disks owned by everybody. And thus the space to store a million hours of video content. The problem is that movie companies and television companies aren’t thrilled to have their valuable stuff sitting on hard disks in your living room. They think they might lose control over how their intellectual property is sold and how they make money. – Stewart Alsop