Gefen Introduces USB Support For Upcoming PVRs

January 18th, 2007 Davis Posted in TV, Movies, Technology, HDTV DVDs, VOD, Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Microsoft, DRM, TiVo |

I was watching GeekBrief TV last night and saw that admidst the hubbub of all the CES news last week, I missed an announcement by Gefen that they’ve decided to throw their own hat into the DVR ring and will be releasing two new PVRs next month that should make it easier for consumers to archive and move their content around the digital home. On both their standard definition PVR and their high definition box, they plan on building support for a feature that allows you to export your shows via a USB connection to external hard drives and other portable devices.

At CES, their high definition demo box was still missing USB support, so details are still a bit sketchy, but Gefen told Everything USB that “it is highly likely that it will be implemented before shipping.” No word on pricing, but the boxes should ship sometime in February.

This is very cool functionality for Gefen to introduce, but it’s not likely to be very popular with the MPAA. If it was up to the studios fat cats, you would be required to pay them money for every device that you want to watch content on, so it’s possible that Gefen may have just painted a big sue me sign on their backs, but others have been pushing this envelope for years and so far, have managed to stay out of court.

While technically, it’s not the same functionality, TiVo has been offering TiVo To Go on their series 2 DVR for a couple of years now, but they haven’t been allowed to offer it on their high definition series 3 or HD DirecTiVo boxes. From the very beginning, Microsoft’s media center has always allowed you to transfer content directly to your home network, including both standard definition and OTA high definition content, but once the cablecard Vista machines are released, Microsoft will be forced to disable content portability features, in order to placate the goons at CableLabs, who have somehow managed to put themselves into the position of being able to dictate what features consumers can and cannot have on their home theater systems.

Because Gefen would also need to go through the CableLab certification process, it’s hard for me to imagine that this new PVR will offer cablecard support, but even without access to the HDTV content from the cable channels, the USB export functionality is still pretty sweet. Given the amount of hard drive space that HDTV content takes up, you would need a couple of external drives, but you could easily rotate hard drives on and off the unit and could start creating an impressive digital library of archived HDTV content to watch later on.

As this technology continues to develop, it will be interesting to see how the content owners react and what moral and legal issues are raised by this sort of support. When I first got my TiVo series 3, I signed up for HBO for about 2 weeks before cancelling and yet months later, I’m still watching high definition HBO movies that I recorded onto my 750 GB internal Weaknees drive. Is this the equivalent of ripping mp3’s from an all you can eat monthly music package like Napster or Yahoo! music or ethically is there something different about taking advantage of HBO in this way, because I haven’t stripped out any DRM? To be honest, I’m not sure what the moral high ground is in this situation, but as technology continues to advance, issues like these will eventually need to be addressed, especially given how paranoid the MPAA seems to get about high definition content.