Tech> Thoughts> Further musings on the potential of Homechoice

Continuing on the below post - I'm talking about having a PVR and a VOD-solution. Would putting PVR functionality in a box driving a VOD concept be counter-intuitive? Yes. But how long will it take before we'll have ALL the channels Homechoice offers on VOD? Longer than I'm willing to wait, probably.

After all, Homechoice invests in a proprietary box for the consumer. Adding an 80GB hard drive and a video card to take care of encoding/decoding would be an extra investment, but this could be used for other purposes as well. Potentially big purposes. Two-way content transfer pops to mind first. While I'm fantasizing, a Homechoice box could as well pull an entire operating system on demand (which I think it does already - the menu functionality *should* come from a centralized location) without much in terms of extra variable costs.

Why would HC want to support user-created content? They are already combining TV and IP, going the YouTube way would the diametrical opposite. It could well be that the channels wouldn't like an operator starting to provide or enable free content. Maybe HC sees UCC as low-quality tosh - but so were websites 10 years ago to a large extent. Video is a more complicated medium, but the quality and style of expression will improve - YouTube and Google Video are analogical to the early days of the internet. The most popular videos are getting millions of views (dozens of millions in some very popular cases), but the content is brief and difficult to navigate. We should expect a "revolution" (at the risk of using a big word) around video comparable to what blogging did to publishing - a simplification where form gets away from the way of the function and allows vastly more people to express themselves through that medium. I could be wrong with the function-over-form bit: it can be debated whether the most popular TV shows today are more form or function. Or maybe I should just think outside the box.

Going back to Homechoice, maybe they're not interested in the above at all and have bigger plans. As an aside - scrounging for leads, I found that the Homechoice PR team has a... MySpace page. That's quite wacky. Having thought about it for three nanoseconds, I conclude that more PR teams should have MySpace pages. I mean, one of those guys says they listen to Marilyn Manson, AND they have a job.