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Digital television, personal video recorders and convergence in the Australian home

Published: 19 September 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Out of the confusion of delivery technologies for domestic digital video, the function of a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) that has a content management system based on an electronic program guide emerges as a key component of a home entertainment system. Serving as a content manager for video broadcasts for free-to-air and pay-TV, PVRs can automatically record, sort, schedule, store and integrate video material from different sources in a convenient, easy-to-use and timely fashion. Devices with PVR functionality are still not yet in widespread use in Australian homes, but are the increasing subject of pioneering commercial enterprise, innovative experimentation and open-source community development. The concept of a MADE system is introduced as a system with converged functionality for Media, Automation, Data, and Entertainment. This paper describes and compares three systems with PVR functionality and evaluates their current and future roles as a component for MADE systems in Australia: the TiVo appliance, the MythTV open source software for Linux; and a Topfield set top box using IceGuide. The drivers for and threats to the convergence of functionality towards a MADE system are also considered.

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  • (2010)A Recommender Handoff Framework for a Mobile DeviceMobile Multimedia Processing10.1007/978-3-642-12349-8_8(137-153)Online publication date: 2010
  • (2009)Adopting user profiles and behavior patterns in a Web-TV recommendation system2009 IEEE 13th International Symposium on Consumer Electronics10.1109/ISCE.2009.5157045(320-324)Online publication date: May-2009

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    DIMEA '07: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Digital interactive media in entertainment and arts
    September 2007
    212 pages
    ISBN:9781595937087
    DOI:10.1145/1306813
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 19 September 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. convergence
    2. copyright
    3. digital television
    4. home theatre system
    5. open source
    6. personal video recorder

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    View all
    • (2010)A recommender handoff framework for a mobile deviceMobile Multimedia Processing10.5555/2172352.2172363(137-153)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2010
    • (2010)A Recommender Handoff Framework for a Mobile DeviceMobile Multimedia Processing10.1007/978-3-642-12349-8_8(137-153)Online publication date: 2010
    • (2009)Adopting user profiles and behavior patterns in a Web-TV recommendation system2009 IEEE 13th International Symposium on Consumer Electronics10.1109/ISCE.2009.5157045(320-324)Online publication date: May-2009

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