X-Box With a PVR?

[Kevin Arnold]

From Smart TV&Sound.  This sounds interesting.

I Want My ReplayTV!
Whether you call them PVRs or digital video recorders (DVRs), products such as ReplayTV, TiVo and Microsoft's UltimateTV have garnered lots of praise, controversy and fascination.

Kishore says PVRs have proven to be a difficult sell to consumers, for a variety of reasons. Perhaps that's one reason why Microsoft has announced it will discontinue the UltimateTV set-top box as merchants' current supplies run out.

Rumors from several sources suggest that Microsoft will add a PVR component to its more successful X-Box videogame system. More certain is the inclusion of new features in its Windows XP Media Center Edition (a.k.a. "Freestyle").

The winner in regards to DirecTV and PVRs has been TiVo, who recently announced a five-year deal with DirecTV to be its preferred PVR solution.

TiVo and the other major PVR player, ReplayTV, both plan to add additional layers of interactivity to their products, capitalizing on the merger of broadband and television. Both plan to allow their boxes to pull some form of digital video off the Internet, providing another avenue of video-on-demand besides those offered by cable companies.