Wired News: Tired of the Telly? Reprogram It
By Leander Kahney
02:00 AM Jul. 22, 2003 PT
A Colorado startup, Interact-TV, has released a hacker-friendly digital entertainment center that plays, records and archives TV shows, DVDs, music and even digital photo albums.
The Telly MC1000 Digital Entertainment Center, available now from the company's website for $900, can also surf the Web and act as a home media server.
So what's new you say? Well,
Unlike TiVo or ReplayTV, the Telly is designed to be easily upgraded and expanded by the consumer and third-party software developers. Most other set-top boxes are expressly designed not to be hacked, and their warranties are voided if the owner opens them up to tinker.
By contrast, the Telly is expandable like a PC. Consumers can add bigger hard drives, more memory or even swap out the motherboard. In most cases, the machine automatically detects and configures itself to run the new hardware.
So an Open source model versus the Branding model of Tivo (etc). Who will win? I guess it goes back to some points I made in the previous post - who is the target market? Mainstream consumers may want additional functionality but are they prepared to do things like open the box and plug in a new hard drive? I don't think so. Not unless there is a slot I can fit it in and it goes thunk and I'm done.
Personally I like the idea of the Telly, although I doubt we'll see it in the UK but I do think it makes the mistake of attempting to be a PC style device rather than a Consumer Electronics style device.