Share Your DVR

TiVo's not the only one into sharing content across the network. DirecTV, EchoStar's Dish Networks and Time Warner Cable, among others, have DVR products that promise to share the wealth of programs stored on one digital video recorder with other TVs or even PCs (in DirecTV's case), in your home.

DirecTV has the most ambitious product: its Home Media Center. As the name implies, this set-top box wants to be the hub of your home entertainment world. It's due out at the end of 2005 or early 2006 and will connect to smaller units attached to other TVs in your home to share the DVR's recorded content and let you access it and program it from any of those other TVs. The product also boasts a broadband connection that should enable it to connect to your networked PC or to the Internet, possibly letting you program your DVR from the Web, send stored photos to or get them from cell phones, or view or get content on the PC. Of course, it will be able to handle both standard and high-def TV.

Time Warner is already using Scientific-Atlanta's new DVR set top box, the Explorer 8300 MR-DVR, for its customers in Minneapolis. The new device lets users share the content stored in that unit TVs in other rooms using standard set-top cable boxes. The DVR can handle HD content; the other TVs won't get HD, though.

And Dish Network offers DVR sharing for two TVs--the company unveiled a DVR set top box that could handled standard TV content and could share it with one other set in the home in 2004 (the Dish Player-DVR 522). It has now upgraded that with HD support in the Dish Player-DVR 942, available in the first quarter of this year.