Coming Soon: Movies On Demand?Wired News Report

An integrated set-top box/digital recorder will let TV viewers in France watch and record movies on demand. OpenTV is partnering with French satellite television provider TPS and Thomson Multimedia to make the Digital Personal Recorder, a set-top box with a hard disk to record digital video. The set-top would enable subscribers to download movies onto the hard drive and watch them for a certain time period. The product will let couch potatoes pause and rewind a TV show even as it is broadcast, similar to the Tivo and Replay TV services in the United States. Viewers could also choose to download items that are mentioned during a broadcast, such as saving a company's financial report during a news show. The move to combine set-top boxes with disk drives will ""gain momentum over the next three years,"" said Gerry Kaufhold, analyst at Cahners In-Stat Group. Kaufhold said the product could eventually be used for audio on demand, once copyright issues are worked out. The companies have not announced when the product would be available.