Imagine a room filled with thousands of supercomputers, each holding terabytes of terabytes of data. Imagine a $400 box sitting on top of your television that has access to all the data on those computers, as well as a 150 GB hard drive. Welcome to GTV.

GTV, or Global TeleVision, is a $400 DVR with a 150 GB hard drive. It works with any television provider. It has all the features of Tivo, but it has a "Global Search" feature.

Global Search searches throughout the entire room of supercomputers for the television show you want. After narrowing it down to a show, you can scroll through to see all the different episodes. Choose one, and you can view it from right there with all Tivo functions, including slow-mo and zoom. If you like the episode, you can download it. Every show that's recorded completely is stored on these computers.

Commercial Skip automatically skips commercials by reading tags put in by officials at GTV Headquarters. Every tag either indicates that a commercial has started or ended. Because of the staff size at GTV, 98% of shows will have tags installed. You can see which shows don't have tags by a special icon shown.

If you're watching live television that's stored on the computers, your show automatically converts to the one that is on the computers - so you can skip commercials live! If not, your two tuners kick in. The tuners save the last half hour of a show so you can always go back. You can record two shows at once, download three at once, and at the same time, have two live shows being on the tuner.

Feel free to annotate! I'd like as much advice for this one as possible.

(More coming later when I have time.)
-- Nemmy, Apr 11 2005

I'm not seeing much innovative here that moves this beyond current IPTV and on-demand schemes and systems.
-- bristolz, Apr 11 2005



random, halfbakery