I’ve been looking into home theater PC (HTPC) software lately and I’m very impressed with some of the packages available. HTPC software is essentially a digital video recorder (DVR) on steroids. You can use it not only to record live television, but also to provide access to all of your stored media content (mp3s, ‘ripped’ dvds, mpeg, game emulators, etc).

Some HTPC software packages provide RSS aggregators (feed readers). You can use this to read the news through your HTPC, but you can also use it with feeds that provide bittorrent links to audio and video content. This is great if there is a regular TV show that you watch, because you don’t have to program the recording of the show yourself. Somebody else has recorded it and it is now available for download in a widely distributed network of bittorrent users.

When I first started learning about HTPC, I envisioned an ability to tell the software what I wanted to watch and have it (transparently) get that content for me. This seems like a simple concept, and I hope to see it eventually. Here’s how I envisioned it would work:

I go onto a channel guide to select a show. This channel guide not only has current shows, but as much past and future scheduling as is possible. I select a show that I want to watch and click go. The HTPC software transparently retrieves that content for me (as fast as possible) and I start watching my show.

If a TV program is in the past and I have a recorded copy on disk, it would immediately start showing the program. If a TV program is in the past and I don’t have a recorded copy, it would start downloading the show for me over P2P.

If a TV program is currently showing and it is not being recorded, it would show the program and simultaneously start downloading it for me in the background through a P2P network, so I would have the ability to rewind to a point before I started recording.

If a show is in the future and I have access to the channel, it would schedule the system to record the program for me, just as it does now. If a show is in the future and I don’t have access to the channel, it would schedule the download over a p2p network. The mechanism for scheduling could be an RSS feed, some type of bittorrent “placeholder”, or something else (as a user, I don’t care because it should be transparent).

Eventually, as bandwidth, users, and recorded content increase, a highly reliable video content retrieval system would exist. You would be able to watch any TV show that you would like, whether you recorded it or not. I can imagine the evolution of a common file format being used for P2P video distribution. If these files have the start time, end time, and channel (including region) embedded, then recorded fragments from different people could be pieced together.

At first glance, this seems like an overtly illegal process, but it doesn’t have to be. People would be willing to pay big bucks for a service where they could watch TV that they didn’t schedule a recording for. A company could charge a service fee, pay all the royalties to the content providers, record as much TV as possible, and seed all of the bittorrents.