TVSquad

Look, there was absolutely zero doubt that Cablevision was going to appeal the federal court decision barring the cable service provider from rolling out its remote-storage PVR plan. But now that they've filed their appeal, the news is showing up in more newspapers and blogs than the original ruling.

So let's review. Cablevision wants to allow users to record, pause, rewind, and fast-forward live television. But rather than sticking a box with a hard drive in the customer's living room, Cablevision proposed having a bank of hard drives in a central location.
Television networks didn't like this one bit. They said it would effectively give Cablevision control over the distribution of their content. A normal PVR is legal, they say, because the networks send out a signal on their terms, and you record it on yours. But Cablevision's plan would mean that Cablevision actually distributes video over the cable lines. And that, the networks said, is basically video-on-demand, for which they should get paid.

Anyway, Cablevision says the court misunderstood what they're trying to do, and that basically the remote-storage PVR is just like a PVR in your living room. Of course, the only reason they want to roll this program out is that it's going to be easier/cheaper to maintain a series of hard drives in a central location than set-top-boxes deployed to thousands or millions of customers.

And it's a short logical leap to think eventually they might cut costs further by determining that if you and I recorded the same program, they don't need to store it twice. And at that point, the fine line between remote-storage PVR and video-on-demand does start to look pretty blurry.