BBC R&D Mega-TiVo

BBC R&D Mega-TiVo: "By nat When I visited BBC R&D labs last year after EuroOSCON, I saw an absolutely astonishing system. Macro is a few PCs with video capture cards recording a pile of domestic British channels and storing the encoded files for later playback. Tom Loosemore talked about this today at XTech so at long last the cat's out of the bag and I can talk about it. You can see it in operation here but actual show downloads are password-protected (and you can't get a password, for obvious reasons). Macro is gorgeous. It consumes the BBC's electronic program guide to determine when shows begin and end, who's in them, etc. There was a way sexy PHP interface (written, I think, by the fantastic Phil Gyford) to the archived programs that let you subscribe to shows, actors, keywords, etc. (I don't recognize the current UI, so I think the cool social software is still inside the R&D firewall). It's social software, so you can see what your friends are watching, your friends can recommend shows, and shows can simply bubble up to your attention because a lot of yo"