Tired Of The Telly? Reprogram It

from the giving-consumers-what-they-want dept

As the new ReplayTV continues to take away the features that make it worth buying, a new company is making a bet that it makes sense to offer technology that lets consumers do what they want. They're selling a set top box, called the Telly MC1000 Digital Entertainment Center that. It sounds like quite a box, with all the typical TiVo-style features. However, the more interesting point is that the company behind it, Interact-TV, is actively encouraging people to hack the box. They want people to build add-ons and make the device more useful. They're not trying to bend to the wishes of the broadcast industry, but to the consumers who are actually buying the box. Of course, right now, the box is a bit on the expensive side ($900), but hopefully the price starts to drop over time - and additional features make it even more valuable. They're really positioning this as a digital entertainment hub. However, unlike previous top-down attempts to create such a device, they're basically admitting that they're not sure what people will do with it - so they might as well make it easy for anyone to do anything they want with it. What a concept.

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