Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Sony has decided to come out with a competitor of sorts to Tivo, but at least for now it will just be available in Japan. Called “Vaio X,” Sony is calling the device “Tivo on Steroids” and that it is! It contains six TV tuners (only analog, but hey, can you really complain that much?) so that six shows can be recorded simultaneously. To provide storage for so much recording capability, the device includes a terabyte of storage, or optionally a higher 1.3TB. I think this equates to something like 1,300 hours worth of content, or about 81 days of straight watching - minus 8 hours per day for sleeping, eating, cleaning, brief walks to get circulation going again, and potty breaks. I suppose you could always cut the number down by using catheters and treadmills, but in any case, it’s enough to where you you’re not going to run out of space any time soon! This also doesn’t take into consideration the fact that 99% of people wouldn’t be able to get through half the number of hours of marathon TV watching without going insane.

The unit will go on sale next month for over $4K, so it’s not exactly in the same marketplace as Tivo or ReplayTV, but rather for avid, obsessive-compulsive, slightly insane, and/or fairly well-off TV enthusiast. My main question would be when are there ever six things on at the same time that I just really need to watch? I guess if you were a sports fan and wanted to watch most of the football games on in their entirety, this would be one way of doing it. Or if you were a writer wanting to cover an event and wanted to watch all the major cable and broadcast news networks for their individual takes on the event… I guess the other main thing would be for people sharing this one unit in a household and everyone in that household being able to program their own set of recordings and not worrying about what others are watching or recording at the time. The problem with this is that while it’s great to allow multiple people to record so much stuff for later viewing, if everyone’s sharing this one unit, how do you ever get time for everyone to then view all that they’ve recorded. I suppose one answer would be to pass that content off to computers as MPEG-4 files so that people could then watch on their individual computers or even Portable Media Players. This may actually work in Japan, but I can see why Sony isn’t talking about a U.S. version anytime soon, although I’m sure some gadget heads with money to burn will be trying to acquire one or even construct their own.