Earlier this year, the New York Times carried an article about AOL/Time Warner’s plans to enter the PVR market, both with the DVR box for Time Warner customers, and with a new service called MystroTV.
A few months later, details about the Mystro service began to leak out. It may be pay per view video-on-demand plus Television DVR functionality in addition to broadcast TV on demand. That last one’s a new feature. Imagine a system with every major network show from the past few days stored on your box and ready to go at the touch of a button. It’d be like having the ability to TiVo everything over a shorter time frame.
Whatever Mystro may turn out to be, it sounds like the wheels are in motion. Time Warner is advertising a few openings on the Mystro marketing and development team as they gear up for test marketing in Green Bay.
It’ll be interesting to see what a huge company that owns multiple channels, the largest internet service provider on earth, music labels, and studio assets can do with a magical box sitting in your living room.
[PVRblog]
I also picked up on the NYT story when it ran… I wonder what they will do with this box. The Explorer 8000 box is rolling out pretty strong now as a Time Warner Cable device and service, but how will the MystroTV box compete? If it’s the way cable modem service is sold, you can expect to choose the Mystro option or the TWC (Explorer 8000) when selecting your service. I hope that the additional features like email and web surfing become available to both boxes. You know just to have… I like the idea of connectivity options.