On how storage at home will change how we watch television

The availability of low cost mass storage for home usage will bring a significant change in how people will watch television in the future. This will be mainly driven by the convenience users will experience when using storage. In a first chapter we will describe the many inconveniences users have at this moment and explore how they may be solved. In order to realize this we need however assistance from the broadcaster or service provider, such as a cable company. Whereas before content providers resisted the usage of storage at home because of copy issues, there is now a trend that the content providers will support it. The main reason for this is that the consumer is offered a lot of content in parallel and that he has a lot of choice. Content providers prefer that the end users watch (and pay) for their content and not of someone else. One approach is to make sure that their content is on your local discs. Then the chance that you will watch it increases significantly. Therefore many content providers are now willing to support to storage function at home. Later we will explain what is needed for this. In the second chapter we will examine what are the future technical possibilities. In a last chapter we will explore which technical challenges lie ahead of us.