With current set-top box/digital video recorders (STB/DVRs), a consumer is generally limited to a number of tuners available on their STB/DVR, and is limited to an amount of local disk storage available to the STB/DVR. Because of this, consumers are constantly having to manage their local STB/DVR storage (e.g., by deleting programs so that new content may be recorded by the STB/DVR). There are limited options (e.g., due to copyright issues) for consumers to transfer such content to another media device within the home, which makes archiving the content problematic.
STB/DVRs also typically limit a number of programs that can be recorded at a given time. This may cause consumer frustration because consumers may need to decide which programs they want to record (e.g., tuner conflict is currently a manual process). Furthermore, adding tuners and disk space to STB/DVRs is a non-trivial task and is generally very expensive.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds