An integrated set-top box/digital recorder will let TV viewers in France watch and record movies on demand.
OpenTV is partnering with French satellite television provider TPS and Thomson Multimedia to make the Digital Personal Recorder, a set-top box with a hard disk to record digital video. The set-top would enable subscribers to download movies onto the hard drive and watch them for a certain time period.
The product will let couch potatoes pause and rewind a TV show even as it is broadcast, similar to the Tivo and Replay TV services in the United States. Viewers could also choose to download items that are mentioned during a broadcast, such as saving a company's financial report during a news show.
The move to combine set-top boxes with disk drives will "gain momentum over the next three years," said Gerry Kaufhold, analyst at Cahners In-Stat Group.
Kaufhold said the product could eventually be used for audio on demand, once copyright issues are worked out.
The companies have not announced when the product would be available.
E-books keep pace with print: Book publishing giant Simon & Schuster on Monday signed a deal to distribute titles from Ibooks -- a publisher that releases books simultaneously in print and online.
Ibooks said its first digitally downloadable book, one of Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime series, will be available through its Web site on 1 October.
The cost? Free -- well, not exactly. You will have to give Ibooks an email address to download the HTML file.
Ibooks will use the Microsoft Reader software to secure and charge for electronic texts delivered over the Net sometime after the millennium, said Byron Preiss, Ibooks president.
"I liken it to MP3. Initially, people have a high expectation of [products online] being free. If people like what we're doing, they will be willing to pay," he said.
Preiss said the books will cost "significantly less" in digital form.
