A month or so ago I talked a little bit about what a 21’st century VCR might look like – combine RSS with BitTorrent and you get a system that automatically collects the TV shows you’d like to watch on your hard drive for you while you sleep. The problem with the implementation I mentioned a month ago was it only runs on Radio Userland, which most of us don’t have. Folks are working on this stuff though, and now we have a python based tool that will run on any platform that will run Python, ie almost anything ;-). It’s rough around the edges and probably only for geeks right now, but the premise is sound and the implementations are getting there – I strongly suspect that soon enough this type of tool will be refined enough that the same pool of folks who jumped all over Napster will be jumping all over broadcast television. What do you suppose the chances are that the networks are even thinking about this type of stuff?

Aside from refining this such that joe and jane consumer can run it, the next step is to get other media types integrated. Everyone seems to be focused on broadcast tv, me meanwhile, I would prefer to be able to grab Fresh Air off of NPR in an automated fashion. If anyone stumbles across these types of systems being applied to radio or print, I’d like to know about it.