Honey, I shrunk the PVR

Travel, they say, broadens the mind, but sometimes while traveling, you're simply bivouacked in a hotel room watching TV. These are the times I miss my TiVo most. By this point, it's almost trite to say that having TiVo has spoiled me for watching television the "normal" way. Having spent the past few weeks in homes and hotels without its benefits, I've treasured the flexibility and convenience it offers at home all the more.

Which got me thinking: I'd love to have a portable personal video recorder, just something basic with RCA video and audio inputs and a small infrared remote control that I could plug into, say, a hotel TV and use to get basic TiVo functions while on the road. I wouldn't need fancy geegaws like the program guide or Season Passes, but having something that would let me pause TV by buffering 15 or 30 minutes, or to record short programs would be fantastic.

Last night, for example, as I was getting ready to go out and meet some friends for dinner, I was in the bathroom shaving and overheard something that interested me in a news report on the TV in the sitting room. WIth a half-shaven face, I rushed out to catch the end of the report but I'd missed the critical bit. What I would have given to be able to rewind three or four minutes and see it all. Then, just as I was leaving, an obscure cable channel—one I don't receive at home—began a documentary I'd have loved to watch. How cool would it have been to hit a button and have it waiting for me when I returned. Instead, my insomnia was sated with a diet of infomercials.

Let's just say I've been even more twitchy to be TiVo-less when visiting the ancestral Graham homestead, where even the DVD player is a fairly recent acquisition.

How hard would this be for someone like Griffin or Belkin to make as an iPod add-on? The iPod already has a capacious hard drive and a fast Firewire interface. Make something that snaps on the bottom with composite video plugs and maybe a remote and voila! It's a portaPVR. I'd shell out a couple hundred bucks for that and, if it went both ways, such that you could stream recorded shows from home (transferred to your iPod with Tivo-To-Go) to the hotel TV while you're on the road, I bet a lot of folks would pony up for one.

For that matter, memory and hard drive space are so relatively cheap these days, how long do you suppose it'll be—if it hasn't happened already and I admit to not having researched this—before television manufacturers begin including some basic PVR-type functions in the TVs themselves? A 1 gigabyte Compact Flash card in a TV and the necessary electronics wouldn't add that much to the base cost of a unit and would make live TV buffering, pausing and rewinding, at least, a standard TV function.

Any geeks out there wanna build a portable PVR and make millions? I've got the first few hundred in my wallet right here.

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