Faucet PVR | A Personal Video Recorder Enabling Recording Of Mainstream Italian TV

Faucet PVR is a new web based personal video recorder (PVR)
which allows the recording of mainstream Italian network channels.

These can then be easily downloaded to your Apple iPod or iPhone, and be
instantly accessible.

This unique service is in beta testing at the moment, and is
at a purely experimental stage of development with no commercial
ambitions. But it provides a truly useful, easy to use product in an
area where rules and laws have left an open gap in the market up to now.

Born out of the engineering and product development team of Inrete, an Italian
company devoted to help and support large enterprise customers in their
IT network needs, Faucet
PVR is a web-based personal
video recorder that can capture any time range on the all the
major on-air clear broadcast channels available in Italy.

A Virtually Unique Service

There seems to be no similar service yet
in the
international market as competing tools are either scheduling software
front-ends for video-television recording software or web-based
versions of TiVo-like personal video recording systems.

All competing
or similar systems I have been able to find online require a direct TV
reception capability in your computer either via set-top box, tuner
card or other device, while Faucet records any television program even
if you are lost on an island with no reception.

In the case of Faucet PVR, the recordings are all done and
reside on
the Faucet servers and each user can access and download what she has
selected to video record.

Faucet does NOT record indiscriminately all
of the on-air programming takes place but it rather provides an
interface to a web-based digital
video recorder that each individual can use to record his
preferred television shows.

The recordings are then made available for a limited amount of
time
in the user account and can be easily downloaded to an iPod or any
other portable media player including mobile phones and PDAs.

Here are more details:

What is a PVR or Personal Video Recorder?

A personal video recorder or PVR
is an interactive TV recording device capable of recording television
programming at your own preferred times. Like the familiar video
cassette recorder (VCR), a PVR records and plays back television
programs and has the ability to pause, rewind, stop, or fast-forward a
recorded program.

Most existing PVRs come as part of a television
subscriber service
such as Sky or Virgin Media in the UK, or Fastweb here in Italy and can
be either hardware or proprietary (can record only their channels in a
locked format) web-based units.

Good PVR services also enable searching
for shows by type and selecting video-on-demand
(VOD) among other options.

In the US, service providers such as TiVo and ReplayTV,
also sell hardware-based PVRs. Popular PVR products on the market
include TiVo’s DVR, SONICblue’s ReplayTV, Sony’s SVR-2000, and Philips’
PTR.

There are also a few software products that offer similar
functionality (see list at end of this article).

Faucet PVR – Overview

Originally announced in October of 2006
in Barcelona and then in Turin, Italy, in the month of June of this
year, Faucet PVR is not even a product yet.

Still in full “alfa” and never intended to become a commercial
public service, Faucet PVR was born out of the need to experiment with
a new television recording facility to be added to another already
existing web-based podcasting service: Vcast.

VCast
is a podcasting aggregator
allowing registered users to select and create their own podcast
compilations by selecting and bringing together into one feed the
podcast shows they are most interested in.

By integrating the ability
to record and splice together into one feed private and public podcast
channels as well as radio and TV broadcast recordings, Faucet provides
a unique platform for creating and putting together your own podcast
compilations.

Vcast was born out of a business partnership between Inrete, Tex97 and
Video Gruppo.

Access and Use

For any Italian citizen traveling abroad or unable to access
her television set to watch a specific show, Faucet
PVR is true godsend. No matter where she is, she can easily schedule
the recording of her favorite Italian television show while she is
swimming on the other side of the planet.

Vcast Faucet
PVR allows to
select among over 40 Italian television language channels that include
all of the mainstream public and commercial networks as well as a good
selection of minor stations.

I specify “Italian citizen“, because in
principle, to stay
within the law, Italian television programs can only be recorded by
Italian citizens owning a television set in this country and having
paid an annual subscription fee (“the wildly infamous canone
RAI”).

In reality, if you can manage a
fully Italian
interface, the service is technically accessible to anyone no matter
what nationality and whether or not he has paid Italian annual state
television fees.

The only obstacle to this being, upon first
registration, the system request for your Italian social security
number. But as for most other countries these
can be easily generated online by simply providing a name,
last name and a birthdate.

The range of possible applications and uses seems rather large
with
commercial and non-commercial opportunities having equal chances.
Training, marketing, sales, R&D would all benefit from specific
targeted uses of such a PVR.

Key Features

Faucet PVR presents a simple interface in which all necessary
commands and options are pulled together into one page form.

Setting up
a Faucet PVR television recording is within the reach of anyone with
enough patience to read through the different labels available on the
PVR one-screen-interface page and testing the different alternatives
inside the drop down menus.

Faucet PVR Key Features:

Station set

Faucet PVR has a rich Italian TV stations catalog from where
to
choose from. The list includes in fact all major Italian broadcasters
and a few additional international television stations (BBC
World).

Notably Faucet PVR includes also a full list of Italian radio
broadcasting stations that can be also recorded with the same ease

Precise scheduling

The user can easily select the day and time-range in which she
wants the recording to take place. Unlike TiVO here you are not hooking
into a programming schedule but you simply input specific start and
ending times for your recordings to take place.

Repetitive recording

Faucet PVR allows you to set a recording to be automatically
repeated every week or every other day in order not to miss periodical
programs. Repeating recordings can also be easily edited and modified
to correct and revise wrong timings or other inaccuracies.

Downloading

Faucet PVR allows you to immediately and easily download any
of
the completed recordings.

iPod aficionados get great looking 320×240
.mp4 that they can start immediately playing back on their portable
devices as much as Playstation, mobile phone and Apple TV users for
whom specific optimized target video formats have been made available.

RSS support

Broadcatching
here is fully enabled. Broadcatching is the act of downloading TV
programs to be viewed on your iPod, computer or other media player
device (iPhone, Apple TV, PDA, Playstation, Wii, etc.).

“Some
call it the poor man’s Tivo, but whatever you call it,
it’s becoming more and more popular.” (Source: Mashby)
Faucet PVR automatically generates a RSS feed with media enclosures
which you can plug-in in any quality RSS reader/aggregator.

iTunes support

First and foremost among these is Apple iTunes which can read
in full Faucet-generated RSS
feeds and can fully display associated videos inside the
iTunes player.

High-quality recording

Faucet PVR can digitally record your selected television
programming in your preferred video format.

From standard 320×240 iPod
matching .mp4 to high-quality iTunes mpegs at 640×480 resolution with
H264 codec compression and with a data-rate of 1,3Mbs, Faucet PVR
satisfies also mobile users with a 3GP quality output and gamers with a
PSP compatible format too.

Radio recording

Faucet PVR can also record Italian live radio stations in
the exact same way that it records video programs. Available all of the
main state network channels, a few commercial ones and a nice group of
other (to me unknown) European radio stations.

How does it work

Faucet PVR is extremely simple to use.
All one
needs to do is to select the television channel she wants to record,
the starting and ending time and the format for the recording
(available now: iPod, Playstation, 3GP and Apple TV).

Once a title is given and the recording button is pressed
Faucet PVR
does the rest by itself all automatically. At the established time it
goes out and it does a custom recording, just for you, of the
television programming time and station you have selected and it drops
it inside your Faucet PVR account.

You as a user can easily add new automatic recordings, set
repetitive recording assignments and watch or easily download shows
that have already been recorded.

Best of all Faucet PVR creates a
RSS feed with media enclosures that can be immediately fed to iTunes,
providing a perfect bridge to a high
quality
media player as well as the perfect vehicle to then transfer your
selected television recordings directly to your iPod or other media
portable device.

Legal Issues

Faucet PVR reqires each registering user to approve the
following statement:

“Per utilizzare le funzionalità di
registrazione di Faucet
ocorre avere diritto ad accedere ai contenuti radiotelevisivi italiani
trasmessi in chiaro, in quanto già detentore di altri
apparecchi
radiotelevisi e di essere in regola con i pagamenti delle relative
imposte.

Dichiaro di essere in regola con canoni di
abbonamento RadioTV e di essere cittadino italiano
“

which translates to:

“To utilize Faucet PVR video recording functions you
need to be
able to access Italian unencrypted on-air broadcasting channels as an
owner of a television set and to be compliant with the payment of the
relative television subscription fees.

I declare to be in compliance with the payment of
the Italian TV subscription fee and to be an Italian citizen.“

Editor’s Review

Faucet PVR is a unique breakthrough web-based
personal video recorder
(in alfa, experimental testing), which allows Italian citizens anywhere
to schedule the recording of their favourite broadcast television
programming and to watch it back at their preferred time on their
favourite media player.

There is no other web-based tool out there on the web today
that
does the same. Other PVRs are generally software based solutions that
need to be interfaced with a tuner card or other incoming digital
television input.

Faucet instead is completely self-contained, fully web-based,
does
not require any download or software installation to be used. The
recordings take place on the Vcast servers and you as a user have
nothing to worry about but finding out at what time is the television
program you want to record.

Excellent Quality Recording

Quality of the video recordings is excellent
and
well above my best expectations. The choice of multiple formats gives
everyone something good to work with and the Apple TV high quality
format is just impressive.

Considering that Faucet PVR is in alpha, experimental testing,
and it
is just a module within a larger web-based service, the success it has
garnered so far in the Italian press are more than well deserved and
nonetheless the very low profile with which Inrete likes to talk about
its baby Faucet, this is truly a tool you can’t avoid telling about to
your friends.

Inrete, the
company behind Faucet PVR, promises to surprise you again very soon
with the release of a new service labeled VHS 2.0.
This will act as a schedulable video screen recorder capable of
capturing and recording live video internet streams and making them
available to you for later use.

Tying-in television program names and show schedules would
obviously
make Faucet PVR a million times easier to use and more effective but, I
guess you will need to wait some time before that happens.

The same is true for any PVR potential ability to skip ads
during
recording, a feature as much loved by users, as feared and fought by
advertisers.

But if users want it their way,
why don’t the main
television network channels allow me to opt-in for a yearly
subscription to their programming and then have the freedom to do
ad-skipping on my own personal, private recordings. If the price was
right I’d certainly go for that.

But for now it ain’t so. Stay
tuned.

Conversation with Giorgio Bernardi of Inrete

N.B.: The video clip goes bad at about 5’30”. Apologies.

Click To Play

Author

Robin Good

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