Who wants to figure out what might be on over the next week, and when it will be on when you can get your DVR to record it all.

When Cory Doctorow visited last weekend’s OpenTech conference in London, he was stunned to see a box about the size of a 1990-era VCR boasting some pretty forward-looking capabilities.

The box was a prototype of a digital video recorder from Ascot, England, start-up Promise TV that can record and index an entire week’s worth of British digital-television programming.

To Doctorow, an editor of the popular culture blog BoingBoing and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s European outreach coordinator, Promise TV has broken impressive new ground with its DVR, which it plans to unveil next month.

“There wasn’t a jaw in the room that wasn’t scraping the floor during (the) demo,” he said. “It was genuinely futuristic.”

Dominic Ludlam, Promise TV’s lead developer, said the project was commissioned by the BBC and uses commodity PC hardware, including a bank of hard drives totaling 3.2 terabytes.

At week’s end, new programming overwrites previous programs, although those recordings can be archived on separate storage devices.

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