Peter Griffin: TiVo coming to NZ

We've all heard of that US invention TiVo, the little box that lets you record live TV and watch it slightly behind schedule so as to cut out ads.

A TiVo-like service will debut here later in the year when Sky starts selling decoders with hard drives and electronic programming guides.

But before TiVo-ing takes off here, Americans are already moving on to the next big thing — TiVo for radio.

Software such as Replay Music (www.replay-music.com) is being used to capture the content in "streaming" radio feeds. Thousands of radio stations now broadcast via the internet and subscription music services have sprung up to offer audio streams — a massive catalogue of music is available to American subscribers in this way.

But here's where web radio listeners and users of Replay Music-like software bump into the Digital Copyright Millennium Act, which doesn't allow for making duplicates of copyrighted digital material from a computer and storing it on your computer hard drive.

TiVo rattled the cages of US TV networks that could see the potential loss of revenue, and now the entertainment industry, which is fighting a losing war against music and video piracy, is scared the likes of Replay will open up another front.

As San Francisco-based software maker, Applian Technologies, claims on its website: "Wouldn't it be great if you could record music from online radio stations or music subscription services and play it back on your iPod or MP3 Player? You can with Replay Music!" Anything that streams can be recorded. Replay captures streaming audio as an mp3 or WAV audio file.

The files can then be cropped, trimmed and edited to remove the parts of the stream you don't want to keep. You can set the audio quality level at up to 320Kbps (kilobits per second), and the software will even tag the stream with the artist name and song title, by comparing the captured stream to a database.

The software can be used to record audio that was only meant to be heard as an audio stream, not stored and played at will. Replay threatens to destroy the paid-for streaming audio model before it even gets going. It's a powerful tool and you can expect the lawsuits to start piling up at Replay's door.

Price:US$50 (NZ$71)