In a world where hardware vendors erect very stringent walls to protect their precious products from being modified, customized, or otherwise hacked, it is a bit refreshing to hear about a company that wants people to be able to do all of those things to its product.

And the pleasure factor goes way up when you take into account the fact that the product is really, really cool.

Digital video recorders are the big new toy for 2003, at least in US homes. These nifty gadgets fit a nice niche for people who are too busy to actually watch TV when they want to and are also unable to (a) actually program their VCRs or (b) they want to tape far more television than a measly six-hour videotape can hold. The question of whether they might be watching too much television seems beside the point.

Love them or not, DVRs are actually opening up a much larger arena: computer-controlled entertainment centers that can do a lot more than just record shows to a hard drive. This is the territory that Interact-TV's Telly MC1000 is trying to move into--territory that the company hopes to chart with the help of open source development.

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