Neuros and DVRupgrade have partnered to bring hackers two new cash money bounties to allow an OSD to synchronize with TiVo's electronic programming guide.

The OSD is primarily used to consolidate all your DVDs and VHS tapes into one box, but, due in large part to it being open source, more adventuresome users are already benefiting from its ability to do so much more (like record live TV, stream YouTube to your TV and music to your stereo, play photo slide shows on TV). And now you can get paid to help it do even more.

from the DVRupgrade forums Posting (click for details)

"People love TiVo for its robust program guide and related features, and people love the OSD for the portability of its recordings. So, we've come up with a bounty for a project that combines the best of both devices. Namely for the OSD to piggyback on the TiVo's recording schedule and make portable MPEG-4 recordings of those shows that you choose. It's essentially like having TiVo simultaneously record onto a portable device at the same time that its recording to its hard drive. With no file transfer or conversion, you could have all your favorite shows automatically on your laptop, iPod, iPhone, Blackberry or whatever portable device you prefer. Ultimately, this functionality would be perfect for commuters, road-warriors or anyone that spends their days on the go."

I believe the significance of these bounties goes well beyond the immediate benefits of these specific features.

A great motivation for Neuros in open sourcing our products is the involvement of 3rd parties, and an important category of those will be value added or "customizing resellers." Such resellers emerged in the early days of PCs as were open and customizable and it's just natural that the same would happen with electronics as they become more open and customizable. We're delighted to have DVRUpgrade as one of our first such partners. They have both the technical capability as well as the community to support such customizations. As recent history has shown, innovation typically comes from individuals and small entities, and the 3rd party model of "customizing reseller" is a great way for them to monetize their innovations while keeping their customizations as free software.

Certainly the position of large retailers won't be threatened anytime soon by this movement. But take one look at the communities forming around any open product, and you can't avoid the fact that users have very individual needs and usage patterns. It doesn't seem like much of a jump to conclude the best way to support this long tail phenomenon is through a variety of 3rd party customizing resellers that have the will and the means to respond to those needs (and just innovate generally).

Think of this reseller program as somewhat analogous to the variety of alternative distributions of Linux that build upon one another. The main difference being that a piece of hardware is attached to it. And nowadays, with affiliate programs and streamlined drop-ship distributors, it doesn't take much more than a website to capitalize on the device sales that any given modification can drive. So if you're an individual with an idea for an innovative Neuros mod, feel free to contact us at busdev at neurostechnology.com with your idea, and let's see if we can't work out a way for you to profit from it.

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