AppleTV Hackers:

I am writing to introduce you to Neuros, and to solicit your help in building the next generation open set-top box, the Neuros OSD and other future products.

We have watched with great interest as you have begun to hack the AppleTV, and we applaud your skill and willingness to make your CE devices play new formats, adopt new functionality, and have more capacity. With the quality of the people in your group, there is no doubt you will accomplish a great deal with this device – whether its creator wants you to or not.

While we at Neuros are all for clever hacking and warmly welcome anybody who wants to help us make our products better, we believe there's even more at stake here. With the transition to IPTV, the face of “television” communication worldwide will to a large extent be determined by the events of the next five to ten years. If open set-top boxes have enough momentum and consumer adoption, they have the opportunity to become the irresistible force that can break big media's walled garden that controls our TV sets today.

Put another way, the transition to IPTV creates a golden opportunity to ensure that the gateway to the TV set becomes open to all, instead of just a select few gatekeepers. This is an opportunity we may not see again for a long, long time. Free distribution and use of media is being threatened today. From the DMCA to the CableCard to the broadcast flag and repeated attempts to close down analog recording, there are threats from multiple angles, and fewer and fewer defenders of those freedoms. The reason is simple: too many manufacturers have banded together with Hollywood to divvy up the spoils gained at the expense of consumer freedom. Can we really expect a manufacturer to fight against Hollywood when those same manufacturers share the proceeds from the sale of that content?

The FSF and EFF continue to fight against the erosion of these freedoms, but, in a free world, the most powerful force of change is the voice of educated citizens voting with their pocketbooks. What better way to educate citizens about the evils of CableCard than to put a MythTV or Freevo into their homes? Once they find they can't connect the PC they own to the cable they pay for, it won't be long for them to start protesting and demanding change.

Then the question becomes: how do we get such a box in their hands?

We believe the answer is to build a silent, small, low power, low cost box connected to the open Internet. This box will allow communication not only between clients and servers, but between peers as well. Such a box should stand on the shoulders and support the work of those free software hackers that have come before us and who work beside us, and should be made by a manufacturer that is independent of big media, not a reseller, customer or vendor of big media. Such a box should be packaged with all the necessary software already installed and configured so that it can be sold to a mainstream consumer in a retail outlet.

We at Neuros are working to fulfill the vision of the open set-top box, but the path is not an easy one. The embedded components that are typically needed are quite often not nearly as open as many of the components in PCs. We don't have the heritage of mature, free software to support multimedia playback and recording, and we often have constrained computing resources that are a challenge to porting the software designed for PCs. Although each generation of our devices has become increasingly more open, we continue to rely too heavily on licensed proprietary code that would benefit greatly from the kind of help and expertise that you can bring.

Unlike other manufacturers who typically ignore or may even try to suppress or undermine your contributions, we at Neuros rely on them. Your contributions can get quickly incorporated in our official releases, and you will have a say in the creation of future generations of our devices and the ability to work side by side with our internal engineering team.

All while expanding the body of free software for those that follow.

At Neuros, we do not sell content, nor do we sell our devices through content distributors, as most set-top box manufacturers do. We are beholden only to you, the consumer. In a world of DRM, closed systems and proprietary walled garden content distribution, we record content from any legally obtained source to free and non DRM-encumbered MPEG-4 files that allow you to use that content as you wish.

Join us, and watch your hacking contribute not just to the making of superior devices but to something much larger: the future of free media.

For more information see our developer welcome page and please join us this Saturday at an IRC welcome/Q&A meeting setup just for a discussion of what neuros can offer AppleTV hackers.

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