Playlater Serves As A DVR For Online Media, Complete With Subscription

Tweet

Yesterday we brought you the Channel Master TV DVR, a DVR system that was geared toward cable cutters in that it offered up functionality with over the air digital television broadcasts. But now, we’ve got one more service for you cable cutters out there, and it’s called PlayLater, from the folks at PlayOn. It’s a service that so closely imitates a DVR that it even charges fees, but it’s geared toward online video.

We all know there’s a wealth of online video out there, from a wide variety of sources like Hulu and Netflix and even some channel sites themselves (we’ve seen NBC, TBS and TNT offer up their own samplings recently, and there’s more besides out there), and you can’t always get around to watching the stuff you want to watch. Most of the time this isn’t a problem, but in some cases, there’s a time limit on the stuff you may want to watch but simply can’t right now. Or worse, you’ve paid for the content, you want to watch it, but you can’t because you’re not in an area with an internet connection, like on an airplane or some commuter trainsl. What PlayLater does is it saves the video to your local device where you’re in range of an internet connection so that you can play it later (hence the name) on your local device without the need of an internet connection. PlayLater charges license holders $5 a month, or $50 for a year, so if you use a lot of digital video you may want to check this out.

Now, of course, a lot of you are likely thinking, is this legal? We’ve all seen the hissy fits that intellectual property holders throw over this kind of thing, but the early analysis seems to be that it is, though that’s not stopping a lot of grumbling. PlayLater doesn’t download a digital media file, but rather, it records the stream as-is, complete with ads. It saves the resulting files as WMV files with DRM protection, which means it will only play on devices with your PlayLater license.

So what do you guys think of all this?  Think the intellectual property holders will roll the dice? Or will they live and let live? Either way, we welcome your commentary down in the comments section!