ZDNet's David Berlind:

Several television and movie studios have joined forces to sue Cablevision which has been testing a TiVo-like recording service (officially: Networked Digital Video Recorder or Remote Storage (RS) DVR) where the recorded programs are stored on Cablevision's servers rather than locally at the customers premises in a digital video recorder like the ones offered by TiVo and Motorola.

Cablevision should try to settle this out of court with an iTunes Music Store like licensing agreement with the studios. The studios would benefit from centralized DRM and avoid the iPod lock-in that gives Steve Jobs so much price setting leverage. Cablevision would need slightly better marginal terms than Apple for want of a high-margin device. Or perhaps those negotiating hurdles prove too high, and the studios build their own digital storage and delivery data centers:

The plaintiffs contend that because Cablevision only has agreements in place for the simultaneous broadcast rights to their content, it would require a separate license for the network DVR that would see Cablevision storing that content and sublicensing it to consumers. The cable platform, the sixth largest in the U.S., has said it will not shell out a further license fee or share the additional revenue from charging customers for the service.

Either way, the network is the computer and EMC, and Sun lick their lips. For Mr. Berlind is right that "moving all of those terabytes out of our homes and into the cable operators' data centers will require some series (sic) hardware not to mention some special storage management software".  ¶ 1:26 PM