digital video recorder

TiVo is gearing up to dish out Disney movie rentals, as the digital video recorder company expands its line up of movie offerings from major studios.

Under an agreement with Disney-ABC and CinemaNow, the companies will offer TiVo subscribers movies for a 24-hour rental.

TiVo expects to offer Disney movie ...

Last week I wrote about the premise of Oxford professor Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale University Press).

He warns about a future of “tethered” technologies like the digital video recorder and smartphones that often are programmed remotely by the companies that make them rather than being programmed by users, as PCs are.

As a partial solution, Zittrain offers up the idea of Wikipedia-style communities, where users create their own services without being “tethered” to a company that can change the rules any time.