I would really like to build or buy a box that lets me easily watch files I download with bittorrent on my TV. There are a lot of interesting new media appliances for the TV these days, including:

• PVRs, which are hard drive-based TV recorders with nifty features for automatically scheduling shows to be recorded,
• XBox and XBox 360, which are game consoles that can buy and update games through an online service
• Windows Media Center, which is basically a PC running a special version of Windows XP designed for PVR and other functions

I don't have any of these things, but I'd quite like something that does at least the PVR stuff, but also lets me run bittorrent.

If you don't know what bittorrent is, it's basically a network protocol for downloading files that is well suited to transferring large, popular files. Without going into the technical details (which, as a geek, I find fascinating), bittorrent turns the usual dynamics of downloading files on their head - the more people that are downloading a file, the faster it will be for you to download.

This makes it an ideal and increasingly popular way to download software, television shows, movies, etc, which tend to be large files. Serving media files on the Internet requires a lot of bandwidth, which gets very expensive for popular files, but with bittorrent it's much more efficient, cheap, and faster, so better for everyone involved. Of course much of the content people download using bittorrent is of dubious legality.

Personally, I like to download TV shows that aren't available in the UK using bittorrent. The two big things I like are that I can watch it when I want, and without commercials. The big thing I don't like is that I mostly have to watch these on my PC instead of my TV. It's possible to hook my TV up to my PC, but not convenient, since they're in different rooms, and the PC doesn't have a remote control.

A PVR like Sky+ would probably give me the two things I like about bittorrent, and solve the thing I don't. But there is another advantage bittorrent has over a PVR, and that's the Internet. A PVR still only lets me watch whatever is made available by my cable company, satellite service, or local broadcasters. A torrent box connected to my broadband Internet connection and my TV would give me access to any content people put on the Net.

This would do for TV what VOIP is doing for phone service, and what IPTV doesn't even try to do) - wipe out geographical limitations. Producers and/or distributors of television content could make their stuff available on the net via bittorrent, either charging a fee or, for promotional or amateur content, for free, and reach viewers everywhere. My wife and I could watch TV shows from Turkey, local stations in the US, and independent producers, no matter where we live. That would rule.

The box is actually trival to make. It's a hardware device that can connect to a TV and a broadband connection (a plain ethernet jack or wifi would work for me), play media files (XviD), and run a bittorrent client (ideally Azureus), and a UI to make it easy to browse and select files to download. Adding 1 or 2 TV tuners would give you a PVR as well, and a DVD drive (preferably a writer) replaces your DVD player.

The quickest way to get a box that does this, and more, would be to get a Windows Media Center device. This is basically a PC shaped and designed like a home entertainment component, running a special version of Microsoft Windows. It would be a simple matter of installing Java and Azureus, and ideally writing a decent UI (or perhaps WMC plugins?) to browse and select torrent files to download. Alternately, the same hardware could run Linux and a free PVR software package like MythTV.

The drawback of this is expense. Most of these boxes seem to cost around £1,000. I'm sure a box could be sold for around £300-400 that could handle this, maybe not quite as full powered and full featured as the media center PC's, but enough for downloading and watching TV. The new XBox 360 games console actually looks to have the right hardware. I think the only thing keeping the 360 from being able to do this easily is that its Internet connection seems to be restricted to connecting to Microsoft's online service. I'm sure there are hacks for this or, at the worst, Linux will inevitably be ported to the 360 the way it has for the original Xbox.

In fact, I could probably get a workaround for what I want by installing Windows Media Center on my normal desktop PC, and buying the XBox 360 and connecting it to my TV. The 360 apparently works with Media Center as a "Media Extender", so it can play music and video on the Media Center PC's hard drive. I'm not sure how easy it would be to install a program on the XBox that let me browse and choose bittorrent files from the X-Box though, and it is overall an awkward solution.

In any case, the hardest part of all of this is the content. Most of the content out there right now is illegal, so nobody other than a hobbyist like me is going to make a bittorrent box. The key to making it popular will be on the content side, which is an interesting business challenge. I've got more on that subject for a later post.

If anyone knows of a box that costs around £300 and can run Linux (or Windows Media Center), has a hard drive, TV connectors, and ethernet or wifi, let me know. The closest I've found in price is the Topfield (also see the UK forum), which is a sweet-sounding PVR but has no network interface. Shuttle makes many different small form-factor PC's, but these are pretty powerful and more expensive than I'm looking for.