Rui Carmo- Living in a backwater country where the ratio of advertising to actual programming (even on local cable channels) is starting to approach the American norm. There is so much junk cluttering the airwaves these days that the concept of relaxing in front of the TV has become "a thing of the nineties".
- The lack of an open, Euro-centric PVR appliance (I keep looking at stuff like the Dreambox, but we're a long way from DVB here).
- The fact that no single Portuguese TV station has a decent online program guide in half-readable HTML. Crummy frame-based garbage littered with JavaScript seems to be the norm, and trying to get any of it into XML format for an electronic program guide or importing into my calendar is certainly beyond my own patience.
- Having to wait until TV series get out on DVD when I could simply buy and download them a la iTunes. That I would pay for, especially if it involved BBC content.
- Having no quick, decent, painless way to rip those DVDs I already have into a big, fat, home media jukebox. All of them, complete with subtitles, menus, etc. If I could do it in H.264 already (and keep the DTS audio), it would be icing on the cake (and I could probably fit half of my DVD collection in my 250GB Maxtor). And yeah, I noticed ffmpegX is getting close, but what I really want is an appliance.
And yeah, I know all about all those Sci-Fi Channel series floating around in BitTorrent. I just can't be bothered to keep track of that sort of stuff - maybe I should hire a teenager "media consultant" to do that for me...