Warning: a crystal ball rant:
With the current revenue model of iTunes and “owning” and renting content, I don’t think Apple has an interest in DVR capability, nor do the majors (big film and television companies), in terms of playing nice with their monolithic point of view (them being Steve Jobs in particular)...you can see evidence of this in the anemic roll-out of the rental store in iTunes. Majors also have a real problem with the notion of people circumventing DRM via DVR technology; they would much rather support an infrastructure for on-demand viewing of content, subsidized by ad revenue; just check out Hulu and you’ll get the big picture from several major studios already moving in this direction.
Bit Torrents are also dissuading companies from entering into “capturing” technologies like DVR-it’s just another means to pirate content. Keep your eye on on-demand repositories, like Hulu (and Rhapsody, Fuse, Last.fm and Pandora on the music side)...together with tech like the SlingBox, VCast and 3G/FIOS, the idea of “hording” content onto a storage appliance will be largely relegated to personal (home) movies, nullifying the necessity to “capture” and store media for time-shifted consumption…If and when big Telco opens up (relative) unlimited bandwidth over the ether and cell networks, we’ll see this come to fruition and Network media will experience a boom as folks consume mass media from their mobile appliances via live stream.
The new/bigger picture involves “place-shifting”-that is, consuming media on-demand direct from the source, wherever you are. Ad and subscription models are pretty much going to be the default for this tech as it rolls out here in the “West”...
Alas, in spite of all this, we’re still about 5 years behind tech-folks in Korea and Japan can already stream personal media from home to their cell phones.