RSS Enclosures and PVRs

Congrats to Greg Reinacker! His newly released NewsGator Media Center Edition is a proof of concept for things to come.

Specifically with the syndication of multimedia content via RSS enclosures.

However, the combination of RSS and PVR’s is not new. For example, the MythNews module for MythTV is actually an RSS aggregator for the open source homebrew PVR project, but MythNews does not support RSS enclosures (Yet! [wishful thinking]).

Personally, I think what Greg is doing in NewsGator MCE along with what Andrew Grumet is doing with RSSTV will have broader social impacts on the distribution of digital content.

For instance, suppose Netflix’s planned video-on-demand service offered an RSS feed with enclosures to its subscribers?

Hypothetically, I can imagine a “Top Rated” feed from Netflix, which is comprised of movies that have been highly rated by other Netflix users. NewsGator users’ would simply subscribe to the feed and receive a fresh supply of choice content.

Indeed, this starts to get into the territory Andrew is paving with RSSTV, which is why I think the synergies of multimedia content and syndication technologies are starting to produce some interesting results.

Soon, changing channels on your TV will be akin to flipping through syndication feeds in your aggregator. Perhaps we’re already there…