I love my TiVo. It's a great device and it just plain works. But in a lot of ways it feels like the tip of the iceberg to me. And I've been waiting to see what is next. Today, my friend Ellen pointed me at a product that I think shows one of the next steps. It's the Telly: The Entertainment Computer. It does all the stuff of a TiVo, plus you can play DVDs and CDs on it. You can play music off the network (so if you store your music on a central server like I do you can play that music through it). It's got a web server built in. Oh yes, and it runs linux. But unlike the TiVo they seem to have no problem with you going in and playing around with the unix side of things. According to the FAQ you can even configure the on-screen menus to run programs.
