Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Must agree, I can invision it now,a check a friends list and all i can see is crummy japanese animation, and british sitcoms. And that what someone is watching. All i can think of is Bob is watching Girls gone wild JOIN HIM...scary

As I see it there are ways to handle parallel viewing of Tivo'd stuff that don't always rely on streaming or downloading - the core way would be in the 'sharing a social library' section further down the page. If you're already recording many of the same programmes as your friends then the two sets would only have to roughly sync their clocks at the time of recording to be able to play the two in parallel whenever. And I'm not against streaming (or other broadbanded communications between TV sets) either. As I say later, you should be able to go and look at EPG information in the past, select programming and potentially swarm download that to your local box.

Yeah, the thing is, the average PVR right now isn't the vast chasm of unused space the average iPod is. Having a new "autodownload" category for your social group might work, but it seems that your chances of everyone actually having the show would drop exponentially with the more people you want to watch it with. Perhaps if you could swarm download it, from your 0social for viewing... but that would still (a) take a mighty bit of bandwith for it to be a while you wait function, (b) require TiVo to be much smarter than it is and know how to intermingle timecodes and commercials and such from The West Wing recorded in Boston and The West Wing recorded in Atlanta, and (c) at least make the assumption that half the people have the show to begin with.

This may be untrue - but certainly this is not about large-scale social interaction - this is not about trying to find twenty people to experience a show with any more than you'd do that in your own home.

Actually, finding 20 people might be easier than finding 2 :P I can see this finding a use for something like "The Sockheads", a mailing list I am on for the long forgotten (and slightly ressurected on MTV2) Sifl and Olly Show. Finding a chat group via a blog as "The Daily Show" starts up might be really easy to do as well.

I think I've addressed your third point a bit by saying that presence alerts should only be triggered if you turn over at the beginning of a show or if you've been watching a show on a new channel for more than a certain period of time. That's specifically to limit the annoying consequences of having that presence be too heavily invade your TV watching experience.

Hmm. I must have missed that.