When your renting an HD DVR you are for the most part paying by the hour. You get a 160GB hard drive with a fixed amount of hours of recording space at say 10 bucks a month for the DVR Service.

What I find more interesting is the ability to record more than two shows at a time because this service could allow additional recording tuners if you will. I would gladly swap out my three HD DVR boxes for three normal HD boxes "and" continue paying the 30 bucks I was paying each month for DVR services as long as I could record at least 6 shows at a time with at least 150 hours of "HDTV" recording space.

This is the type of service I could really see taking off and the only true cost is server hardware and a few more VOD based QAM channels purely for the additional customer demand. You would still at worst case only send one stream per box so this idea really can work. Just the fact alone knowing if my hard drive or box failed I wouldn't lose my recordings would be worth the money.