"The TV industry finds itself at the very same crossroad which the music industry had encountered some seven years ago. Our goal is to meet consumer needs with products enabling both traditional TV and new services in the most inclusive, user-centric, and scalable fashion. By puzzle-matching our Inverto R&D assets with those of Discvision towards the hybrid space, we focus on making this technology available to tier-1 consumer electronic players for this year’s sales" said Tomer Bentzion, FTA's CEO. "Inverto recordable hybrid product shall be made available by September 2007 with a host of new, real use-cases to consumers and with the newest High Definition technology integrated within it”

“FTA is a specialist in the domain of personal video recorders and the most innovative player in European satellite arena. We are therefore thrilled to have FTA as a partner,” said Dr. Reinhard Luling, managing director of Discvision. “FTA has spearheaded digital recording appliances in the Set-top Box retail segment and won world class brands as customers. Discvision undertook to focalize its efforts around the hybrid solutions and the complementary match with Inverto design team brings these respective assets to materialization in ways consumers are expecting since quite a while. We believe that the market opportunity for hybrid boxes will overtake the market in the coming years much like MP3 players who have displaced CD players from most of the audio console markets.”

The software architecture is based on the Linux operating system. “Exploiting core networking capabilities of the Linux platform to target and effectively addressing, in this way, the DRM issues are vital aspects of the join effort. This Linux-based stack assures easy in-home file sharing based on the UPnP protocols, the richest set of recording functionalities, recording of up to four TV programs and playback of separate stream in parallel and an intelligent EPG application that can collaborate with web services such as those of Axel Springer Digital TV Guide.” said Reinhard who also announced the availability of a PC client software that allows streaming and recordings of live TV from the DVR to the PC as well as archiving recordings on DVD.