Traditional DTV set top boxes haven't move on much in the past few years. Most now have the ability to pause, rewind, and record live TV thanks to the inclusion of a hard drive, and other than the addition of streaming services, new features have not been common in the market.
That's not to say that innovations haven't been occurring elsewhere, but the audience for a premium service like Sky Q is very different from a someone who makes do with access to free to air TV.
Bush's new DTV box is set to change all this by giving users the ability to record live TV to a personal cloud storage locker, called ShowDrive, which can then be streamed to any device.
In theory this would allow you to, for example, set a film broadcast on Film 4 to record and then watch it on your iPad on your commute.
A litigious legacy
The idea of combining free-to-air broadcast with cloud-based recording is nothing new. In the US a company called Aereo briefly offered the service, but ran into legal difficulties due to the way the company located its TV tuners outside of the customer's home.
The idea was resurrected by Simple.tv, which is the company behind the ShowDrive service.
Simple.tv's service differs from Aereo's by locating the TV tuner inside users' homes, which avoids any legal problems surrounding fair use of TV broadcast content.
Given that catch-up services are increasingly comprehensive, the ability to record and stream content might end up being more cumbersome in many cases than simply watching it through a catch-up app, but there continues to be a large amount of programming (such as The Simpsons on Channel 4) that doesn't make it onto these services.
You will need to pay a monthly fee for access to this storage locker with prices starting at £1.99 for 35 hours of recording, or £5.99 for 350 hours in addition to paying for the DTV box itself which is available for £99.99 from August 30.
So while it might not quite be free-to-air, it's nevertheless a great deal cheaper than premium offerings from the likes of Sky, while offering a more limited suite of services.
- Check out our review of Sky's budget Freeview box, its Now TV Smart Box
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