[fox35]

I suspect in the years ahead, as technology advances, the need for a recording box with a hard drive or cloud storage will be a lot less. The streaming and catch-up services will become stronger as more and more quality content is added, with some bypassing linear TV completely and going straight to on-demand. This together with the newish "watch from the beginning" functionality, which can only get bigger, will eventually render live linear TV redundant, obviously except for live news, live sports and live big events. We are only just seeing the beginning of this now, with the removal recently of several linear TV channels, with prime time series switching to the main streaming sites. This will only increase, but I also think the need for numerous multitude of streaming sites will either not survive or will merge and only a few will remain in the years ahead. Virgin Media used to be at the forefront of providing streaming and catch up services, way before Sky could handle it, and they need to regain that position. Perhaps with the debut of this new streaming device with a search across all providers function, they are finally trying to regain that position whilst preparing for the future. Linear TV days are numbered.