Simple.tv to launch ShowDrive, a cloud DVR to store/stream up to 1K hours of TV, in UK within weeks, cost £1/month for 100 hours, £5/month for 1K hours
Context & Ripple Effects
ShowDrive is Simple.tv betting that recording can be sold as a standalone cloud subscription: no box, up to 1,000 hours stored and streamed, priced at £1/month for 100 hours and £5/month for the full tier. It arrives in the UK ahead of the US streaming giants' DVR pushes — Amazon had already anchored UK cloud-storage expectations with unlimited Amazon Drive storage at £55/year.
The subsequent coverage shows where the market went: YouTube TV launched with unlimited cloud DVR built into its $35 plan, Hulu planned a cloud DVR add-on under $20 on top of a ~$40 live package, and AT&T layered a 100-hour DirecTV Now cloud DVR onto a premium tier. ShowDrive's standalone pricing is the baseline those bundles would spend three years undercutting.
First-order effects
- UK viewers get device-free recording at a price point (£1/month entry) well below hardware-DVR ownership, putting Simple.tv in direct competition with set-top recorder economics rather than with broadcasters.
- Simple.tv must prove demand for a neutral recording layer that works across whatever sources users already have, since it sells storage and streaming rather than content.
Second-order effects
- Once YouTube TV made unlimited DVR a free inclusion and Hulu/DirecTV Now priced add-on capacity near or below ShowDrive's rates, standalone cloud DVR gets squeezed toward either extreme cheapness or platform-neutrality niches the bundles don't serve.
- Hardware DVR vendors feel the pinch from both ends: TiVo's answer in the coverage was to pivot toward software and services with the TiVo+ streaming offering alongside new DVR boxes, rather than defend hardware alone.
Third-order effects
- Recording hours become a tiering currency in streaming packaging — 100 hours versus unlimited turns into the same kind of upsell lever as resolution or simultaneous streams — shifting DVR from a purchased device to a recurring line item inside someone else's subscription.
- If the pattern holds, independent cloud-DVR providers survive only as interoperability plays attached to sources the major bundles exclude, while capacity pricing power consolidates with the live-TV platforms that control the content relationship.
The trend: Cloud DVR is migrating from a standalone paid product into a bundled feature of live-TV streaming services, with storage capacity becoming the standard tier differentiator.