No doubt that this is what they are doing. For non-live shows, they may even get a dump prior to it airing, so they have the whole day's worth of content queued up and ready to go.
If it lets you view a program guide, and watch anything that "aired" earlier than now, it sounds like it's basically a different interface but otherwise the same as current YouTube or Netflix. YouTube even has live streams.
However the way it's described makes it sound like there's probably some limitations to make it "seem like TV". The worst of this would be to totally emulate the normal TV+DVR model:
* You only get access to recordings if you picked them to "record" prior to when they "air"
* You have some arbitrary limit of number of "concurrent" recordings (eg: you can't just record every show on every channel at the same time, despite being 'unlimited DVR')
* If you want to watch/record a show and it's already started, you can only watch/record it from the current point forward
* Everything has commercials, at 31% rate, with the same commercial repeating multiple times like current TV.
They can also do some really awful things with it being a cloud DVR:
* Delete your recordings, or 'expire' them after some time. For example, you have 3 seasons of some show 'recorded' and are working your way through, but then they lose the license for that network and poof, all your 'recordings' are gone.
If it lets you view a program guide, and watch anything that "aired" earlier than now, it sounds like it's basically a different interface but otherwise the same as current YouTube or Netflix. YouTube even has live streams.
However the way it's described makes it sound like there's probably some limitations to make it "seem like TV". The worst of this would be to totally emulate the normal TV+DVR model:
* You only get access to recordings if you picked them to "record" prior to when they "air"
* You have some arbitrary limit of number of "concurrent" recordings (eg: you can't just record every show on every channel at the same time, despite being 'unlimited DVR')
* If you want to watch/record a show and it's already started, you can only watch/record it from the current point forward
* Everything has commercials, at 31% rate, with the same commercial repeating multiple times like current TV.
They can also do some really awful things with it being a cloud DVR:
* Delete your recordings, or 'expire' them after some time. For example, you have 3 seasons of some show 'recorded' and are working your way through, but then they lose the license for that network and poof, all your 'recordings' are gone.
* Make commercials unskippable