As reported by Light Reading, Cisco, Humax, Pace, Technicolor and others are working on hardware for a new multiroom setup based on a central gateway (or maybe a Cablevision-style networkDVR) that streams video to IP-connected extenders called the XI3.
Distributed DVR allows for any hard drive on the home's network to act as the storage device for your DVR, theoretically eliminating the need to even include an HDD in the set-top-box and giving customers the unadulterated ability to scale their storage capacity to fit their needs.