[dan @ Feb 5th 2007 11:32AM]

It's actually kind of interesting. When TiVo first came out in the US, a few companies tried to introduce DVRs in Korea... Except no one could adequately explain the concept of DVRs to customers, and no one bought one.
That is, until, someone reduced the DVR concept down to two simple uses: pause live TV, and dubbed it "Time Machine Feature", and built it into a tv set as an additinal tuner functionality. When they started marketing it as "a tv-set with time machine functionality", everyone understood it immediately, and it became an instant hit. Soon, they included recording and EPG as additional features, and became a DVR as we know it, but it was still called a Time Machine.
It's not just LG's marketing gimmick on this TV set, but rather, all DVRs are commonly called a time machine by every tv manufacturer... and it's now common place for most top-end tv sets to list hard disk capacity in their specs, and the manufacturers try to one-up each other by introducing a new model with "world's largest time machine harddisk capacity" every other week, in the truest Korean fashion.
It sounds cheesy to us to hear "time machine", but personally I think it was a brilliant stroke of genius by whatever marketing department first came up with.
I have no idea who came up with that first. Maybe it's a transplanted Japanese marketing line, maybe it's Samsung or LG.