I just want to wish everyone happy holidays and a great new year. New posts will be light over the next week, but next year should be good with some new product reviews, a re-designed TVHarmony Product Tracker with some helpful new features, and some new articles and How To’s that some will find useful.

Happy Holidays!

-TVHarmony

Peter Near’s Blog has a great review of the Creative Zen Media Player. He’s put it through its paces and has some very good real world observations on how it works for a daily road warrior.

Extremetech.com has a nice primer for HDTV and the main technology options involved.

In another blow to plasma televisions, rumors have it that Sony will pull out of the plasma television market as soon as this next Spring. According to the article, the reason is business related; Sony doesn’t produce the plasma televisions so it can’t compete on price and the profit margins are eroding in the market. Regardless of whether Sony believes plasma has a future, the article then suggests that Sony simply dropping the product line will scare potential plasma customers away from adopting the technology.

The article also highlighted this forecast for the television industry:

According the independent research firm DisplaySearch, the global market for plasma TV sets will reach 5.14 million units in 2005, up 92% from 2.68 million this year. The LCD TV market is expected to double to 16 million units next year.

DisplaySearch predicts that sales of rear-projection TVs will total 6.82 million units in 2005, up 20% year-on-year. While sales of flat-panel sets are booming, traditional cathode-ray tube (CRT) models still make up about 90% of all TV sets sold worldwide.

I guess my old Sony CRT television isn’t that out of fashion yet. It may actually turn out to be retro chic.

The Richmond Times Dispatch wrote this short comparison comparing the two rival products. It oversimplifies things a bit but I think it’s still worth noting.

Via Digitalmerging.la, it looks like the iPod is the Tickle Me Elmo of the 2004 Christmas season. It’s in short supply this year, with many retailers out of stock of the iPod Mini.

If you can’t find it in stock, never fear, because DigitalMerging.la has a good link to competitive products.

The WhiningDog.net has a review of Microsoft’s MCE Extender for XBox, a cheap way to extend a MCE DVR to another television if you already own an XBox. If you don’t, it might be a good back door way of convincing your significant other that an XBox is needed.

Sounds like a good product except for two things I find disappointing:

• You need to have the software CD inserted in the XBox to run the software, making it a hassle to flip between watching television and watching a DVD on the XBox
• There is no support for XVID/DIVX, which unfortunately, is the format of choice for most of my video library given it’s smaller footprint

That being said, it’s not a bad product for $80, including a remote control with a stylish, big green button in the middle of it.

(Hat tip: HTPCNews.com)

Competition is a great thing for consumers and good example of this is the battle being waged in the video capture card market. Both Hauppauge and AverMedia have released sub-$100 MPEG2 Encoder cards to the market this year, and at a $70 street price, the Hauppauge 150MCE and the AverMedia UltraTV 1500MCE both give the consumer a lot of bang for their buck. I had a chance to try the AverMedia UltraTV 1500MCE, and I found it to be a great value.

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Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis of NPD Techworld, writes a weekly column in Engadget. This week’s column, Mr. Rubin had some advice for Tivo: drop the subscription fees. His argument:

” Without the subscription fee requirement, TiVo would turn the marketing tables on cable DVRs that now soundly beat it at face value. Paying a one-time $400 fee for stable DVR service with home networking links and a great interface is compelling versus paying $8 or more per month to your probably beloved cable provider for which the only “Lifetime” option is a barrage of sappy women’s TV movies. TiVo will never be able to beat cable and satellite providers at a subscription price war, so why fight one? And when compared to a Media Center PC for $1,500 or more, TiVo would be closer to the price of a far less versatile Media Center Extender.”

As a monthly check writer, I like the idea of no subscription fees but I would worry that it might hurt Tivo more than help it. Some people end up paying their monthly fee because they aren’t sure of Tivo’s long term future, and adding another $200-$300 to the price tag may be enough to turn them from toe-dippers into swimmers in a different pool. If I were a consumer who wasn’t certain about DVR technology but wanted to give it a try, would I pick a $0 cost, no long term commitment monthly fee from a cable provider or a $400 Tivo?

There is no doubt, long ago, my wife and I were reluctant to purchase a Tivo given the monthly fees, uncertain about the value a DVR can have on television viewing. If there were a no cost alternative, I certainly think we would have tried it before purchasing a Tivo.

I’d suggest the opposite position for Tivo: offer a 60 day, full refund, no questions asked, return policy. That would encourage people to try Tivo before waiting in line for their cable or satellite operator. Calling the cable company, let alone being home for a 4 hour block of time so a cable guy can plug-in a DVR, puts cable and satellite operators at a disadvantage. Going into Circuit City or Best Buy is a heck of a lot easier, and with 60 days to try risk free, most people will learn they can’t live without it.

I think consumers are still questioning whether they need a DVR at all, not whether they need the best one out there. The monthly fees can be daunting to a potential buyer, but so is a high initial purchase price. Tivos, once in use, sell themselves so from my point of view, removing the obstacles to getting them in the front door is objective #1. Making it risk-free and “cable guy”-free, seems like an easier sell.

Build Your Own PVR has some interesting things to say about the restrictions starting to appear on DVRs. Both on Tivo and MSO provided DVRs, restrictions on recording video on demand and undoubtedly other content are starting to appear, limiting the time you can leave those recording on your DVR. With more and more restrictions being placed on consumers of retail DVRs, the better it is to just build your own DVR using off the shelf components and software.

The roadblocks to building a DVR system are steadily being removed. DVR software is getting easier and easier to install and use, while at the same time, getting more competitive with products like Tivo. Hardware components like video capture cards are dropping in price, with $70 cards like the Hauppauge 150MCE and AverMedia 1500MCE, as well as bargain basement computer CPUs, motherboards, and hard drives, easily capable of providing the necessary horsepower.

The one remaining roadblock, shared by Tivo unfortunately, is the lack of a standalone solution to HDTV. It’s easy for a HDTV set-top box to record a compressed signal directly to a hard drive, but it’s very difficult to take an uncompressed HDTV signal and compress it and store it to a hard drive. That’s why you only see either over the air HDTV capture cards or HDTV DVRs provided directly from cable and satellite operators. Encoding HTDV signals in real-time is still a tough nut to crack. At this point, that will be the Achille’s heal for homebuilt systems moving forward, particularly as the dubious “broadcast flag” requirement takes effect for hardware manufacturers.

At this point, I’d rather have a good DVR system than HDTV, but that equation will change over time as more and more content is available in HDTV and a clear standard for next generation DVD technology comes out. Hopefully before that tipping point, we’ll see some new affordable HDTV encoders make their debut.