Via TVPredictions.com, DVR sales and usage have increased dramatically over the last year. Last May, 3.6M households had a DVR service while current usage is up to 9.2M. What’s more, in a survey conducted by the same market research group, 89% of DVR users are “very satisfied” or “extremely satisfied” with their DVR.
It looks like the market is doing pretty well.
Via TVPredictions.com, Scientific Atlanta, one of the big manufacturers of DVR and set top boxes for cable operators, saw higher earnings this last quarter based on robust sales of DVRs. According to the AP:
Scientific-Atlanta shipped 449,000 digital video recorders, up 72 percent from a year ago and 13 percent from the first quarter. Of this total, 193,000 were high-definition DVRs, up 29 percent from the first quarter.
200,000 HDTV DVRs is a big number, but I wouldn’t be surprised if by the end of the year, the majority of DVRs sold are of the HDTV variety. If someone buys an HDTV, I don’t think they’ll be satisfied with a DVR that won’t record HDTV. Couple that with Comcast laying down the guantlet with an inexpensive monthly HDTV DVR which must attract some business away from satellite operators, and it’s only a matter of time before the satellite operators follow suit and drop their price on HDTV DVRs as well.
ServerElements.com, the makers of NasLite (TVHarmony Review), a very elegant linux floppy distribution that changes an old clunker PC into a file server, just announced a new NasLite+ which increases throughput and simultaneously serves up files in both ftp, SMB (Windows Shares), NFS (Linux Shares), and HTTP. NasLite+ can be downloaded for $24.95.
The only consideration with the original NasLite and NasLite+ for video libraries is a 4GIG file size limit for SMB (Windows Shares). If you can live with that, $24.95 is a real bargain to turn that old PC into a whirling fast file server.
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.
eMarketer.com has a great article on the current DVR market penetration. According to their data, Time Warner has made the biggest inroads with 16% of cable subscribers using one of their DVRs. That’s triple the number of subscribers that use other DVR brands (read Tivo there). That’s also much higher than other cable operators.
The article has some great charts and is well worth a quick browse.
There’s a good primer in the Chicago Tribune on Motorola’s Broadband Business which includes set-top boxes, cable modems, and DVR technologies. Motorola and Scientific Atlanta are the two behemoths in the set-top box industry.
One interesting tidbit was phone giant Verizon’s investment in this market:
On the other hand, set-top box makers can see opportunity in another market shift–the arrival of phone companies in the TV business.
Phone giant Verizon recently chose Motorola to help build its TV system and supply set-top boxes to its customers.
Verizon plans to spend $2.5 billion by 2006 to run fiber-optic lines directly to customers homes, allowing for television service.
The whole article is a good read.
Is this holiday season going to the year of HDTV? The Washington Times has an article stating that it will be a big year for HDTV. The Consumer Electronics Association predicts 7M HDTV televisions will be sold this season.
That’s still only a 25% of all televisions sales this season, but it’s still a big number. Next holiday season will be the big Kahuna, at least if prices continue to drop.
(Hat Tip: TVPredictions.com)
Ploosh! has an excellent round-up on the Intellectual Property Protection Act (IPPA) making its way through Congress. I need to read up on it more before I can comment on it, but from the things other people are writing, it sounds horrible.
Startup Digeo won a Advanced Media Technology Emmy from the National Television Academy yesterday. It was awarded for Digeo’s Moxi Menu user interface for finding current and upcoming content in an innovative manner.
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Applian Technologies, the guys who created Replay Radio, announced a new product today called Replay Video Suite. Similiar to Replay Radio, which records Internet Radio Streams with Tivo-like functionality, the announcement suggests that Replay Video Suite will include similiar features for streaming video.
Additional Info:
TVHarmony Product Tracker: Replay Radio
