According to Investor’s Business Daily, Echostar is set to roll out it’s own portable video player which will integrate with it’s DVR and satellite products. The report mentions that the product called “PocketDish” will be produced by Archos, which already sells similiar products.
I have my doubts that this product will make much of an impact on the market, but it may convince Echostar subscribers who are already in the market for a portable player to purchase PocketDish over some other competitive products to ensure compatibility.
Hat Tip: TVPredictions.com
Want another good reason to build your own DVR? The guys at Build Your Own PVR.com have an article on integrating a Dance Dance Revolution game into a PVR complete with USB enabled Dance Pads (USB enabled Dance Pants sold separately).
Stephen Speicher has an excellent article describing CableCard technology and the minefields that must be navigated before the technology can really be used. It’s definitely a “must read” if you want to understand the technology and why it’s important to the consumer.
A few weeks ago, Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research created a “blog with us” program allowing a few bloggers access to a Jupiter Research report and asked them to post their feedback. Along with Thomas Hawk (his take on the report here), I asked to take a look at an intriguing report entitled “PC and Standalone Digital Video Recorders, Strategies to cope with an Uncertain Market”. After reading the report, I understand why Jupiter Research is a household name to marketers and why their reports are so popular. I’m very thankful to have the opportunity to read this report in particular.
The bottom line of the report, after slicing and dicing the demographics and industry trends of the DVR market, is that there will be significant growth in the DVR market primarily coming from cable and satellite operators who have significant advantages in the marketplace. It’s hard to argue against their logic and data, but I have a feeling one company would undoubtedly like to make them look wrong.
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Build Your Own PVR has created some new digs for their user forum. If you’ve never checked out the BYOPVR user forums, it’s a really great resource for people trying to build their on DVR solution. It’s a good community with a lot of friendly and knowledgeable people, and an excellent option for people trying to get their questions answered.
Mark this under the column “bad news”, Build Your Own PVR.com is reporting that the deadline for cable and satellite operators to include support for CableCard has been extended an additional year (from 2006 to 2007). This is bad news.
Implementation of CableCARD technologies will definitely help create innovation by removing one of the big hurdles for DVR technologies, the set top box, and allow software and hardware companies to create new products without partnering with cable and satellite operators. No doubt that some companies stand to lose power if CableCARD is forced upon them, but in my mind, better to let us, the consumers have the power to choose.
Also via Build Your Own PVR.com, SageTV 2.2.7 has just been released which includes some bug fixes and performance improvements.
Via ThomasHawk.com, EdBott.com has a great comparison of three different DVRs he has in his house: a Series 1 Tivo, a Microsoft MCE computer, and a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD. While some may quibble with some of his results, it’s a really good read comparing the products feature by feature.
No, this isn’t breaking news that Apple bought Tivo. However,there is a new interesting DVR product for the Macintosh called EvolutionTV from Miglia which will be released later this month for $280. Via PVRBlog, the EvolutionTV product will have a USB2.0 connection and have hardware video compression to MPEG2, MPEG4, and Divx.
Competition is always a good thing for consumers and it looks like more and more vendors are starting to see the Mac platform as a good place to create products.
Related Info:
Plextor ConvertX for Macintosh
Build Your Own PVR is reporting that a new version of MediaPortal has been released. I’ve been using an older version for a month or so as a front-end for our video and audio library, and I have it on my to-do list to do a review of it as a full PVR solution.
It’s a nice product that continues to get better and better and the user interface is pretty slick.
