VCRs To Give Way To Disk Drive-Based Personal Video Recorders

The video-cassette recorder (VCR), a household mainstay, has a competitor empowered by hard disk drive (HDD) technology: the personal video recorder, or PVR. Boasting greater user control by filtering content to match individual viewing habits - and recording content directly on to a disk drive - this product is forecasted to grow at a compounded annual rate of 159 percent through 2004, according to research published jointly by TrendFOCUS (www.trendfocus.com), a Palo Alto, California-based market intelligence firm, and the Institute of Information Technology (IIT) of Tokyo, Japan. ""The PVR is an entirely new consumer device,"" states John Donovan, Vice President of TrendFOCUS. ""The ability to record what you want and view it on your own schedule, while skipping commercials and replaying instantly - thanks to the HDD - is a sea [of] change in consumer electronics functionality."" The market data shows that well under 200,000 HDDs were sold into PVR applications in 1999, but demand projections call for more than 13 million annually within three years. ""HDDs are the key ingredient in the PVR,"" adds Donovan. ""In comparison, VCRs have rudimentary capabilities, so consumers are hungry for more features. The volume potential of the PVR market has attracted every HDD manufacturer, ensuring rapid expansion of storage capacity to meet the forecasted demand explosion."" PVRs are shipped generally with 10 hours, 15 hours, 20 hours, and 30 hours of storage - with each hour equivalent to roughly one gigabyte - and the installed base is rapidly filling up the resident HDD with programming and movies. Increasing resolution to more acceptance levels effectively cuts storage capacities in half, meaning that PVR users will fill up existing capacity faster. ""Add-on storage will be available in 2000, so PVR users can continue to store more on external disk drives."" High-definition TV at more than 8GB of storage per hour translates into even faster HDD usage, adds Donovan. These new applications do have challenges to overcome. ""Users don't want noisy devices that wake them up at night,"" added Donovan. ""Since many products such as PVRs and home audio systems will be in bedrooms, HDD vendors are having to design ultra-quiet devices."" Additionally, HDD prices will fall well under $70 and PVR prices will dip below $300 by 2002. Finally, ""cable operators are expected this year to begin offering PVR-like capability on digital set-top boxes. This will force users to make a choice between a cable company-supplied box and one that a user must buy in a store,"" adds Donovan. ""Despite the competitive between PVRs and set-top boxes, unit requirements for HDDs in these applications will reach the tens of millions per year rate by 2003.""