Another recordable settop, and sales projections for 1999 and 2000......................................
zdnet.com
New Recordable Set-Top: A Removable Feast
By Karen J. Bannan
April 5, 1999 9:14 AM ET
The recordable set-top box market continues to heat up, with a market entrant promising a product that will deliver a little more flexibility than the competition.
EMC2 International plans to introduce a product later this year that will use Digital Video Disc-Rewritable to receive and record programming and data, according to Will Graven, the company's founder and chairman.
Recordable set-tops previously announced by Replay Networks and TiVo use hard drives built into the boxes to record video and data content. EMC2's approach promises to give consumers a way to use content stored on the set-top in other machines, as is the case with conventional VCRs.
The EMC2 box works with the company's electronic distribution delivery (EDD) service. The service mimics other video-on-demand services and lets users order movies and video for delivery over cable or telephone lines. The current EDD service downloads content to videocassette recorders, company officials say.
The new EMC2 box will allow users to download movies and games and will feature a high-speed data link for the PC, Graven says.
The box is scheduled to start trials with a major telco in June, Graven adds, with mass production and distribution expected by the end of the year.
Set-top boxes with record capabilities are expected to catch on quickly, analysts say. More than 200,000 digital video recorders are likely to ship this year, with the number jumping to 1.2 million next year, according to industry watcher Paul Kagan Associates.
While this bodes well for manufacturers and retail stores, not everyone is looking forward to the arrival of digital video recorders. Since content is recorded digitally, Hollywood studios are worried about piracy. TiVo and Replay avoid pirating problems by limiting the resolution on downloads to archiving devices such as digital videodiscs and VCRs.
The EMC2 product may face opposition from Hollywood, since it can create perfect digital copies. Graven says studios should sell content and movies at a discount using EDD.
Pirating isn't the only issue. Analysts say network broadcasters worry about losing valuable exposure to lead-in programming if consumers set the devices to record specific programs every week.
TiVo is considering the option of forced promos, whereby 15-second commercials designed by broadcasters to showcase other programming would be recorded automatically at the beginning and end of every session, according to Ed MacBeth, TiVo's vice president of marketing and business development. "The biggest challenge the networks are facing is customer attrition," he says. "We can give the networks a showcase for their programming like movie trailers on a video rental, except we'll give the consumer the option to hit thumbs up or thumbs down to record the promoed shows automatically."
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