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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stoctrash who wrote (44079)	8/23/1999 9:39:00 AM
From: J Fieb	Respond to of 50808

The digital video recorder still frightens Hollywood RICHARD DOHERTY techweb.com In the annals of consumer electronics, 1999 will mark the year Americans got to digitally pause their TV entertainment, taking command of their most precious commodity: personal leisure time. TiVo, Replay Networks and Echostar's WebTV-based DishPlayer all grant their owners the ability to control time itself. At least, TV time. Everyone we've talked with just loves the notion of being able to pause a TV program in midsentence to deal with a telephone call, door knock or brief emergency while the program gets temporarily stored on disk. After returning seconds (or tens of minutes later), the viewer just hits the play button, and the program resumes while a multigigabyte disk drive keeps recording, allowing the viewer to sync up with prime time. Alternatively, the viewer can skip through commercials instantly. Most of them realize commercials pay for most broadcast-TV fare and a good chunk of cable but they've always been able to skip them by leaving the room or talking. Now they can zip through 100 times faster than the fastest analog VCR skip feature. The business models for these three machines (more will come) are diverse. Exploiting TiVo's time-shifting features takes a lifetime $199 subscription, or $10 a month. Replay essentially builds the online guide into their price, placing it $200 higher than the entry-level TiVo system. At $1,999, DishPlayer is a bargain, partially subsidized by its Echostar Dish network satellite programming, 56k-modem WebTV service or both. It is the scarcest of the three back-ordered systems. But the very success of these machines has attracted TV and studio attention. Lawsuits filed midmonth by Hollywood and content studios against these pioneering companies also name their investors-truly a black day for visionary technologists and forward-looking investors. So what is wrong here? These are, after all, personal TV record-ers that digitally convert analog video to MPEG-2 video for hard-disk storage. For whatever reasons, too many Hollywood minds see the machines as digital video recorders, which they are not. Not yet. But whisper digital video recording in Hollywood and even great media moguls scowl. They know that digital media can be all too easily redistributed. Yet, the existing time-shift devices keep all their digitized video in the box. The arrival of true digital video recorders will test industry courage. Philips and Pioneer have committed to delivering DVD re-recordable systems. Sony and Panasonic have shown prototypes of hard-disk set-tops that are equally at home time-shifting digital programming or digitizing analog sources. Until more media moguls-and their eager lawyers-better understand the fine differences, look for a bumpy road ahead. RICHARD DOHERTY DIRECTS TECHNOLOGY TESTING AT THE ENVISIONEERING GROUP (RDOHERTY@ENVISIONEERING.NET). Copyright © 1999 CMP Media Inc.