DVRs bloom with HD, new functions

[Gregg Lengling]

The cable industry's big push into digital video recorders will produce a new crop of set-tops ready for harvest in the coming year, giving MSOs their pick of new varieties heavy on high-def, but also sprouting multi-room networking functions and even optional CD burners.

With one notable exception, the trend among box makers is to concentrate on combination HD/DVR digital set-tops. That includes Pace Micro Technologies, which is planning to come to the U.S. market late this year with an HD/DVR box. David Novak, Pace's director of marketing, says operators are looking for the extra DVR hook to reach valuable, higher-end HD customers in the coming year or two.

"DVR is going to become mainstream in that time frame as people start to pick up those HD sets, but most cable operators view it as a long-term investment in those customers," he says.

It also future-proofs the operator, so "when we get our HD set, they can activate that without having to do a truck roll or switch a box out or anything like that," notes Bernadette Vernon, director of strategic marketing for Motorola Broadband.

The one exception to this strategy is Scientific-Atlanta Inc., which is offering HD and SD DVR versions. S-A has shipped a little more than 800,000 two-tuner Explorer 8000 units to date. In December, S-A started shipping its Explorer 8000HD to Time Warner Cable.


S-A sees slightly different consumer studies that show DVR's appeal is beyond just the upper end cable subscriber, according to Dave Davies, vice president of strategic marketing for subscriber networks. S-A's surveys indicate the average income for a DVR home ($66,000) isn't that much different from that of the average digital TV household ($65,000).

"What we are finding is it has very broad-based appeal–very high ratings from households that are under $30,000 in income," Davies says. "Those are not the households that are buying expensive high-definition television sets today."

Cable operators could indeed choose to future-proof themselves by offering HD/DVR boxes, but there is literally a price to pay in added HD tuners, expanded memory, digital connectors and processing power and, most importantly, heftier hard drives, he adds.

"So, a very large percentage of the households today that have taken DVR don't have HD televisions, and for some time to come, a very large percentage of those won't have HD televisions," Davies says. "It is very expensive to have only one HD model deployed to every subscriber."

Record in HD
S-A is in agreement with the other major box makers in fielding HD/DVR boxes that can record in the HD format. The box makers say that is important for subscribers, who want the same quality in recording that they saw with the original.

"As a consumer, you don't want to know that I can do one thing with HD and another thing with SD," says Haig Krakirian, vice president of software engineering for Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. "A TV show is a TV show is a TV show, and you want to know that anything I record will record and there are no concerns or limitations."

But recording in HD does mean disk size must rise, given that the content will require roughly five times the storage space. Pioneer's first DVR unit, the Voyager 4000 HD/DVR, will come with a 120 Gigabyte disk drive when it debuts in a little more than a month. That compares to the 80 GB drive standard among SD DVRs.

Still, space will be at a premium, so Pioneer's box software includes automatic overwrite for older stored programs unless the subscriber marks them for permanent storage. That cuts down on the need for the subscriber to be a database manager.

"We sort of hide the concept of the disk is full, and we don't force the users to figure out 'OK, how do I manage my disk space?'" Krakirian says. "We make it much more transient, and seamless, in that people watch and record, and they will have time to watch it before it gets erased for a new show that is coming in."

Meanwhile, S-A's new Explorer 8000HD set-top sports a 160 GB drive– double that of its SD 8000 sibling. S-A is working on software to maximize the disk space, but it also is counting on disk drive prices to drop.

"One of the things that we are following closely is the cost curve of hard drives, and hard drive prices," Davies says. "And as they continue to come down it is going to become more and more affordable to put in a 150 Gig and a 160 Gig hard drive for SD households over the next 12 to 24 months."

Motorola DVR moves from 'Pause' to 'Play'
More than six months after it began shipping, Motorola Broadband's first DVR box, the DCT-6208, is finally landing in subscriber homes.
Insight Communications LLC started deploying the combination DVR/HD box in 12 HD markets in December, and Comcast Cable is expected to roll it out any day now in its Richmond, Va. and Washington, D.C. systems. Comcast plans to expand that to other HD markets through the first quarter and into the second, according to a spokesman.

The six-month stretch between shipment and deployment can be blamed on software snarls, according to Vernon.

During the normal integration process with Comcast, "We discovered some new things, they discovered some things working with the software and all," she says. "So it may have caused a slight delay there."



Motorola also is working on a dual-tuner version, which would allow subscribers to record two shows simultaneously.

But Motorola isn't the only one to face a DVR delay. Pace Micro Technology has yet to field a DVR box, and that delay in part has to do with the British box maker's dissatisfaction with silicon for low-bit-rate compression. Plans are to launch an HD/DVR box by the end of the year, according to Novak.

"We're big believers in getting the most of your dollars spent in hard drive capacity," Novak says. "We are also big believers in the long-term future of low-bit-rate compression on the network itself, for being able to pass HD content and on-demand content at lower bit rates. So we do see that as being the next generation, being a necessity in set-tops going forward." –KB
 

External hard drive?
But a bigger hard drive may not be the only storage option. Box makers, including Motorola and S-A, are now exploring the idea of an external hard drive, giving customers a place to permanently store recorded material.

S-A demo'd just such a drive at January's Consumer Electronics Show. Linked to an Explorer 8000, the 80-GB external unit would use S-A's PowerKey encryption to lock in the content, so it could only be accessed through the main box and displayed on the subscriber's TV.

One MSO that is listening at least to that idea is Time Warner Cable.

"We are studying the feasibility with S-A and others to see if offering customers an external hard drive would be attractive to them and make economic sense for us, and address any potential copyright issues," says spokesman Keith Cocozza.

Meanwhile, Pace and Pioneer are dabbling with the option of adding a read-writeable DVD player. Pace is looking at that as a feature for its upcoming DVR, while Pioneer has already committed it as an option to its next-generation Voyager 5000 HD/DVR, scheduled for debut in 2005.

"That's a way for a user to archive off their shows that they really want to keep," says Dan Ward, director of marketing for Pioneer Electronics. "We've done a little bit of consumer research and we've found that they are willing to use a box or a service like that–if they can download or archive their shows, they are happy. They would rather download them than lose them completely."

That could raise flags with content providers worried about pirate versions of their valued HD content, so Pioneer has designed the DVD burner to record only in SD.

"Until everyone is comfortable with making true copies of HD content, downsampling to SD is a good compromise," Krakirian says. "From the consumer perspective they have the option to have removable media and get their recording to the archive–they've been doing that with VCRs for a long time and that's something we know consumers like to have."

Multi-room
In the meantime, also look for DVR boxes with multi-room networking capabilities. That includes Motorola's BMC 9022 DVRs, co-developed with Digeo Inc.

Thus far, Charter Communications Inc. and Adelphia Communications have put down orders for the box, along with its single-TV sibling, the BMC 9012.

In the meantime, don't count out the idea of a DCT-6000 series with multi-room DVR functions.

 
Scientific-Atlanta's Explorer 8000HD
"We have not announced anything yet, but yes, it is very likely," Vernon says. "We see that same demand, and are looking to have a product to respond to that."

S-A demo'd the Explorer 8300 multiroom DVR box at CES, and has scheduled it for a summer rollout. Using pumped up processor power, the 8300 will serve up content to Explorer 2100 and 3200 boxes over the home's coax wiring, using QAM in a frequency higher than the MSO's active spectrum.

"So we are taking the content, upconverting it to a frequency above the cable plant, digitally encrypting it and then transporting that content to other televisions," Davies says. "So we are telling the existing digital set-top boxes in the home, which do require a software upgrade–to simply tune to a specific frequency and then decrypt that content."

Because the box sends the content to the smaller units with the PowerKey encryption intact, the system also avoids problems with digital rights management, Davies notes.

"Essentially, we turn an Explorer 8300 into a mini-headend," he says.

[RogerBrown]

It should be noted that this story was written by Karen Brown of CED magazine and that the story is copyrighted by CED and Reed Business Information.

CED can be accessed at //www.cedmagazine.com.

--Roger Brown
Publisher/Editorial Director
CED magazine

[Gregg Lengling]

Apparently the way I linked to this story was not giving me the entire site and information and I apologize for the lack of credit.  This will not happen again.  I personally sent Mr. Brown an email to this effect.