Personal Video Recorders (PVR) remain one of the fastest growing electronic consumer markets since their first introduction in the late 1990’s. Also known as Digital Video Receivers (DVR), this amazing new technology takes video streams and saves them in digital format to a source of memory such as a hard drive. Consumers can then access the video and watch it at a later time. The television viewing community has not been the same since.
This new technology was first started with the widely popular TiVo and ReplayTV brands but quickly branched out to numerous competing brands. There are new features and receivers coming onto the market all the time now, trying to snatch up a piece of the booming digital video recording pie.
The expanding PVR technology has even linked into the computer market allowing consumers to transfer movies from their televisions into the computer to burn onto DVDs. Watching movies and other videos is also possible right on the computer screen, as is scheduling new recordings for a PVR through service provider websites.
From new technology that links television sets with viewer’s computer networks for the ultimate convenience of literally viewing your favorite television shows on the go, to Sony’s new PVR with built in high definition tuners, the world of PVR technology is continually evolving. What was originally a great thing just gets better and better for consumers who no longer have to watch commercials or schedule their nightly activities around primetime television.
The DVR world no longer circulates only around TiVo and ReplayTV. Most cable companies now offer their own DVR box top sets which offer many of the features consumers get from buying expensive boxes for the bigger name companies like TiVo. Actually, TiVo and ReplayTV have scrambled to link up with these cable companies to link their services into the cable company PVR boxes. It’s the best opportunity that companies specializing only in PVR service have to remain alive in a highly competitive market.
The expensive brand services such as TiVo took a direct hit with the emergence of decent quality competition because most consumers do not want to add extra boxes into their living rooms to hook TiVo up with their cable sets. Many are completely satisfied to use the PVRs offered within the cable boxes and save themselves a little money for slighter lesser services. There may be more glitches and set up hassles with the cable company DVRs, thus the highly desired unions between TiVo and ReplayTV with the cable companies.
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