Even in the USA, entertainment country of the world, PVRs (personal video recorder) seem to have a limited appeal – after close to a decade the market is still struggling to reach a 10% market penetration. Of course TiVo is the grandfather of the current wave of developments. Again, the service has appeal, and generates an enormous amount of interest, but in reality the uptake remains far below expectations.

There are a number of reasons for this, the most important factor being that customers don’t like proprietary systems, walled gardens and closed portals. Nobody wants to clutter up the already overcrowded and over-cabled entertainment centre in their living room with the PVRs and set-top boxes that are needed to obtain a more or less full choice of programs and options. In general the womenfolk take a very negative view of all the gear that the men want to bring into the house. And, certainly, the battle for control of the remote also plays a role.

But the second most important issue is either the lack of interesting content or the high cost of good quality content.

Those who buy the DVRs (Digital Video Recorder) often have plasma screens and a whole heap of other ‘stuff’ as well, all competing for the few hours that these people have available to actually watch what has become possible through these boxes. And if they do find the time there is little of interest on the 100 or so channels, and the VoD (Video on Demand) often only has B-rated and outdated material.

Most people do the cost/benefit analysis and, quite rightly, decide against it.

Unless the entertainment industry gets its act together, comes up with hardware standards and makes interesting information (e.g. new movie releases) available at affordable prices there won’t be a lot happening in the area of DVRs.

So this is a bad omen for other VoD/PVR services which are sprouting up around the world. Not that there aren’t a lot of excellent features in PVRs.

In the meantime more and more web-based services are emerging – none yet good enough to replace the traditional entertainment formats, but give it a couple more years and these services will become better. I don’t think there will be enough time for the PVRs to establish themselves in the market as a viable mass market product. Certainly there is a niche, but this niche, also, is set to disappear as soon as the more professional media centers begin to appear, in a couple of years’ time.

We predict that all those existing and new PVR services will compete with each other in the same small niche market of perhaps 10% of the population in these countries. Perhaps this is OK for the smaller players, but it is questionable for the more serious
entertainment companies, and in five years most of us will almost have forgotten about the PVR market. It will become a distant memory, a predecessor of the free and open Internet-based media centre.