Viva TiVo: Digital video recorders are coming thick and fast

Cable and DTH operators are attracting customers with technology innovations like DVRs

MUMBAI: The epitaph of the video cassette recorder was written a while ago with a digital beam.

But the contraption did have its heyday, when joy was limited by the government to a single television channel: the VCR was then the favourite tool to record many a soap opera.

That habit, however, atrophied with the leap of technology:  re-runs and the availability of entire TV series and movies on compact discs turned the VCR superfluous.

When direct-to-home (DTH) started a couple of years ago, an attempt was made to offer the consumer a recording facility through a cumbersome version of a digital video recorder (DVR). It did not find much resonance.

But, of late, matters have taken a frenetic turn: leading DTH player Dish TV is launching a sleeker, technologically advanced version of the DVR, while rival Tata Sky made an announcement recently that it will introduce PVRs or personal video recorders.

With cable operators and DTH players fighting for every inch, it was not long before Hathway announced its tie-up with the UK-based NDS Technology for providing DVRs to its viewers.

Hathway’s XTV DVR would be the first solution provided through a cable TV service in India. It will be rolled out in the next couple of months. Other cable operators are expected to follow suit.

Hugely popular in the west, DVRs allow the viewer to pause, record, play back, rewind and fast forward television programmes. It allows viewers to record one programme even as they watch another. They can also build and manage their own personal playlist.

R V R Chowdary, managing director, Incable Andhra Ltd, a cable operator in Andhra Pradesh, said the time has come for this technology with so many models of DVRs available.

“All one has to do is install the software in the set-up boxes. Even some television with built-in-television. ”
 
Buyers remain few for now, and are not friendly and receptive in conditional access service areas. CAS is right now mandatory only in limited areas within metros, but the government is considering it expanding the regime to other cities too.

So acceptance for anything such as a DVR would be slow, say cable operators.
 
Also, with DVRs, the signals have to be received at a preset frequency, else picture becomes pixelated. Even weather conditions influence signal quality, said Choudhari.

The cost of this new technology is still not known.

Dish TV officials said the DVRs would more than Rs 10,000.

K Jayaraman, managing director and chief executive officer, Hathway said, “We haven’t decided on the price yet, but it would be in line with DTH services, since the technology is the same, no matter who provides it.”

That would mean each connection with a DVR enabled set-up box would cost Rs 8,000-10,000.

But Vikki Choudhary, managing director of Home Cable Network Ltd  based in Delhi, said  considering that the difference is just about an additional basic software for recording and a storage hard disk of about 80GB, the DVR should not cost more than Rs 2,500-3,000.”

The buzz in the industry is that Anil Ambani, who is launching Big TV direct to home service next month, might bring in TiVO, the hugely popular service in the United States.

A type of DVR, TiVo is more intelligent in the sense that apart from requested programmes, it also records programmes which might match with the user’s interests.

Also, it deletes all advertisements from the recording, giving the viewer a tremendous anti-marketing tool in hand.
 
s_tanvi@dnaindia.net