PurePVR

Dorian Sweet has an entry up over at ClickZ.com where he talks about his experiences with a PVR / DVR. His initial reaction was one that I have seen quite a few times: you hate the PVR / DVR for a week because you can’t quite get it to work and then one day you realize that you can’t live without it.

The breadth of the article goes on to focus about the advertising model (or lack of) for the whole PVR / DVR market. As Dorian put it, ‘most people are programmed to avoid any TV-based ad’ which is something that I think holds quite true. From my younger days when people would tape shows on their VCRs, you wouldn’t be caught dead watching the commercials. With technologies like TiVo and do it yourself solutions like MythTV, skipping commercials is not new – it’s just easier now.

Anyways, Dorian reiterates what has been said quite a few times already: unless advertisers change their model, TV advertising will dwindle.

Technorati Tags: PVR, DVR, TiVo, MythTV

As a follow up to the CNet article I posted about yesterday, Marguerite wrote her own follow up with regards to the problems she was having with Time Warner. After getting a third box, it turned out that the issue wasn’t so much the DVR as much as it was the signal strength coming in over her cable line.

For anyone who uses a lot of bandwidth through their cable provider (think Internet service + HDTV) you may want to check out this story, its good food for thought.

Technorati Tags: PVR, DVR

Marguerite Reardon has a write up over at CNet where she describes her love/hate relationship with her DVR (a Scientific Atlanta 8000). Her biggest complaint is probably one that is shared by many – too much complexity for the average user.

At the start she realized that her DVR stopped recording her shows that were set to record for the season (she already had Time Warner replace her first DVR). This incident then got the ball rolling on the idea that more of the complex operations (scheduling, storage, rebooting, etc) would be better for consumers if the cable companies could do it all on their end (sort of like what Cablevision was trying to do with their network DVR).

In an ideal world, PVR/DVR use would be as easy as pie. Sure, some systems are close (TiVo comes to mind), but all too often features take priority over usability. In a case like this, more does not necessarily mean better, especially if more means more things that can go wrong.

Technorati Tags: PVR, DVR, TiVo

Michelle Quinn from the San Jose Mercury News wrote a piece in which she brings to light the plight that faces networks when it comes to advertising revenue and PVRs / DVRs. The article mentions some of the recent ‘DVR Ready’ commercials that have aired (ones from KFC, GE & Coke) and she also goes on to discuss new advertising approaches from TiVo (such as watching commercials for a product that is currently being featured on the show you are watching).

Although she doesn’t really mention any solutions to the problems, she does have a great quote from Don King (no, not that one), the group director for Sprite, Coca-Cola, North America: “There hasn’t been a technology invented that can’t be leveraged for a marketing tool”. Very true (and slightly scary).

It seems to me that it is just a matter of time until one network gets things right. They have to realize that they can’t destroy TiVo’s and other PVR / DVR devices. They have to find a way to embrace the technology, maybe even find incentives for people to not skip their commercials. Once one network gets it down right, the other big ones will hopefully follow.

Technorati Tags: PVR, DVR, TiVo, advertising, Coke, KFC, GE

I’ve decided to start a new category called ‘PVRs & DVRs In The Media’. This category will focus primarily on what journalists and reporters are saying about the PVR / DVR revolution that is upon us.

Over the past few months I have started seeing more and more reports on PVR / DVR devices (whether on TV, the internet or in print) and almost all of them have the reporter sold on the product by the end of the column/segment. I’ve decided to start archiving these when I can find them if for no other purpose, at least so I can watch how the number of stories increases over time.

Back on Thursday Jim Rossman from the Dallas News wrote a piece titled ‘Here’s the magic behind pausing live TV’. In it he went on to explain in layman’s terms how DVRs perform their ‘magic’, mainly by buffering content. In the article he mentions TiVo by name and talks about the old favourite of pausing the first 20 minutes of an hour long show that you can watch it and skip all of the commercials. He also gives out the great advice to his readers that they should visit www.tivocommunity.com to learn more about the potential of their devices. If you are going to buy a PVR / DVR, please learn all of the uses – you’ll appreciate it.

Technorati Tags: PVR, DVR, TiVo