I'm trying to figure out TiVo's place in the future PVR embodied household. As a student of new media adoption and diffusion for the past 25 years, I can say with authority that PVRs will track close to the diffusion curve for the VCR but not as likely for the DVD player's diffusion curve. Why? Cable operators, like PBS, make decisions centrally that can greatly impact the market introduction and take-up of new television services like the PVR.
For those television households that are also cable subscribers, few have an "automatic" option to add or "upgrade" to PVR. With DirecTV's joint marketing of TiVo and especially Echostar's aggressive rollout of its PVR, satellite viewers as a group will experience PVRs before cable subscribers do.
Cable operators are in something of a Catch-22. They want to perfect and roll-out their potentially lucrative video-on-demand services, but this may or may not have anything to do with their need to have a set-top box with a hard drive capable of storing 40 hours or more of television programming. Should cable operators upgrade rapidly to the next generation of set-top boxes with "standard" PVRs, the diffusion curve could be nearly as dramatic as that which we saw for the DVD player. Like DVD players, it is possible that households will adopt more than one PVR which would be great news for the providers of the hardware and software.
Meanwhile, does anyone know what ReplayTV is doing?
2:44:07 PM 
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