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Saturday, April 03, 2004 |
This will be a major surprise if it succeeds. It would be unprecedented.
How many DVDs are played on video game machines today?
Does anyone know? From: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104
STORY =/www/story/03-25-2004/0002135071&EDATE= ONTARIO, Calif., March 25 /PRNewswire/ --
Apex Digital Inc., America's number-one seller of DVD players, has finalized
the specifications of its revolutionary ApeXtreme (pronounced Apex Extreme)
DVD player/Personal Video Recorder/PC game console, it was announced today
by company President Steve Brothers. At the heart of the system will be AMD's
AthlonXP2000+processor chip; video will be supplied by NVIDIA's nForce2 IGP
graphics processor; all of which will be integrated on a motherboard produced
by Biostar. The ApeXtreme will also utilize NVIDIA's GeForce4 MX graphics card
to supply smooth, crisp graphics. Additionally, the company has added Personal
Video Recording (PVR) functionality to the device since it was originally
unveiled at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES). "By creating the first
game console that will play PC games and combining it with a full-featured DVD
player and a Personal Video Recorder, Apex is defining a new product category,"
said Brothers. "And just like with all of our other products, we want to provide
the best technology at a price that makes sense to the average consumer. Working
with AMD, NVIDIA and Biostar allows us to do that."
11:48:01 PM 
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Public domain article: another angle on the CTAM study.
Must-Schedule TV: Study Finds Appointment Viewing Still Prevalent By
Staff Writer
Thursday, April 01, 2004
Appointment television is alive and well in most TV viewers' schedules, as the
wider appearance of digital video recorders hasn't yet changed habits.
That revelation is among the findings of a new study, "Tracking the Evolving Use of Television and Its Content," released Tuesday afternoon by Cable &Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) and Lieberman Research Worldwide. More than 64 percent say they knew what they were going to watch when they sat down in front of the television. Forty-eight percent of viewing is made up of television shows that viewers regularly watch, and 53 percent of viewers say they like to stick with their favorite program and not switch to another while their favorite is on.
"Though we are starting to see changes in the way people are deciding what to watch on television, it's surprising how much 'appointment viewing' to specific programs continues to dominate TV consumption," Michael Pardee, vice president of research at Scripps Networks and chairman of the CTAM Research Subcommittee that commissioned the research, said.
More than 55 percent of those surveyed said that they turned to their favorite channels to see what was on the evening before being asked. The favorite channels remain top of mind, but half of all viewers said they had watched a new channel within the past year.
The study is also meant to track viewing behavior in the future to determine the impact of high-definition television, DVRs, and other technology on the television viewing experience. Forty-five percent of the people surveyed said they're familiar with high-definition TV; two in 10 say they want to buy an HD-capable set.
The survey was conducted October through December among focused groups in the Philadelphia area and through telephone interviews with 1,201 adults. |
11:29:27 PM
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Highly Disciplined Research Shows True Nature of New Media Landscape
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 31 /PRNewswire/ -- Amidst 50th birthday celebrations of the color TV and swirling rumors of the death of traditional television, CTAM (Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing) has taken responsibility for clearing up the muddied and sometimes contradictory picture of today's media consumer. The organization and its research partner, Lieberman Research Worldwide, have unveiled the first in a series of carefully-controlled looks at how consumers watch TV and use new media
-- setting the stage for tracking and predicting changes in behavior over the next several years. The study, Tracking the Evolving Use of Television and Its Content, is an unbiased "screen grab," designed to answer some of the most critical questions facing the cable business, as it wrestles with providing both traditional and new media services and content.
MORE at http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&;STORY=/www/story/03-31-2004/0002138693&EDATE=
11:03:10 PM
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DVR Service Allows Customers to Record and Pause Live Television and Is
Another Example of Comcast Giving Customers More Choice and Control
WASHINGTON, March 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Comcast today announced the launch of
its Digital Video Recorder (DVR) service throughout the Washington
Metro/Virginia Region. DVR service will allow Comcast Digital Cable customers
to easily pause and rewind live television at the touch of a button and record
their favorite television programs without tapes, timers or a VCR. In
addition, Comcast's DVR service is equipped with a new feature that gives
customers with high-definition-capable TV sets the ability to record high-
definition programming. The Washington Metro/Virginia Region is the first
Comcast market in the country to have access to this innovative new
technology.
DVR is available to Comcast Digital Cable customers in Montgomery and
Prince George's Counties in Maryland, Alexandria, Arlington, Prince William
County and Reston in Northern Virginia, as well as the District of Columbia.
Some of the innovative features and functionality of Comcast's DVR Service
include:
-- Easily record television shows so customers can watch them when it is
convenient.
-- Pause, fast-forward and rewind recorded television programs so that
customers never miss an important moment in the show.
-- Record high-definition programming so that customers can watch shows
on their schedule and still record the same crystal-clear picture
quality.
-- Record one episode or the entire season of a favorite television show.
-- Easy-to-navigate DVR menu that explains step-by-step how to utilize
all of the exciting features.
-- DVR customers can save up to 30 to 50 hours of standard programming on
their digital set-top box or up to seven hours of HD programming.
-- "Instant Replay" button that sports fans or television viewers can use
if they miss a big play or an important punch line of a sitcom.
10:50:55 PM
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Klopfenstein: If you are keeping up with this blog, then you know omniscient observers like me (who took the time to see what TiVo was really all about ;-) were not persuaded by naysayes like this observer from just over one year ago. Oddly enough, Mike Ramsey of TiVo was already on what I suspect is a reasonable comparison: DVD player growth. The interesting question to me is how DVD-R might or might not confuse potential DVR adopters, although TiVo smartly has already announced a combo TiVo/DVD-R. Embracing new technology like the DVD-R is a far better strategy than trying to dismiss it (as the advertising industry wanted to in the 2000-2002 period). From the public domain http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/chi-030317dvr,1,952050,print.story:
Mass rollout of DVR stuck on pause
By Michael A. Hiltzik
Los Angeles Times
March 17, 2003
Three or four years ago, in the heyday of gotta-have-it technology, scarcely a week would pass without a clutch of Silicon Valley executives trooping through our offices to demonstrate one or another hot new gizmo. In all that time, only once did I ever see something I thought would take the world by storm.
That device was a DVR, or digital video recorder.
It worked by diverting a TV signal onto a hard disk, like the one inside the average personal computer, before passing the image to the TV screen. This process enabled viewers to exploit the disk's storage capacity to view live TV with VCR-style pause, rewind and replay functions -- and, given sufficient delay, to skip obliviously through commercials, all without videotape. The electronic services designed to work with the boxes also allowed viewers to schedule off-hour recording of shows with unprecedented ease.
It was the greatest thing I'd ever seen demonstrated in an office cubicle, a device you had to check out only once to understand its potential to revolutionize the television experience.
At the time, the technology was being developed by two competing companies, TiVo Inc. and ReplayTV Inc., that harbored great hopes for it. (The latter had given us the demonstration.) As a ReplayTV executive told me then: "Five years from now, all TV will be watched from a hard disk."
This forecast sounded plausible at the time not only because we were in an era when the spread of great technology seemed to operate under its own organic logic, but also because the device was so compelling. Television network executives, contemplating a world where viewers could zip through commercials with the flick of a remote, talked about DVRs the way music executives would soon be talking about Napster: with utter fear.
Yet here we are in 2003, the executive's prediction has only a year or so to run, and it must be said that the revolution is way behind schedule. Far from being an indispensable household appliance, the DVR remains a device of cliquish partiality.
The best estimates are that over the last four years, only about 1.7 million DVRs have been sold to U.S. consumers (out of 105 million TV-viewing households). Digital video recorders are not exactly a flop, but the number of users has probably failed to keep pace with the number of newspaper stories that quoted TV executives fretting that mass commercial-skipping might destroy the business model of broadcast television.
The purest picture of DVR growth comes from the financial records of TiVo, the Alviso, Calif.-based company that markets the leading player and earns most of its revenue by charging a subscription fee for its programming guide and other services delivered through its box. (ReplayTV, now owned by Santa Clara, Calif.-based audio-video gadget maker Sonicblue Inc., has about one-sixth of TiVo's installed base.)
This month TiVo released its 2002 results, showing that it had quintupled revenue, cut its chronic losses roughly in half and registered a 64% gain in subscribers, to 624,000. TiVo presented these results cheerily, but fourth-quarter subscriber growth came in almost 10% shy of what investors expected, and TiVo's stock price fell sharply.
The figures also disclosed a sharp slowdown in the rate of subscriber growth; the gain in 2002 was less than half the 154% surge the year before, although the absolute numbers were about the same. Among other things, the performance renewed questions about how long TiVo may last as a going concern, even if DVRs eventually become as common as, well, television sets.
The sluggish diffusion of TiVo machines and other DVRs makes for a worthwhile study in what it takes to get even a great technology into consumers' hands. Technology gurus tell us that to spread rapidly, a new technology has to do something new at an acceptable price, or take on a tedious task more efficiently or cheaply than existing solutions.
Sometimes the process looks easy: Consider the DVD player, which hit the 1.7-million mark in sales (i.e., where DVRs are today) within 24 months of its introduction in 1997. There are now an estimated 45.5 million DVD players in U.S. homes, and they continue to sell at an average rate of 1.7 million units per month.
It's only fair to note that Michael Ramsay, the affable Scot who is TiVo's chairman and chief executive, contends that this is a false comparison. The notion that the rollout of DVRs has been sluggish, he says, is a bum rap. "It's wrong to think this is going slowly," he says. "It's actually going really well. But we're conditioned to think that if a product category is hot, it will take off like a bat out of hell."
The pace of DVR sales is deceptive, according to Ramsay, because they are still relatively expensive contraptions; even the cheapest TiVo can cost nearly $600, including subscription fees. (These run $12.95 a month or $299 for the life of the unit.) On a kind of dollar-per-sales-rate basis, he contends, the devices are matching the growth rate of DVDs.
"If you line up the historical data on DVRs," Ramsay tells me, "you'll find they're tracking DVDs almost exactly at the same price points." In other words, DVDs sold at the same rate as TiVos back when they, too, cost $600. By that measure, he argues, TiVo is a success.
"Never in my wildest dreams did I think we'd be at this stage with this technology" by now, Ramsay says.
But such a buoyant assessment brings up some issues that go to the heart of TiVo's quandary. To start with, DVD players are easy to comprehend ("They play movies that look really good!"), easier to operate than VCRs and, most important, cheap. The DVD player never spent much time at the $600 price point; I've seen perfectly serviceable units recently advertised for $49.99.
TiVo has none of these qualities. Although it can do things that everyone appreciates in the abstract -- such as pausing, rewinding and one-touch recording of live TV -- the power of these functions is hard to communicate by word alone. As any DVR owner knows (and I am writing from personal experience), you can talk about its virtues with the zeal of a biblical prophet, but your listeners will gaze at the ceiling and suck at their teeth in pure apathy. It isn't until you set somebody in front of one for an hour or two that they're hooked.
Then there's the price. Hard as it is to convince a friend that it's a pleasure to pause and rewind live TV, try adding: "And it costs only 600 bucks!"
That price is an obstacle comes as no surprise to Ramsay. Back in 1999, when TiVo first started shipping units, he told me that he thought the DVR would not become a mass-market technology until it was priced as a "$100 add-on," meaning an enhancement to satellite or cable set-top boxes. The closest it has come is the DirecTV satellite service, which offers TiVo as an enhancement to its receiver box for an additional $199.
"It's still a premium-priced buy," Ramsay acknowledges.
In the end, however, the main obstacle to the DVR's popularity may be the structure of the U.S. television industry, which is dominated by cable operators protecting regional monopolies. TiVo has tried to interest cable companies in adding its technology to their set-top boxes, but with notably little success.
Cable companies are typically cash-strapped and investment-averse. As competitors they strictly play defense; laying out millions to launch a technology for which customers are not clamoring -- and sharing the revenue with another company -- is simply not in their culture.
The converse accounts for why the most determined purveyors of DVR technology are satellite-TV companies, which are trying to use enhanced viewer functions to pry customers loose from cable. Roughly half of TiVo's subscribers buy its service via Hughes Electronics Corp.'s DirecTV, while EchoStar Communications Corp.'s Dish Network has installed an estimated 700,000 of its own DVRs in customers' homes.
DVR partisans still believe that infiltrating the cable universe is the key to finally reaching the technology's potential. TiVo's Ramsay says he has lately detected a little more interest among cable operators in TiVo's potential to deliver programs, promotions and other content directly to user boxes for their off-schedule viewing (complete with pause, rewind and fast-forward).
Others who have long predicted that DVRs would flood the marketplace are convinced that we are finally on the edge of the water. Think about this: It's possible, just possible, that five years from now, all TV will be watched from a hard disk.
6:11:45 PM
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Klopfenstein: Always nice to include the thoughts of others. This was published in the public domain at http://www.skyreport.com/viewskyreport.cfm?ReleaseID=1264#Story5 and dated 3 December 2003:
"OUTSIDE THE BOX: TiVo and the Future of TV"
"By Bruce Leichtman
"Last month TiVo celebrated surpassing 1 million subscribers, and achieving its most successful quarter on record. These announcements, along with the long-awaited emergence of the digital video recorder (DVR) category as a whole, appear to be indications that the company is finally prepared to fulfill its goal of revolutionizing TV. However, these achievements may ultimately prove to be but Pyrrhic victories.
"By the end of 2003, there will be approximately 3 million DVR subscribers in the U.S. While this is not close to the widely unrealistic expectations that many held for the category, it does represent more than twice the number at the start of the year. This is the first clear indication that the category is beginning to blossom.
"Yet, well over three-quarters of DVR subscribers do not "own" a DVR.
"Since its inception, TiVo has done an exemplary job of building a brand – even to the point of making "Tivoed" an adjective heard in some circles – and establishing the groundwork for a new category. Yet, the challenges that the company has encountered in growing a business stem from the fact that consumers (who are interested in the concept DVRs) perceive it to be a service rather than a product.
"The bulk of growth in the DVR category is not as a stand-alone product, but rather from being bundled as a feature in DBS and cable set-top boxes. In nearly five years, TiVo has 526,000 stand-alone box subscribers. This is less than the number of DVR-enabled cable set-top boxes that Scientific-Atlanta shipped in the past five quarters. In addition, TiVo was not the first DVR provider to announce one million subscribers, since DBS provider EchoStar made that announcement in September. (Neither EchoStar nor Scientific-Atlanta use TiVo in their DVRs.)
"In addition, of the 209,000 net new additional subscribers to TiVo in the third quarter of 2003, over 70 percent came from DirecTV. In total, 48 percent of TiVo's subscribers now come from DirecTV, a figure that has rapidly increased from 37 percent at the beginning of 2003. TiVo is clearly becoming increasingly reliant on DirecTV for its growth. With Rupert Murdoch soon taking charge of DirecTV, this unbalanced relationship may become more precarious.
"TiVo's Web site boldly proclaims, "We've pioneered an exciting new category that will forever change the way the world watches TV." For nearly five years the company has journeyed through the desert leading the minions in this ambitious undertaking, and the promised land is now almost in sight. As this brave new world continues to take shape, how this will change the TV watching world, and what role TiVo will ultimately play, remains unclear.
"Bruce Leichtman is president and principal analyst for Leichtman Research Group, which can be found on the Web at: http://www.leichtmanresearch.com. His e-mail is: Bruce@LeichtmanResearch.com."
2:24:39 PM
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Klopfenstein: What a difference a year makes! After the ReplayTV debacle (including the death of its savior, SonicBlue) and doomsayers for TiVo, spring 2004 is going down as the "whoops! We changed our minds!" Let the record show that my students learned in no uncertain terms that TiVo represents the most revolutionary new television technology since satellite delivered programming hit the cable industry (and the impact od DVRs will come much more quickly than the slow and deliberate diffusion of satellite cable television channels). IDC (who is underestimating the diffusion rate for DVRs, see my archive) public has released more
According to canada.com:
In the United States, DVR adoption has become a function of the heated competition between cable and satellite television providers. Initially, satellite providers emphasized DVR offerings to combat cable televisions' investment in video-on-demand (VOD), and now cable is being forced to respond. "This strategy has done more in one year to advance the understanding and acceptance of DVRs than standalone options, such as TiVo, had done in the previous five years," Ireland added.
The DVR market in Western Europe, although not quite as aggressive, closely resembles that of the United States, relying heavily on pay TV providers to advance DVR penetration. In Japan, however, things are quite different as DVR/DVD-recorders are igniting the market. These combo devices will ship 11.3 million units worldwide in 2008, with nearly 80% of the shipments happening outside the United States. Standalone DVR shipments will decline toward the second half of the forecast period as these devices increasingly add DVD recording functionality. In fact, the DVR/DVD-recorder segment will continue to grow and account for nearly 40% of the entire worldwide DVR market in 2008. Key Findings
-- At the end of 2003, there were 3.2 million U.S. DVR households
-- Despite its strong brand, which is virtually synonymous with
the DVR product category, TiVo owns only 39% of the U.S.
market
-- Unlike in the U.S., DVR/DVD-recorder devices have ignited the
Japanese market
-- In the U.S. and Japan, DVR will increasingly incorporate
high-definition (HD) capabilities
-- Storage capacity will become more important as more DVR users
wish to build larger and larger libraries of content [I do not endorse this product, however, to judge for yourself, call IDC Sales at 508-988-7988 or email sales@idc.com].
1:17:04 PM
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Much of my research has turned on understanding why some new media succeed and others fail. An example is the RCA Selectavision videodisc player of the 1980s. Think a major company with big bucks matters? You know it doesn't. RCA wrote off half a billion dollars when it discontinued the Selectavision videodisc player in 1984. What went wrong? Well, RCA's enormous marketing and advertising expenses couldn't convince people to get it. RCA's laudable but largely irrelevant reason for marketing the RVA Selectavision videodisc player was (cue the Star Spangled Banner) to bring back a consumer electronics product back to the USA after we gave away videotape technology to Japan (well, Ampex did). See Klopfenstein, 1985). (By the way, it didn't help that RCA had a tiny catalog of movies and old NBC shows from which to choose.)
Anyone remember the IBM PC Jr.? Not only did IBM have not experience marketing a product to a home user, but they deliberately cripled the machine so it could not compete with its business PCs. Anyone remenber how Microsoft bought an exciting new company called WebTV and pounded it into its grave? The lesson is that Microsoft does <i>not</i> have history on its side. In addition, it's not afraid to walk away from products like WebTV. So, Microsoft might have been better off following the original antitrust agreement that the Bush administration abandoned. Perhaps a separate Microsoft company would have a better chance at home entertainment.
Oh, by the way, we "all" use Microsoft products, but I haven't seen any surveys that show Microsoft users like it. If using Microsoft products is about as welcome but unavoidable as death and taxes, don't expect the Microsoft name to matter much to consumers choosing home networking video products.
From: http://www.hoovers.com/free/news/detail.xhtml?ArticleID=NR200404023300.2_56f50069336d847f
Can you characterize the importance of the licensing deal with Major League Baseball and how that plays into your long-term strategy with the newly launched MSN Video?
It's a great way to aggregate a lot of additional consumer interests and time on the MSN network, which will increase our traffic, reaching and engaging more people.
We also sell online advertising and will have the rights in this deal to sell all online advertising throughout all the MLB video broadcasts. Broadband video advertising is one of the things that will kick off the next wave of brand advertising. So we now have a very unique property to go talk to Fortune 500 accounts about doing brand advertising in a way you cannot do anywhere else.
12:44:57 PM
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© Copyright 2004 Dr. Bruce Klopfenstein.
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