Digital video recorders: monstrous yet cheap

Imagine being able to pause and replay your favourite TV programmes or sequences, skip the boring links, or even shun ads altogether. Sounds impossible? Not in the emerging 'terabyte life' that data companies envision for consumers.

Dramatic increases in storage capacities of re-usable digital storage media coupled with an equally spectacular fall in their prices have brought digital data storage out of the workspace and into the living room.

With the introduction of products like digital video recorders, which convert and record multiple TV channels on to a digital storage device, the age of huge treasure trove of digital data at home may finally be here.

"It's a very new product category," says Ravinder Zutshi of Samsung India, which launched its first high data-storage DVR in the Indian market two months ago, "and it'll take some time to figure out how the market will evolve."

Samsung's recorder, the only one in the market outside Sony's portfolio of expensive offerings, has a storage capacity of 80 GB (gigabytes), which lets an user record around 100 hours of TV programme, which he can manipulate later - much like he does on a DVD.

While 100 hours may sound like a lot, most products that will be launched in the coming months in India, including a model by LG Electronics next month, will boast of four-six times that space.

Similarly, while you can record only one programme at a time on all the existing products, the market by next year is expected to see launches of true 'recording monsters' that can encrypt and store up to half-a-dozen channels, for days.

Driving the growth of the digital video recorder industry have been magnetic-disk-memory manufacturers such as Samsung and Seagate. Taking a cue from the runaway success of the Ipod, which for the first time brought the advantages of large amounts of cheap, erasable digital storage to consumer products, the company is betting big on DVRs to drive growth.

"We expect 2.5 crore (25 million) DVRs to be sold in the world next year?" says Rajesh Khurana, Seagate's country manager for India. Seagate, the world's number one with around 30 per cent market share, has been at the forefront of making high-capacity digital storage cheaper and more efficient. The company was the first in the market with a 500-GB storage disk designed for such consumer products as DVRs.

Indeed, while an average housewife would have hardly qualified as a lucrative 'data consumer' in the olden days, the huge price drops - estimated to be around 50 per cent a year, enabling you to buy twice the memory a year later - have changed the rules of the game.

Memory, the company says, is no longer just for PCs. "CE is the fastest growing segment when it comes to HDDs. Consumer electronic devices with hard drives are gaining market share rapidly... storage has become a critical consideration for people," says Khurana.

While declining storage prices and increasing storage capacities, both estimated at around 50 per cent a year, may make storage-based consumer products cheaper and more efficient, the change is usually slow to reflect in the latter's pricing.

For example, while a 256-GB (300 to 350 hours) hard-disk drive costs around Rs 5,500 in the Indian market, the only DVR with a similar capacity costs exactly ten times as much.

While part of the cost may be due to the high-end features that come bundled with the product (both the Indian variants have built-in DVD writers), prices are expected to tumble in the coming months as more players and models enter the market.

Zutshi, whose company is yet to start promoting the product in India, sums it up: "We'll definitely see the prices falling, but the volumes too have to pick up."