New video recorders allow users to send programs over the Net to pals

01/17/2002

By DOUG BEDELL / The Dallas Morning News

Ask anyone who has bought a personal video recorder – one of those hard-drive-equipped replacements for VCRs – and you'll probably hear, "It changed the way I watch television."

The early models of ReplayTV, UltimateTV, and TiVo have made a slow, steady advance in consumer popularity for their ability to store massive amounts of television shows and to skip quickly through commercials on playback.

Now, Sonicblue (www.sonicblue.com), ReplayTV's new owner and an innovator in home entertainment, is shaking up this young manufacturing sector with an imaginative box that allows users to share programs over the Internet.

The pricey ($700 to $2,000) Sonicblue ReplayTV 4000 began filling online orders in November despite a lawsuit from Disney and Paramount, which fear it will create a Napster-like distribution of digitally recorded content.

Since you must know someone else with a ReplayTV 4000 in order to share movies or shows, that prospect is unlikely, analysts say. As shown to a steady throng at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the interface allows you to distribute recordings to only 15 acquaintances who are similarly equipped.

What really has Hollywood types worried is that the ReplayTV 4000 opens the door to Internet-delivered video content, says Andrew Wolfe, Sonicblue's chief technical officer. With boxes such as this, users could begin ordering video on demand directly from untraditional providers.

"They're worried about the fact that it's not under their control," Mr. Wolfe said.

Ostensibly, that kind of customized programming would be cheaper and more varied than current pay-per-view options available to cable and satellite subscribers. The model for television content delivery could be upset and reorganized, Mr. Wolfe says.

Whether that becomes reality will depend on how consumers respond to the broadband-equipped set-top boxes. Sonicblue will say only that orders thus far "have exceeded our expectations." Broadband – high-speed cable and DSL Internet connections – still reaches only about 10 million American households. And personal video recorder units have not sold as well as their creators had predicted.

However, high-end entertainment buffs embraced the early models because hard drive prices made them costly to build at home. With hard drive prices falling dramatically, so have PVR prices. Many analysts believe 2002 will be the year that holdouts start junking their aging VCRs for these digital alternatives.

The ReplayTV platform has pioneered several enticing PVR features. Previous models, for example, introduced the 30-second, skip-ahead remote control button and a Web interface that allows users to easily to set up and erase recordings.

With ReplayTV 4000, Sonicblue continues its relentless technological push.

With a cable or DSL connection, the ReplayTV sheds the telephone connection that other PVR boxes require for software upgrades and downloads of weekly program guides.

Each box has a unique number, much like a telephone number. If you know another person's ReplayTV 4000 number, you can enter it into an address book within the on-screen guide. With two clicks of the remote, you can select a recorded movie and send it to anyone in your address book.

The process is slow, even with the broadband connection. A movie recorded at high quality may take hours to make it to the recipient's hard drive. But, judging from the buzz at the electronics show, it is a feature that may strike a chord with consumers.

"The reason we're doing this is that our research shows people have personal video on boxes they wanted to share with friends and family," says Mr. Wolfe. "They also want to attach a show to recommend it to others, and that seems like a reasonable thing to do."

This newest ReplayTV model ranges in price based on the hard drive size. The $700 model holds about 40 hours of programming. The $2,000 model can record and store about 320 hours of programming at standard quality. To keep track of all that digital content, the on-screen guide allows users to set up folders, making organization easy.

Connect two ReplayTV 4000s to the home network, and users in one room can play content stored inside units elsewhere in the house.

This model also introduces Commercial Advance, an option that allows users to automatically skip through commercials. The box detects gaps that preface and terminate advertising in a program, then plays back only the program when ordered to do so.

As a bonus for high-end videophiles, the ReplayTV 4000 can now output a signal for high-definition-ready televisions.

The broadband ReplayTV 4000 has already been named one of BusinessWeek magazine's "Best Products of 2001" and "Best Video Product of the Year" by Fortune.