« Still catching up. | Main | Gunning for Google? »
December 23, 2002
PVRs: A Convergence Success Story
Wired News chimes in with another skeptical article about Tivo and personal video recorders (PVRs) (via Mitch Ratcliffe). The good news -- there are now 1.8 million of the things out there. The better news (from Tivo President Morgan Guenther at the Supernova conference) -- churn is less than 1 percent, and Tivo is close to profitability. The best news, and I've said this before -- PVR is a killer app. People love it, and it's a platform for other new services.
It will take more than three years for PVRs to hit the upswing of the growth hockey stick. Guess what? It always takes a few years for huge consumer electronics success stories to take off. We forget that was true with CDs, DVDs, mobile phones, PDAs, digital cameras, dial-up Internet access, and television. And maybe the bigggest beneficiary won't be SonicBlue and Tivo as PVR functionality is built into other devices (though I don't think people give Tivo enough credit). By 2005, though, I'm sure we'll be seeing stories about PVRs as a huge seller the way we are today for DVD players.
And then things get really interesting.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at December 23, 2002 9:30 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)