Will DVR become a relic?

No longer save your TV shows on a home DVR. That’s the message Cablevision seems to communicate by announcing a new service, that is planned to roll out in early 2009. The new service will let viewers record any show on their network, instead of recording on a home DVR.

Network DVR, as the technology is called, will first see daylight in 2009, but other networks like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications say to be interested too.

For now only Cablevision is expected to be ready for deployment, and therefore it is believed that the company "paves the way for the rest of the industry". Cablevision believes that the shift from home DVR to network DVR could save them a grand total of $700 million.

Besides saving money and offering an innovative product, network DVR seems to have a few disadvantages. Time Warner points to the legal cloud surrounding it. Cablevision says that network DVR isn’t really different from home DVR, but The Motion Picture Association of America believes something else is going on and therefore fights the network all the way to the country’s Supreme Court.

"We did win our case, and the law of the land right now is that our network DVR is lawful," Tom Rutledge, Cablevision’s chief operating officer told The Associated Press. "So we want to use it. Simple."

Main reason for Cablevision winning the case is their argument that network DVR essentially acts like a home DVR. This means that the company has to make sure that subscribers initiate the recording of shows, and not Cablevision. Besides this all programs will have to be unique to each viewer and not set aside for all subscribers.

To make sure that their winning argument isn’t forgotten Rutledge says that subscribers will start with 160 gigabyte capacity, an amount that matches the capacity of a standard DVR. Fees are likely to be $9,95 a month.

"If the functions are exactly the same (as a home DVR), I don’t think we’ll price it differently," Rutledge said. But the question we started of with still isn’t answered… Will home DVR become a relic? Well, probably not too quickly. The people that already have DVRs will probably keep DVRs until they’re gradually phased out, says Rutledge.

This means that it will take a while before you can use ‘home DVR’ and ‘relic’ in one sentence, but also means that the first steps are taken for it to become a relic in the next few years.