Digital video recorder

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The digital video recorder, or DVR, turned the television set from a passive window into something a viewer could rewind, pause, and escape from at will. Before it arrived, watching television meant showing up on time. Miss the program and you missed it. The VCR offered a workaround, but programming one required the patience of a technician and the memory of someone who never forgot to press record.

  At the 1999 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, two companies named ReplayTV and TiVo unveiled something different. TiVo shipped its first units on the 31st of March 1999. ReplayTV walked away with the Best of Show award in the video category, with Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen among its early investors. But the questions those two booths raised that week would take years to fully answer. Who controls what you watch, and when? Can a broadcaster force you to sit through an advertisement? And what happens to the entire advertising economy if viewers can simply skip?

  The story of the DVR stretches from prototype tape machines demonstrated by Fujitsu and Hitachi in the 1980s to patent battles that reached the United States Supreme Court. It runs through a Stanford University computer science classroom, a Tektronix engineering award, and a bankruptcy filing by a company called SONICblue. What the DVR did to television was less a revolution than a slow renegotiation between viewers, broadcasters, cable companies, and courts, a renegotiation that is still unfinished.

• 2. From Tape to Hard Disk

  ›

  Hitachi demonstrated a prototype digital video tape recorder in 1985, using digital recording tape as its storage medium to capture high-definition video. By 1987, Sony had produced the first commercial digital video recorder, the DVR-1000, which recorded onto D-1 digital video cassettes. These were professional tools, not household objects.

  The shift toward hard disk storage came from Tektronix, an Oregon-based electronics firm. In early 1995, Tektronix introduced the Profile series PDR100 Video Disk Recorder, which stored video on a hard disk as motion JPEG rather than tape. The PDR100 was not a consumer product either, but it found immediate broadcast use. Sweden's TV4 used the PDR100 extensively when building a new facility in Stockholm in 1996. That same year, NBC deployed PDR100 units at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. The device earned Tektronix an Engineering, Science and Technology Emmy Award at the 1996 Primetime Emmy Awards for outstanding achievement in engineering development. In 1997 the United States Patent Office granted Tektronix patent 5,642,497 for two claims central to the Profile system.

  In parallel, a working disk-based DVR prototype was built in 1998 inside the Stanford University Computer Science department. The design came from Edward Y. Chang's PhD dissertation, supervised by professors Hector Garcia-Molina and Jennifer Widom. Chang presented the work at the 1998 VLDB conference and again at the 1999 ICDE conference. The prototype was developed in Pat Hanrahan's CS488 class, titled Experiments in Digital Television, and was demonstrated to industrial partners including Sony, Intel, and Apple. The line between the research lab and the consumer market was about to collapse.

• 3. TiVo, ReplayTV, and the Consumer Bet

  ›

  Forrester Research estimated that market penetration for consumer DVRs stood at fewer than 100,000 units by the end of 1999, a figure cited by Ad Age. That modest start masked a tectonic shift in how audiences understood their own viewing rights.

  ReplayTV and TiVo each made different bets on what viewers wanted most. ReplayTV built in automatic commercial skipping from the start. TiVo focused on an intuitive interface and the concept of a season pass, which automatically recorded every episode of a chosen program. TiVo proved more commercially durable, but ReplayTV's commercial-skipping feature triggered a legal war that would eventually consume the company. In 2001, SONICblue acquired ReplayTV. In March 2003, SONICblue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy after fighting a copyright infringement suit over the commercial-skip function. DirecTV purchased the remaining assets of ReplayTV in 2007.

  The legal assault on ReplayTV's feature set illustrated the depth of broadcaster anxiety. In 2002, five owners of a ReplayTV DVR sued the major television networks and movie studios, asking a federal judge to affirm consumers' right to record television and skip commercials. The plaintiffs argued that commercial skipping helped parents protect their children from excessive consumerism. The networks argued the opposite: that the technology violated copyright and should be banned. Half of all United States viewers, by some estimates, were already using DVRs to skip commercials entirely.

  Meanwhile, Dish Network had demonstrated DVR-capable hardware at the 1999 Consumer Electronics Show with assistance from Microsoft software, bundled alongside access to the WebTV service. By the end of 1999, the DISHplayer had full DVR capabilities, and within a year more than 200,000 units had sold.

• 4. The Advertising Industry's Crisis

  ›

  An excerpt published in Advertising Age laid out the stakes plainly: as advertisers lose the ability to invade the home and the consumer's mind, they will be forced to wait for an invitation, meaning they must learn what kinds of advertising content customers will actually be willing to seek out and receive.

  Broadcasters developed a counter-measure. Rather than buying time in programs that were heavily recorded, some networks began weaving products directly into their programming. The show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition advertised Sears, Kenmore, Kohler, and Home Depot by featuring their products on screen. Sporting events were renamed after sponsors, as with the Sprint Cup of NASCAR. On-screen overlay advertisements, called Secondary Events or 2E by media companies, appeared at the bottom of the screen during other programming. In the most aggressive examples, these overlays occupied as much as 25 percent of the viewing area, sometimes moving or making noise. An advertisement for a program called Three Moons Over Milford, shown before its premiere, displayed a video occupying approximately 25 percent of the bottom-left portion of the screen, depicting a comet striking the moon.

  In January 2012, Dish Network announced its Hopper service, which recorded prime-time programming from the four major broadcast networks automatically. The Auto Hop feature allowed viewers to watch those programs without any commercials, without having to manually fast-forward. The service cost ten dollars extra per month. On the 24th of May 2012, Dish and the networks filed suit against each other in federal court. In May 2012, Fox Broadcasting separately sued Dish, arguing that the automatic recording and commercial-skipping function constituted copyright infringement and breach of contract. The Ninth Circuit rejected Fox's claims in July 2013.

  DirecTV signed an arrangement with NDS Group in March 2011 to enable delivery of addressable advertisements, meaning ads could be injected dynamically into recorded programs at the moment of playback, targeted to a viewer's specific interests.

• 5. Patent Battles and Court Rulings

  ›

  David Rafner, an employee at Honeywell's Physical Sciences Center, first described a drive-based DVR for home TV recording, time shifting, and commercial skipping in 1985. His United States Patent 4,972,396 focused on a multi-channel design enabling simultaneous independent recording and playback. It described possible applications including streaming compression, editing, captioning, multi-channel security monitoring, military sensor platforms, and remotely piloted vehicles.

  Forgent Networks filed suit on the 14th of July 2005 against a group of companies including EchoStar, DirecTV, Charter Communications, Cox Communications, Comcast, Time Warner, and Cable One, alleging infringement of a patent titled Computer controlled video system allowing playback during recording, which had first been filed in 1991 and amended several times since. Scientific-Atlanta and Motorola, manufacturers of the equipment sold by the named defendants, filed a counter-suit arguing the patent was invalid. The two cases were combined into case 6:06-cv-208, filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division. On the 20th of June 2006, Motorola asked the United States Patent and Trademarks Office to reexamine the patent.

  Cablevision Systems Corp lost a legal battle on the 23rd of March 2007 against Hollywood studios and television networks over a network-based DVR service. On the 4th of August 2008, Cablevision won its appeal. Second Circuit judge John M. Walker Jr. declared that the technology would not directly infringe on the media companies' rights. The Supreme Court declined to hear a further appeal. Cablevision had argued that each user's recordings would sit on that user's individual server space, making the network DVR simply a recorder with a very long cord.

  TiVo sued EchoStar Corp in 2004 for patent infringement. The two parties reached a settlement in 2011 in which EchoStar agreed to pay a one-time fee in three structured payments, granting EchoStar full rights for life to the disputed TiVo patents upon the first payment. In January 2012, AT&T settled a similar TiVo patent suit, agreeing to cash payments totaling $215 million through June 2018, plus recurring per-subscriber monthly license fees through July 2018.

• 6. Security, Surveillance, and Embedded Uses

  ›

  Closed-circuit television systems adopted the DVR early, replacing VCRs with devices that could search recordings by event, time, date, and camera. A DVR security system can overwrite the oldest footage automatically when storage fills, a function that analog tape systems required human intervention to perform. Remote access to security footage over a local area network or the internet became standard in many professional installations.

  Security DVRs take two basic forms. A PC-based DVR uses a conventional personal computer architecture fitted with video capture cards. An embedded DVR is purpose-built, with its operating system and application software stored in firmware or read-only memory. More recent professional models include video analytics firmware capable of detecting a virtual tripwire or identifying objects left unattended in a scene.

  At the other end of the size spectrum, small embeddable DVRs designed as bare circuit boards allow manufacturers to integrate recording capability into larger equipment. The control keypad connects via a detachable cable so it can sit on the system's exterior while the DVR circuitry is mounted inside. Similar compact devices with built-in displays of around five inches diagonal and SSD storage are used in professional film and video production. These external recorders remove the recording-time limitations and codec restrictions built into camera bodies, and support higher bitrates than most internal camera recorders allow.

• 7. Software, Platforms, and Open Source

  ›

  Windows Media Center, Microsoft's DVR software, was bundled with the Media Center edition of Windows XP, the Home Premium and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista, and most editions of Windows 7. When Windows 8 arrived in 2012, Windows Media Center was excluded from standard installations and offered only as a fifteen-dollar add-on pack for Windows 8 Pro users, bundled with DVD playback codecs. Microsoft has not supported Windows Media Center since Windows 8, but unofficial versions remain in use on Windows 10 and Windows 11.

  SageTV provided DVR software for the Mac that could also control YouTube playback and other online video through a remote control. Google acquired SageTV in June 2011, and the software is no longer sold. On the Linux side, MythTV, Video Disk Recorder (VDR), LinuxMCE, and Kodi (formerly XBMC) represent a range of open-source options. Geniatech produces a line of Mac recording devices called EyeTV, compatible with third-party tuners from manufacturers including Pinnacle, TerraTec, and Hauppauge.

  Apple distributed applications within its FireWire software developer kit that allow any Mac with a FireWire port to record the MPEG-2 transport stream from a compatible cable box, with channel-changing capability over the same interface. One free scheduled-recording application derived from this SDK is FireRecord, formerly known as iRecord. Only unencrypted broadcast channels can be recorded through this path, as the remaining channels use encryption.

  By 2009, DVRs were in use in 32 percent of all United States television households. By 2010, that figure had risen to 38 percent. Among viewers aged 18 to 40, viewership in DVR-equipped homes ran 40 percent higher than in homes without one, a gap that made DVR ownership rates a variable advertisers tracked as closely as any ratings number.