THE FUTURE OF PVRS
WE DIDN’T THINK PVRS HAD MUCH OF A FUTURE UNTIL WE STARTED TESTING THESE UNITS AND SAW JUST HOW MANY CHANNELS (OVER 60!) ARE NOW AVAILABLE VIA THE FREE-TO-AIR NETWORKS.
There’s no doubt that streaming video over the internet is going to continue to bite into the market share of free-to-air, but currently most Australians still watch more free-to-air TV than they do IP-based video. So it doesn’t appear that free-to-air is going to disappear in the immediate future, which means we’ll still have PVRs evolving along with it.
The biggest difference in future PVRs will likely be the move to 4K support. Most mid-range TVs now support 4K resolutions, so it’s a no-brainer that PVRs will have to move to support it too. The problem right now is content; there really isn’t much. When that issue is solved, PVRs will face another quandary, in the form of storage. 4K requires more than four times the amount of storage space as a standard HD show. Look forward to PVRs with 10TB of storage, likely spanned across multiple hard drives in RAID mode. We also think more PVRs will start recording streamed video, as the likes of Netflix’s 4K service become more common. As these streams require such a large amount of bandwidth, some users may need to buffer them for a long time. Enter a PVR that can record 4K video streams, so your movie is ready to view when you want it.
Finally, as streaming video becomes more pervasive, we can expect PVRs to become true multi-media hubs, with their video-on-demand and DLNA-serving capabilities becoming just as important as their ability to record live free to air TV. Right now, this isn’t a priority for many models, but we can see this changing rapidly, with the likes of the Fetch series of units leading the way.