Who will win the battle of the boxes?

The Independant reports on the growing competition between "traditional" PVR makers and DVD recorders in the UK..

Like Bill Gates in the world of computing, Rupert Murdoch will cede no ground to any of his media rivals. In deference to this driving ambition, BSkyB's annual results, published last week, show the outcome of an advertising campaign launched last year to boost uptake of the Sky+ box. The number of people using the technology, which records programmes onto a hard disk, rose sharply throughout the year - from 79,000 in March 2003 to 121,000 in September. By December 31 this figure had more than doubled to 250,0000, and Sky bosses want 315,000 users by the start of June.

Despite this typically burgeoning success story there is competition on the horizon for Murdoch: other "PVR" (personal video recorder) products and the increasingly popular family of DVD recorders, which can copy a programme temporarily or burn it permanently onto disk. This is a significant advantage over the Sky+ box, and the vast majority of other PVRs, which cannot create permanent copies. In fact, most of the things that were once the sole province of PVRs are now being overrun by the newer generation of DVD recorders.

Read the full article here.