Cell chips will also be ideal for use inside consumer-electronics devices such as digital video-recorders and high-definition televisions.
Some TV executives and analysts suggest that online video, tablet computers and wider use of digital-video recorders could be pulling prime-time viewers to other places and times that aren't counted in prime-time usage figures, although many also caution it is too early in the TV season to draw any broad conclusions.
New services like digital cable, high-definition TV, video-on-demand, and digital video recorders are proving extremely popular with customers.
Digital video recorders--the cable industry's answer to TiVo (nasdaq: TIVO - news - people )--allow users to record programs on a hard drive inside the cable box, as well as to pause or rewind live TV.
Acronyms in particular foxed users. 75% of online Britons did not know that VOD stands for video-on-demand, while 68% were unaware that personal video recorders were more commonly referred to as PVRs.
This digital wave started with a trickle called TiVo, one of the first computer-hard-drive-based digital video recorders (DVRs).
Products for consumer electronics include various HDDs designed for digital video recorders, set-top boxes, karaoke machines, printers and gaming consoles.
Plus: videocassette players, portable video recorders, the now-ubiquitous Walkman and 3.5-inch floppy disk drives, launched in 1980.
The two (plainly-named) Personal Video Recorders sport sleek, brushed aluminum enclosures that resemble a Mac mini in form, and both units are all but identical save for the high-end edition's ability to handle 1080p.
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Brits are also the most likely to watch TV-on-demand and use digital video recorders, the report suggests.
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In other countries digital video recorders and other technologies are add-ons to pay-TV packages stuffed with desired content.
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That's when a U.S. federal appeals court overturned government rules that would have forced electronics manufacturers to build anti-piracy devices--known as Broadcast Flags--into many digital televisions, video recorders and other devices.
The only video recorders at the time were huge Ampex reel-to-reel machines used by television stations to rebroadcast live shows in later time zones.
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But new technologies like digital video recorders, TiVo, digital cable and Web-based television are shifting the balance of power from traditional broadcasters to consumers.
The player will support several digital video formats, including MPEG 2, which is the current standard for digital video used on DVD discs and in hard-drive TV recorders like ReplayTV and TiVo (nasdaq: TIVO - news - people ).
But as well as buying digtal TVs or set-top boxes, viewers would eventually need new video recorders as well.
Still, the whole ordeal got us at Engadget thinking -- is the planet ready for humans to wear video recorders, and will it ever shake a general unease related to the threat of a world filled with omnipresent cameras?
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The latest D-Link AP can also be used as a wireless client to Ethernet-enabled media devices such as video game consoles, Digital Video Recorders (DVR), and Digital Media Adapters (DMA) for seamless access to the Internet.
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We also hear that SonicBlue (nasdaq: SBLU - news - people ), the company behind the ReplayTV video recorders that Hollywood hates because it lets the viewer skip commercials, as well as the Rio portable MP3 music players may also be involved.
Canon touts both the favor its video recorders have found with Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) Macintosh users and its strategic partnerships with Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ).
But the appeals court disagreed, saying the technology was more equivalent to the video recorders upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in its precedent-setting Betamax case in 1982.
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Some industry-watchers think this could turn into a struggle like that between the Betamax and VHS formats for video recorders.
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