Digital video recorders will be in 47 percent of U.S. homes by 2010, growing their installed base from 7 million households at the end of 2004 to 55 million in five years, according to a report from New York-based JupiterResearch. "While TV networks and their advertisers may get increasingly anxious about DVRs, some constituencies have another perspective. Pay TV operators will see the DVR playing an increasingly strategic role over the next two to three years," said JupiterResearch analyst Todd Chanko. Jupiter also predicts that HDTV monitors will grow from an installed based of 13 million in 2004, to 74 million by 2010. While less than 4 million of current HDTV households were subscribed to an HDTV service at the end of 2004, that number is expected to grow to 69 million by 2010. "Television networks and pay-TV operators alike are unsure of consumer demand for HDTV," said Chanko. "Behind closed doors the executives are still measuring the real costs to produce and distribute HDTV against the benefits. That's why there are only 26 hours of HDTV programming a day across seven broadcast networks."
Every executive who has approved a connected product roadmap has made a quiet assumption: the network underneath it will still be there. That assumption is about to be tested at a scale the automotive industry has never faced. The global connected vehicle installed base is heading toward a billion units, and the cellular technology most of those vehicles depend on is scheduled to begin its retirement before the end of the decade. For automakers, fleet operators, insurers, and the telecom carriers that serve them, the question is whether the recurring revenue those services promise can survive a connectivity layer with a shorter life than the vehicle carrying it. How Scale Meets an Expiry Date Omdia research forecasts that the global connected vehicle installed base will surpass 1.05 billion units by 2035, up from 473.7 million in 2025. Few installed bases of any kind more than double in a decade, and this one signals that connectivity is moving from premium differentiator to baseline e...