Digital Video Recorder

A digital video recorder, sometimes called a personal video recorder in Canadian and British English, records video in digital form to a disk drive, flash memory or other local or networked storage rather than to magnetic tape. Sony introduced the first commercial digital video recorder, the DVR-1000, in 1987, recording onto D-1 digital video cassettes, after Fujitsu, Hitachi, Sanyo and Canon had built prototype high-definition digital recorders through the 1980s and Hitachi demonstrated a prototype digital videotape recorder in 1985. Hard-disk-based recording followed in early 1995 with Tektronix's Profile series PDR100, a video disk recorder that stored motion JPEG video and won a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award in 1996 for outstanding achievement, used by Sweden's TV4 and by NBC at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. The consumer DVR market began at the January 1999 Consumer Electronics Show, where ReplayTV and TiVo both launched; TiVo shipped its first units on 31 March 1999 and went on to outsell ReplayTV commercially, while Dish Network's DISHplayer, built with Microsoft software, reached full DVR features by the end of that year and sold over 200,000 units within a year. Unlike a videocassette recorder, a hard-disk-based DVR allows pausing and instant replay of live television and chasing playback, watching a recording before it finishes, features that made time shifting far more convenient than tape.