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Fast-forward for DVRs

The digital video recorder was in ascendance at CES. Dish Network announced the ViP622 ($499 - shown above), the satellite industry's first high-def DVR to be offered with no upfront cost to new subscribers. A program plan including non-premium HD channels is $50 a month for 18 months. Features include a 30-second quick-skip button and a 500-GB hard drive - but about half that capacity is reserved for Dish's version of video-on-demand, where movies are pushed into your home ready to be ordered and viewed. That leaves room for about 30 hours of high-def programs recorded at your discretion.

Meanwhile, the security features for new CableCARD-compatible Media Center Edition (MCE) PCs that Microsoft built into Windows Vista allowed high-end MCE manufacturer Niveus to unveil its Digital Cable Receiver (below). (The stackable component is available now as a $1,000 option with new systems, or as a more expensive upgrade for owners of certain Niveus Windows XP models who return their PCs for hardware modifications.) What makes this type of DVR so compelling is its seemingly limitless storage and retrieval capability. That means being able to keep every episode of Lost in high-def or, for that matter, every movie you've ever recorded from cable.

While high-definition recordings (up to two at a time) are saved on the computer's internal drive, they can also be archived to a network server - including the HP MediaSmart Server (price to be determined, summer) that Bill Gates unveiled during his CES keynote address. With terabytes at your disposal instead of gigabytes, the HP server means you'll no longer be forced to purge when you have the urge to record. You'll be able to play all those archived shows from the server as long as they're played through the PC on which they were originally recorded.

DVR manufacturers in general hope to take advantage of the FCC's July 1 deadline that requires almost all cable operators to separate tuning and security in their set-top receiver boxes. Boxes delivered, for example, by set-top manufacturer Scientific-Atlanta to operators like Time Warner Cable (who then lease them to viewers) will include a multistream CableCARD (M-Card) slot and a card that, unlike first-generation cards, can tune two channels at once for either recording or viewing.

Digeo, which has already been deploying its Moxi Media Center set-top boxes through some cable operators in a few cities, used CES to show prototypes of two models it plans to sell nationally beginning in the second half of this year. Both integrate M-Card. No pricing was announced. - Michael Antonoff