The <A HREF="http://www.ce.org">Consumer Electronics Association</A> announced last week that factory-to-dealer sales of digital television (DTV) display devices reached their second-highest total ever this February, surpassing 22,000 units. The CEA claims that February's sales total of 22,844 units is second only to the December 1999 figures, and brings total sales since the introduction of DTV (in August 1998) to 178,254 units.

The <A HREF="http://www.ce.org">Consumer Electronics Association</A> (CEA) believes that digital television sales will go off the chart this year.

Four major industries banded together last week to focus on the business issues necessary to bring digital TV to the American consumer. More than 300 people attended the fourth DTV Summit, which was sponsored by the <A HREF="http://www.cema.org">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association</A> (CEMA) in conjunction with the <A HREF="http://www.mstv.org/">Association for Maximum Service Television</A> (MSTV), the <A HREF="http://www.nab.org">National Association of Broadcasters</A> (NAB), the <A HREF="http://www.ncta.com/">National Cable Television Association</A> (NCTA), and the <A HREF="http://www.sbca.com/">Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association</A> (SBCA). The one-day summit featured leaders from the consumer-electronics, broadcast, cable, satellite, and retail industries discussing their latest plans and strategies for the DTV transition.

When the hard-disk&ndash;based personal video recorder (PVR) products like TiVo and ReplayTV hit the shelves last year, they brought a new flexibility to time-shifting television programming. But the first products still had shortcomings: What could you do if you wanted to time-shift two programs from two different channels simultaneously? Buy two machines?