Size of HDD and Video Viewing Behavior: Qualitative change from quantitative change

In the recent post, I described how HDD has become cheaper, and how fast it would accelarate to be in a near future. In this post, I like to shed a light on how this "quantative" change in HDD will bring "qualitative" change in viewer's bahavior.


- VCR era

• total hour of broadcasted contents per week (major ground wave stations in metropolitan Tokyo area) : around 5,000
• average hour of real-time viewing per week : 25 (assuming we watch TV for 3.5 hours per day)
  
• average hour of time-shifted viewing : 1 (most VCR owners do not record TV but use it to play rental videos)

Go home running or you will miss the show.

- DVR(TiVo) era

• total hour of broadcasted contents per week (major ground wave stations in metropolitan Tokyo area) : around 5,000
• typical hour of newly recorded contents per week : 25 (It heavily depends on HDD capacity and automated recording function based on EPG, but this number is surely growing these days )
• typical hour of real-time (live) viewing per week : 10 (assuming this portion is replaced by time-shifted views)
• typical hour of time-shifted viewing : 18 (dramatically increased thanks to the HDD capacity and easy navigation like TiVo)
• typical hour of contens not watched : 7 (The larger and smarter DVRs can get, the more uncomsumable contents will be left)
  

Pain of unconsumable recorded contents has just begun.

- Super PVR era

• total hour of broadcasted contents per week (major ground wave stations in metropolitan Tokyo area) : around 5,000
• typical hour of newly recorded contents per week : 5,000 (assuming these devices record every single broadcasted contents)
• typical hour of real-time (live) viewing per week : 10 (assuming this portion will not change from DVR era)
• typical hour of time-shifted viewing : 18 (assuming this portion will not change from DVR era)
• typical hour of "spotted" viewing : 5 (we will watch certain segment of the TV show which usually we have missed, but now spottable by means of keyword search or WOM)
  

You record 'em all, and you will get something new and have more fun.

Funny video

Our Metacast staff and friends from Geisya Tokyo Entertaiment Inc.(their web site is Japanese only) have created a funny video. "VIDEO WARS: A Galactic Parody of STARWARS and YouTube".

If you are familiar with the fuss that happened 18 months ago between YouTube and Nico-Nico Douga (this page and this page are very helpful), you would probably laugh. We'll release 3 episodes by the end of August.

Please enjoy!

- Trailer


- Episode 1


- Episode 2
coming very soon!

- Episode 3
coming soon!

Disruptive Innovation (a.k.a. Cheap Revolution) in HDD

One of the reason I founded Metacast Inc. was that I foresaw the abundance of video contents available around us, and I also foresaw the dearth of metadata to find a right video.

Speaking about "the abundance of video", there has been an underlying trend that makes the capacity of video storage that money can buy doubling every 1 to 2 years. Here is the chart I made to explain the Cheap Revolution in HDD. You can see the phenomenon similar to the Moore's Law is working in this sector as well. (I collected these resources from the web, thanks to the Google, so there might be some inaccuracy in details, but I believe that overall trend is well explained in this chart.)



If we can assume that this trend will continue, what will we get around 2010 or 2012? Well, here is my estimation. It seems a little overwhelming, but technology has always surpassed our perception this way.

- In year 2010, $500 can buy 10TB HDD.
- In year 2012, this 10TB HDD is down to $250.

I believe this is just a beginning of reemergence of what we saw in Apple's iPod and the disturbance in music and record industry that followed. (Who could imagine that there comes a day when we can carry tens of thousands songs in a breast pocket!)

SONY released an epoch making PVR (Vaio X Video Station) in 2005. It has a 2.0TB HDD and 8 tuners which allows recording 8 simultaneous channels of television for three weeks. The price is about $2,200 (250,000 JPY). It totally changed the way I watch television. I think this type of DVR will be sold less than $1,000 and commoditized around 2012.

hello world

This is my first posting to Blogspot so I like to do some introduction of myself.


I was Bon in 1972 near Kobe city in Japan. My father had worked for an aeronautics company. We moved to Matsudo city, a suberb town out of Tokyo in 1977, where I spent most of my school years. After I graduated from Waseda Univsersity in 1996 (I spent 6 years in college!), I joined Recruit Co. and I was involved in several web projects like this one. At the 5th year in Recruit Co., I got a company sponsorship to learn at MIT, there I joined Professor Madnick's work group to study Aggregation Technology and Business. (I had a quite fun time in Cambridge including a weekly night out to NYC!) After coming back to Japan, I had worked with IT Business Development Team at Recruit Co. till I left the company in 2005 and founded Metacast.


The inspiration of founding Metacast boils dowin to following 3 words.

PVR * Web 2.0 = TV 2.0

I had a huge influence from Tivo, Cocoon (Sony's first PVR), and Gracenote's CDDB. I would like to touch these issues in coming postings. Till then, I introduce some other resources here.

• My previous blog postings are here (Japanese only).
• Our company's web page is here. (We'll have English version soon)
• My Facebook profile is here.
• You can check my video watching logs from here. ("Mitter" is our service!)