Three Benefits Toyota Sees in iVDR Removable HDD Technology
19 April 2004
Nikkei Electronics
Nikkei Business Publications, Inc.
April 19, 2004 (TOKYO) -- On April 12, 2004, the "iVDR Consortium," a group that is establishing technologies for removable hard disk drives (HDDs), held its general meeting in Tokyo, where it decided to employ "iVDR micro," which uses a 1-inch HDD and "iVDR-Secure" copy guard technology for TV contents.
However, the consortium explained that the hardware specifications of iVDR micro are tentative, and the contents of iVDR-Secure could change after talks with content providers.
The size of iVDR micro is 50mm x 50mm x 8mm. The iVDR-Secure structure will take a similar structure as a small memory card, "Secure MultiMediaCard."
The iVDR Consortium revealed at the same time that the number of its member companies reached 39 as of April 5, 2004. They are not only AV equipment and computer peripheral manufacturers, but also many car-related firms. The participants from the car industry are, for example, Alpine Electronics Inc, Clarion Co, Ltd, Denso Corp, Toyota Motor Corp, Fujitsu Ten Ltd and Pioneer Corp.
Of these companies, Toyota, which joined the iVDR Consortium in January 2004, named its three objectives as follows. First is to make it easy for customers to bring contents into their vehicles. Though it is possible to download contents to mounted devices via wireless networks, broadband connection is still difficult under the current circumstances.
"When considering costs and rates for data transmission per 1MB, it is quicker and less expensive to directly bring a HDD into the car by hand than to use a communication network," according to Toyota. Second, Toyota believes taking over the music and map data saved in the HDD should be easy when a customer replaces his or her car. Car navigation systems are currently mounted on cars with internal HDDs, but if the system is iVDR-compatible, the HDD can be easily removed from the car.
The third point is to protect copyrights and customers' privacy. The volume of data such as music and road maps to be installed in a HDD car navigation system is expanding.
"Existing car navigation systems' function is no more than route navigation, but they will be required to make traveling more amusing and comfortable. We would like to help our customers use the contents accumulated in their HDDs in accordance with their preferences and location of driving," according to Toyota.
However, to completely delete the installed data requires additional action such as data overwriting. If a used car mounted with a HDD car navigation system is placed on the market without such care, "copyrights of music and privacy of the old owner could be violated," Toyota said. The company expects it to get clear from that concern when HDDs become removable from car navigation systems.
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