PVR in the Car
By Bill Howard
October 5, 2004
If you weren't the first on your block with in-car DVD, you'll get a second chance to be a hero with your kids. Some 2005 vehicles from General Motors will have a PVR (personal video recorder) option. With the new Mobile Digital Media System you can record TV shows, movies, and music on a 40GB hard drive cartridge that shuttles between home and car.
It's part of the roof-mounted "entertainment rail" in GM's line of crossover sport vehicles—Buick Terraza, Chevrolet Uplander, Pontiac Montana SV6, and Saturn Relay—which already come with DVD players. The new media system will cost about $500 to $750. It's an extension of the PhatNoise music system in Audis, VWs, and now Mazdas, and sold by Kenwood as the Music Keg.
At home, the cartridge connects via a USB dock to your PC. You record (in MPEG format) your favorite shows onto the disk using PVR software, and then move the cartridge to a dock in the entertainment rail. Movie downloads from a paid service like CinemaNow should also be possible, says PhatNoise chief technology officer Dan Benyamin.
If that's not enough, satellite radio provider Sirius says it hopes to be broadcasting video to cars by 2006. The first streams will be kids' programming, says Sean Gibbons, VP of new product development at Sirius. One more chance to shine in the youngsters' eyes.
