Betting on the Future
For Irvine-based Western Digital Corp., the future can’t come fast enough.
The company last week unveiled a new hard drive geared specifically for home entertainment devices such as digital video recorders, or DVRs, appliances that use hard drives for storage instead of videotapes.
The troubled computer disk drive manufacturer, which has lost nearly $1 billion over the last two years, views digital storage in consumer electronics as the industry’s future. But the market won’t really blossom until at least next holiday season.
“Although this market segment has gotten a tremendous amount of press, from the standpoint of shipping products to the field, it’s pretty much in its infancy,” said Charles Leeson, vice president of sales and marketing for Western Digital’s audio-video solutions line of business.
“By next Christmas, there will be a pretty good proliferation of products that you can buy as consumer electronics products that have disk drives as a key component in the product,” Leeson said.
The company’s press release quoted an executive from Replay Networks Inc., one of two main manufacturers of digital video recorders, who praised Western Digital’s efforts. But both Replay and TiVo Inc., the other developer of DVRs, use hard drives from Quantum Corp., a Western Digital competitor.
“We have no current plans to switch at this time. We have a good, long-standing relationship with Quantum, and I don’t see that changing in the foreseeable future,” said Jim Plant, director of marketing at Replay.
In praising Western, Replay wanted to encourage more manufacturers to develop audio-visual storage products.
Hard drives for entertainment devices must operate more quietly than those in computers so they don’t interfere with music. They must also take up less space, use less power and produce less heat. The drives must handle multiple data streams simultaneously, so a person can record a television program while watching another recording.
For the last several years, the traditionally cyclical hard drive manufacturing industry has suffered from cutthroat pricing, with the growth in the personal computer industry failing to compensate for overcapacity.
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Jonathan Gaw covers technology and electronic commerce for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7818 and at jonathan.gaw@latimes.com.
