LATEST ADDITIONS

Last week, <A HREF="http://www.st.com">STMicroelectronics</A>, which manufactures semiconductor devices used in set-top boxes (STBs), High Definition Television (HDTV), and other sophisticated digital consumer equipment, announced what it describes as the "world's most advanced chip" for the HDTV market. STM says that the new STi7020 "brings an unprecedented level of integration to the HDTV industry" and adds that the chip is expected to play a key role in the transition from standard definition to HDTV technology.

If it were legal, how would you record a high definition television program? High-definition digital video signals propagate at a data rate of 24Mbits/second, a rate that would quickly fill up the approximately five gigabytes of storage available on standard recordable DVDs. That's barely enough to record a half-hour sitcom, if the commercials were deleted.

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?