Convergence is more than a buzzword in the minds of the engineers at <A HREF="http://www.hauppauge.com/"> Hauppauge Digital, Inc</A>. The New York electronics manufacturer has announced what it is calling "the first personal video recorder for PCs." In development for eighteen months, the WinTV-PVR is built to occupy a single PCI slot, and allows the recording and playback of television programs via computer. The device is compatible with Microsoft Windows 98 and Windows ME, and comes bundled with a remote control and an FM receiver for the PC.

Digital television, the broadcast format, may still be in limbo, but digital television, the consumer electronics category, is going strong. Figures released November 2 by the <A HREF="http://www.ce.org/">Consumer Electronics Association</A> (CEA) show 368,947 DTV displays were shipped from factories to dealers during the first nine months of 2000, nearly seven times the number of displays sold during the same period in 1999.

Hoping to fulfill the long-awaited promise of delivering broadband entertainment direct to the television, <A HREF="http://www.intertainer.com/">Intertainer</A>, <A HREF="http://www.uniview.com/">uniView Technologies</A>, and Microsoft have buddied up and announced that they will join <A HREF="http://www.zoomtown.com">ZoomTown.com</A> to market-test a service that will provide asymmetrical digital subscriber line (ADSL) broadband entertainment directly to consumers' televisions. ZoomTown.com says it expects to deploy the service to its more than 35,000 subscribers next year following completion of the trial.

Canada's consumers may have a bigger per-capita appetite for high technology than the US, according to recently released statistics. The northern nation is one of the world's strongest markets for televisions and related technology, representing a $1.1 billion market annually for such products. DVD players, for example, are the hottest consumer-electronics products in Canada. More than 202,000 machines were sold in 1999, a 121% increase over 1998, with approximately 500,000 expected to be sold by the end of this year.