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MOVIE producers have succeeded in crippling one of the major advantages of a
new generation of digital VCRs—the ability to record several TV channels
at once. JVC has been promising for five years that its Digital-VHS system would
let viewers record up to six TV channels simultaneously (¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ,
15 April 1995, p 19). But the recorders that have just gone on sale won’t do
this.

Hollywood believes that instead of recording six standard channels, people in
the US would use the £1300 multichannel decks to record a single digital
high-definition TV channel. A digital HDTV recording is virtually cinema quality
and might herald a new wave of extremely high-quality video piracy, the studios
fear.

So to calm the studios’ fears, JVC has made its D-VHS decks record only
analogue TV, one channel at a time. Although no multichannel simultaneous
recording can be performed, the picture quality far surpasses that of today’s
VHS machines. Recent tests by Home Cinema Choice magazine showed that
D-VHS will not record pay-per-view movies either.