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 (New Scientist,
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…
