Can DVD recording come to the rescue of the PC market? Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. The slump in sales of personal computers lingers on. What kinds of new capabilities will it take to get consumers to decide to go out an buy new machines? One answer... according to a new white paper sponsored by Pioneer Electronics... could be the ability to record their own DVDs. Pioneer senior VP Andy Parsons...

"We see that DVD on the consumer electronics side has been selling very, very well. And so what we're proposing now is that because of the fact that DVD video has been so enormously successful that we believe that there is now a point in time where recordable DVD can really be brought into the PC environment and really help to catch onto the coat tails of the DVD video success."

DVD recording capability and the software to make the process simple has been one of the key selling points for Apple's high end iMacs. On the PC side, Parsons believes manufacturers need to create machines geared towards capturing video from camcorders, editing and creating discs that can be played back on standard DVD players...

"You can think of it as a creativity appliance."

Pioneer's interest is that it makes DVD recordable drives. IDC research forecasts that while less than five percent of home desktop personal computers sold this year will have DVD recording capability... .that number will more than double next year and be up to more than 35 percent by 2006. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.