Yes I know, as a card-carrying TiVo geek I’m talking blasphemy, but let’s face it people, the writing’s on the wall. Okay, yes, the Netflix deal will rock, and yes, the the HD DirecTiVo is awesome but this story at Engadget is pretty scary.
Here’s the deal: Comcast is coming out with a Motorola DVR that has 60 hours of standard TV, can record HD broadcasts and HD on demand, and has two tuners to record multiple shows at once. All of that for just $10 a month extra on your cable bill? There’s just no way TiVo can compete with that.
So far TiVo has survived the onslaught from cable company DVRs on quality alone. Those DVRs never had season passes, or any of the features us TiVo lovers have come to enjoy so much. But it’s only a matter of time before those cheap DVRs get as good, or better as TiVo. It pains me to say it, but unless TiVo gets a deal with a major cable company, their days might be numbered (especially if the DirecTV deal expires, which has been rumored for ages now).
Tivo has no worries. At CES in January, Tivo is said to announce a Tivo that will interface with their own CableCard, bypassing the issue of cable company encryption (That’s the reason there are no standalone Tivo’s that can record HD, the streams are encrypted). Tivo Isn’ not going anywhere.
I do have to agree though, I wonder what’s going to happen with DirecTV, I’ve always heard it was going to end, but it seems like now more than ever DirecTV is pushing Tivo
No tears, no tears. I hate Tivo, I owned two of their boxes (original Sony, original DirecTivo) and their support line is horrible. The phone tree has voice-recognition that, well, let’s just say that their voice recognition is about as spot-on as the handwriting recognition in the original Apple Newton. They kept billing me long after I was told my subscription was cancelled, and I had to call over the course of four bills or so to please turn my damn box off.
And while the DirecTivo is nice, and the HD version is even nicer, you’re locked into DTV. I wouldn’t mind that too much, but not having to actually own any hardware via the cable route is nice, and cable giving you HD-capable hardware at a few bucks a month instead of hundreds to own a box that’ll be obsolete in a year is genius.
Lastly, the other DVR brand, ReplayTV, has an ethernet interface that operates with a third-party PC program called DVArchive. While not officially supported (and thus you can’t really get away calling it a “feature”), it does provide a handy way of quickly doing things without using Replay’s klutzy interface and can also extract programs’ MPEG streams, for reasons ethical or otherwise.
So basically, Tivo kind of ranks in last in the pack for me. It’s advantages are an interface even the most old-fashioned Grandma could eventually understand and the intelligence of it’s Season Pass program. And even the latter is a downside to me since my family went nuts with Season Pass on the DirecTV unit, resulting in programs constantly being deleted to make room for more and any one thing you choose to record being erased under an avalanche of automatic recordings.
Later, Tivo. Can’t say I’ll miss you.