Beloved-but-beleaguered DVR pioneer TiVo has found itself a ally: Best Buy. The two companies have struck a deal that will see TiVo boxes heavily marketed in Best Buy stores, reports Brad Stone in the New York Times. The relationship will put Napster (owned by Best Buy) on TiVo’s set-top boxes, and let Best Buy deliver information and shopping opportunities through the TiVos it sells. Best Buy also plans to build TiVo software into its house-brand TVs under the Dynex and Insignia labels.

The Times story includes one statistic which, if you like TiVo as much as I do, is alarming: Two years ago, there were 1.727 million households with TiVos, and that number has fallen to 1.6 million today. Most of the defectors have presumably left TiVo in favor of renting DVRs from their cable companies for a few bucks a month, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them did so when they upgraded their TV setups to HD and needed to replace aging standard-definition TiVo units.

As good as TiVo is, it’s a far costlier entertainment option than a cable DVR: You’ve got to both buy a box and pay Tivo a monthly fee that’s higher than cable DVRs cost. (Some of us choose to pay TiVo a sizable one-time fee rather than the monthly subscription.) I’d like to see the world look at TiVo as a premium product that’s worth the extra bucks, and perhaps the arrangement with Best Buy will result in more folks buying and loving TiVo. I know I don’t want to be part of a relentlessly dwindling cult…

When I first ran into Digeo in the middle of 2007, the company had just begun to roll out its HD DVR to the public. They talked a good game and appeared ready to take on TiVo, who all but owns the set-top DVR market. However, within a matter of months, it became painfully clear that its Moxi DVR wasn’t going anywhere.

Their set top HD DVR could only record standard definition programming over cable, something they left out in their demo to me. Want to record HD? Hope you are in range of a high-definition over the air station. The box was big and clumsy and well, the whole product seemed to suck.

I was on their beta program for a matter of about two weeks before the product went under (in fact, the DVR still sits in my basement in the box, I forgot to send it back — feel free to e-mail me Digeo if you’re reading this with your mailing address). I didn’t even get a chance to set the thing up — and once I found out about the DVRs bizarre limitations I decided to pass.

Color me surprised after Digeo’s spectacular flameout post-CES 2008 to see them attempting to make a comeback. But sure enough, Dave Zatz has discovered a brand new unit has appeared on Digeo’s pages. So lets look over the enhancements.

Sexier, smaller set top box? Check.
CableCARD HD support instead of OTA? Check.
No monthly fees like TiVo? Check.
Reasonable retail price? Sorry, no dice.

Zatz has found out this box will retail for $800. I don’t know what they’re thinking. TiVo, the market leader, had a hard enough time selling its HD DVR for $600. What makes Digeo think its going to be able to break into the market with a device that a) has a smaller hard drive than TiVo HD XL at $200 less, and b) is all but an unknown with consumers, but is coming at a premium?

I’m sorry — not to be blunt — but it seems like this company is just destined to repeat its errors over and over again. I’m glad they’re trying again, but come on, this is a bad economy. You really need to have an awesome value proposition in order to charge a high price for your products.

What I’m seeing so far tells me this new Moxi DVR is not. It’s actually disappointing: I think TiVo could use a little kick in the pants.

TiVo was kind enough to send us over a TiVo HD XL — its “super sized” DVR — for us to take a look at. Essentially the device is the successor to the Series 3 units, however it is enclosed in the TiVo HD casing. From here on out, it looks as if the TiVo HD and its bigger cousin will round out the DVR maker’s lineup.

Like the TiVo HD and Series 3, the XL uses a CableCARD, which eliminates the need for the user to rent a set-top box from the cable companies. At least here where I live, Comcast doesn’t charge for CableCARD usage, so I’m saving myself the $8 monthly or so fee it costs to rent the box.

It has dual-tuner functionality, so if you have the right card (an ‘M’ instead of an ‘S’ card), you’ll be able to take advantage of that. You can record two channels at once, and both in HD, so that is nice.

Really, there is not much different here: it’s essentially the same old TiVo with a big hard drive. That 1 terabyte hard drive should be plenty: it would allow for the recording of about 232 hours of standard def programming, and around 150 hours of HD programming.

This is a serious jump from the previous unit, which only allowed for about 20 hours of recording time in HD.

Altogether, our experience with the device was positive. Being that this was the first TiVo I’ve used that didn’t need the cable set-top box to operate, it was nice not to have to deal with the annoying banner of the set-top box, or the connection process there.

Picture quality was excellent, and the digital recording does not lose as much of the sharpness of HD programming as you’d expect.

You will lose On Demand, so if that’s a big hit in your household, the TiVo HD XL may not work. However here, we rarely use it, so at least in my own personal case, I’m not missing it.

I found one negative, and its very annoying. When selecting programming, and there is both a standard def and high def option, the Season Pass automatically defaults to SD. You have to manually go in and change it to HD, or use the online website to ensure it records only the HD channel.

If this is an HD DVR, it should be recording the high def versions by default, but thats only my opinion.

Overall, we’d recommend this unit over its smaller sibling. If you’re going to spend $1,000+ on a good HDTV, why skimp out on the DVR? Add to this the fact that the difference between recording times is like night and day, and this is a no brainer.

Ten months ago, TiVo and Nero announced that they were working together to bring the TiVo interface to DVR software you could run on a PC. Then time passed, and I sort of forgot about it. Until today–when Nero announced Liquid TV | TiVo PC (yep, that’s the name, complete with | in the middle). The moniker may be a tad ungainly, but it looks like the product aims to be exactly what you’d want it to be: A version of TiVo that happens to run on a PC rather than TiVo’s own box.

Continue reading this story…

Here’s a major development in a tech legal tussle I wasn’t even following: The U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that it’s okay for Comcast to offer a digital video recorder service in which the DVRing is all done at its facilities and delivered over the cable system–rather than via a box with a hard drive inside it in the consumer’s living room, which is how DVRs have worked since the dawn of TiVo and ReplayTV.

Media companies had sued to prevent this form of networked digital recording, fearing that it would make DVRs more pervasive, and therefore increase the odds that TV watchers will skip the ads that pay for their content.

Over at Barrons, Eric Savitz has a good post on the implications of today’s ruling. It’s obviously good news for Comcast and bad news for the media companies who had hoped to prevent it from offering this technology. Eric says it’s also a bummer for DirecTV and Dish Network, since there’s no way to deliver networked DVR functionality via satellite. I imagine that TiVo isn’t thrilled with the ruling, either–anything that helps make DVRs provded by cable companies more popular presumably hurts the sales of the box that’s still synonymous with “DVR.”

Mostly, though, I’m wondering: Should consumers be pleased with this ruling?

One benefit seems to be obvious: If Comcast can put the DVR at its end of the network, it should be able to let its customes sign up for DVR service without having to swap a non-DVR cable box for a new one. It should also allow folks with multiple cable boxes in their homes to get access to their recorded TV from any TV set.

I’m not enough of a cable-TV technology guru to know whether a cable box will be required at all to get access to a networked DVR. I’d like to think that a TV set with a CableCard would be up to the task, but I assume that it will require the elusive piece of technology known as the two-way CableCard.

If any of this happens, it would be pleasant but far from earthshaking. But centralizing the DVR would also open up the possibility of letting people get access to their recorded TV from any PC or phone with an Internet connection–in other words, providing the functionality of Sling Media’s wonderful SlingBox without requiring the SlingBox. You might even be able to get at your shows from any TV with Comcast service.

That would be neat. I’m not holding my breath that we’ll see it anytime soon, though–and even when it does show up, I suspect it might be in a form that’s nowhere near as usable and lovable as the TiVo/SlingBox combo I’ve been using for awhile to watch my favorite programs anywhere at any time. (I haven’t used Comcast’s current DVR box, but as far as  can tell, you can divvy its users up into two groups: Those who find it adequate, and those who can’t stand it.)

Of course, as a Court of Appeals ruling, this decision is subject to further change. It may be a long while before Comcast or any other cable company gets to put DVRs in the cloud. But to answer the question I asked a few paragraphs ago, I hope that they do–I can’t see any way that such a technology would be anything but a happy development for consumers. (Unless you take the “If consumers skip past all commercials, advertising, and therefore advertising-supported TV, will go away” scenario into account, which you probably should–but that’s a subject for another post…)