Entries Tagged 'TiVo' ↓

The New York Times has details of the new non-TiVo DVR’s about to be rolled out by DirecTV:

DirecTV’s standard DVR, originally set to be released this past June, will be introduced in late October, and another model featuring high-definition service will be introduced in mid-2006. The standard DVR will feature up to 100 hours of recordable space, compared with TiVo’s 70 hours.

Wonder why the HD boxes are being delayed so much? Could it be that the combination of HDTV and DVR is still a niche product?

HDTV is hot, no doubt about it. But it would be interesting to know how many DirecTV subscribers have the standalone HD decoder boxes. Demand for HDTV is highly driven by sports content. (Look how many TVs get sold around the time of the NFL playoffs in January.) I suspect your average Sunday football fan is more motivated by the ability to watch high-definition football games in real time via Season Ticket than in time-shifting those games.

Just thinking out loud.

Matt Haughey at PVRblog has details about some outrageously customer-hostile new “features” rolled out by TiVo. I can’t see any rational reason why a content provider should be able to limit how long a program can be saved on your DVR.

PVR Wire has the latest installment in the DirecTV/TiVo feud:

It’s not really news, but it does make it official: DirecTV will stop marketing TiVo’s PVRs later this year, replacing them with NDS Group Plc technology, which is owned by DirecTV investor News Corp.

The word came Wednesday during Reuters Telecommunications, Cable and Satellite Summit in New York City. "The product we will market is our product," DirecTV Chief Executive Chase Carey said. However, he suggested that customers can still get TiVo if they ask.

The NDS PVRs have high-capacity hard drives that store frequently watched programs, creating an almost video-on-demand experience for users.

The NDS box will reportedly be able to handle MPEG4 format streams, which means more hi-def with less hard drive storage. It’ll be interesting to see whether DirecTV offers incentives to current TiVo owners to get them to upgrade.

And a prediction: It’ll be 2007 before the HD versions of these new boxes are available outside of a few test markets.