DirecTV and TiVo get closer to Splitsville

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.