TIVO on Comcast, Motorola DVR's- Yea!!

As you know I’m a die hard tivo fan.  I just went through the upgrade from hell that I shared with everyone, and have since heard from an endless stream of “DirecTV screwed me too emails”.  Anyway, I ended up getting the Tivo Series 3 and loving it.  But, as I would point out,"along with the rest of the world" the S3 is crazy expensive.  It works at least 10 times better than anything on the market, which is how the price, apparently, got set but I have been watching the Comcast/Tivo partnership with interest.

Now, first off, I’m pretty damn suspicious of the Tivo/Comcast deal.  Not that I don’t think it’s a good business deal for both, which I do, but I think it’s a disaster waiting to happen for consumers. 

For those keeping score, I have had several of the Comcast Motorola boxes.  They are, by my most generous review, total pieces of shit.  They are completely laughable.  That is, if you weren’t trying to use them.

At least half of the problems I have experienced with the Motorola gear is without a doubt hardware issues…..and, the other half are, without a doubt,  software issues. I’m an old school dude that knows the difference, so please don’t send me emails about this.

BUT, here is why this is a train wreck that is going to play-out, right in your living room…

1)    The Motorola box overheats, I mean really overheats.  I mean turns to molten goo and melts to the center of the earths core, over-heats. Last year we had people over for the Superbowl and I actually got an “extra dvr” so I could change hardware at half-time if need be.  My neighbor,  “tjmaven” lets call him, has his suspended with coasters within his media cabinet like Tom Cruse in Mission Impossible.  And, it is mission impossible, TO GET IT TO WORK.

2)    The Tivo stuff is no doubt ported to the lower level driver software written for the Motorola (perhaps even a layer up the stack).  In fact if you believe this dude, it's written on top of OCAP.  Oh god, not another decade long effort from CableLabs (located down the street from me ironically). Pvrblog has an article that talks about Motorola and OCAP that asks “how much will OCAP cost consumers?”. They explain, “It won’t cost consumer anything…”.. Ok, my guess is it will cost consumers 10 YEARS, about the same as cable-card..

For the counter point read this dude's report.  He was at CES, as I was last year.  I saw the S3 there and waited all year for it..  It rocks, I'm not just saying that because I bought an unmentionable amount of TIVO stock..   

(I did buy a AppleTV last week, ships in a month, I’ll report on Internet TV later). 

Comments

[Mike M]

Oh good, you got an ATV. I was hoping someone I know would. My big question is: what is the market currently not getting about ATV? I'm enough of an Apple fanboy to think that they would not have spent the R&D to bring the product to market unless there's something bigger behind it than what we saw in the keynote.

The tantalizing detail that I think got glossed over in Jobs' speech was the ability to play movie trailers from the Apple.com site. It's such a non-compelling feature that I have to imagine it was put in there as more of a demonstration to the content industry. Are they gunning for the networks to start putting out QT streams?

I look at the current underwhelmed reaction to ATV and I'm reminded of how everyone reacted to the iPod when it was first introduced (the infamous Rob Malda quote: "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.") Now we're all lining up to plunk down $600 for a telephone because it's an iPod. I'm convinced with the ATV that there's something in there we just haven't seen yet.

[todd vernon]

Mike,

There isn't anything that special about the hardware and i think that is why is being ignored a bit. People have been trained to by this stuff based on Tech Specs. BUT, i think the real power here is continuous chipping away at the content market by Jobs. I suspect there will continue to be more and more content (now in HD) available through iTunes and it will be a pretty good "TV Show" and "Movie Platform".. If Apple can;t do it knowone can.. At the box is reasonably cheap from my perspective..

[greg]

I work at Comcast..I feel your pain on the DVR.. what is the Comcast/TiVO thing? I haven't heard a lick about it.

Anything would be an improvement though. (and I got an email from one of your coworkers about your new software search engine. I'll put it on my blog and see how it goes)

Greg