I took Comcast up on a dump your dish promotion a few weeks ago (previously my townhouse complex had a sucky small cable provider) to get cable modem, etc for a great bundle. I’m in Washington so I got the Microsoft Foundation DVR, BUT I didn’t actually turn off the DTV yet.

Short story, while I’m was a long-time Tivo fan, I was willing to drop it for generic DVR to get Comcast, good deal (multiproduct discount with cable modem, etc)…

However, after about two weeks, I can’t stand it. I’m going to keep the cable modem and dump the Comcast TV (even at cheaper per month for a year with HBO than standard DTV). The DVR doesn’t remotely compare.

I could live with the weaker ad-heavy user interface (Tivo easily kills the MSFT box in this area), Tivo suggestions I was willing to forgo, but I can’t live with the lousy dual-tuner support (no swap button on MSFT box), remote with a puny signal (button presses don’t take effect half the time, I can’t tell if it’s the remote or the DVR being unresponsive), and just plain overall poor usability. I though convincing my wife to give up Tivo would be the big obstacle, turns out I won’t even do it!

I was surprised because after the long-time Windows versus Mac user interface lawsuits, etc, I thought MSFT knew a lot about “cloning” a good UI.

With the recent Comcast Tivo deal (and the DTV Tivo deal phasing out), I figure I’ll probably switch back to Comcast cable in about a year when they have a new Tivo box (hopefully a big upgrade versus the current DTV Tivo!).

To be fair, I don’t use HDTV (which is the only clear advantage I can see versus the commodity DTV dual-tuner Tivos), so that Comcast price advantage was lost on me.

Maybe I can at least get some kind of deal for the next year out of DTV rention… we’ll see..

It’s fair enough to say that the reduced churn has nothing to do with the boxes because you are correct that dtivo has sold more non-hdtv boxes (although I suspect the mix is closer to 25 hdtv and 75 regular, but have no data to base my assumptions on.) Directv does however require an annual subscribtion for the cheap Tivo boxes. I guess that my point was that if someone owns something, it becomes an obstacle to change regardless of how much they paid for it. Because Comcast has chosen to rent their boxes, it will make it difficult for them to upgrade to larger hard drives and multi tuner’s as they became more available. Instead of forcing consumer to upgrade, they instead will be left with a bunch of boxes that they won’t be able to even give away (Is anyone in the market for windows 98 PC?) Directv, shouldn’t have too much trouble upgrading because their client base assumes ownership.

Churn is one reason Comcast did the deal. Another is that all of the work is on TiVo’s side. Comcast says “make it work with our boxes.” TiVo does all the work and Comcast keeps all of the money. Seems pretty straightforward to me.