One thing that annoyed me though was the comment.

[QUOTE]It will be interesting as Microsoft and their CableCARD approved PCs begin shipping later this year to see who comes to market with the first CableCARD PVR, Microsoft or TiVo.[/QUOTE] Considering there are at few CableCARD PVRs out on the market now (heck one’s even been discontinued already) The Sony DHG-HDD500 is a sweet machine, but the price tag was too steep for the market.

Fair enough, that sounds like a good enough reason, or at least a large enough obstacle to supporting HD in a Stand Alone box. Still TiVo should be talking about it, maybe if more consumers understood just how much DRM negatively impacted their lives it would be harder for the MPAA and their ilk to have their way like they do now.

Davis,

Of course I happen to be a Dish Network customer, and believe me I don’t relish the thought of paying more for DirecTV (and then buying an HD DirecTiVo that may become a boat anchor in a few years if DirecTV takes a page from Microsoft and decides to stop supporting DirecTiVos to force adoption of their own boxes), or worse yet paying still more for Cable (and supporting a monopoly).

I think that you might be looking at this the wrong way. Yes there are a lot of satellite subscribers who have customers, but there are also a lot of TiVo customers who won’t use Dish because of the imcompatibilities. DirecTV originally used TiVo as a competitive advantage over cable and I think the number of people who signed up is a great testimonial to how powerful TiVo’s software can be in attracting subscribers. It will be interesting to see how many customers end up choosing TiVo even with DirecTV aggressively marketing their own generic box.

Is TiVo really willing to write off that big a chunk of the market? Or do they think that people will continue to buy the Series2 even as the amount of households with HD capable TVs grows at an ever increasing pace?

Seriously, am I missing something or couldn’t they just put an IR blaster port and the right inputs (HDMI) on the Series3 and be done with it?

I suppose it is possible that CableCARD certification prohibits additional inputs or some other asinine legal restriction beyond TiVo’s control but at least let us know and don’t try to pretend that there aren’t MILLIONS of sattelite subscribers out there that are current or potential TiVo customers.

Just think about the millions of DirecTiVo customers you already have, these people are already TiVo devotees but over the next few years DirecTV will be trying to get them to switch to their own box and I can tell you that HD will be the big issue. TiVo is effectively telling these customers that they have to choose between TiVo and HDTV.