[opendtv] TiVo vs. MCE vs. cable

From: Monty Solomon <monty@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: undisclosed-recipient: ;
Date: Wed, 9 Mar 2005 01:00:22 -0500
TiVo versus MCE versus my cable company
Ed Bott
March 03, 2005

These are rough times for a TiVo fanatic. The company and its 
groundbreaking box are getting squeezed into irrelevance. On the one 
side, cable companies offer their own DVR boxes, which may not be 
elegant but are easy and cheap. On the other side, you have PC-based 
solutions like Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, which do more 
than a TiVo and are improving by leaps and bounds every year.

I've been thinking about this topic for the past month, after I 
received a weekly Circuits e-mail on the topic from David Pogue, a 
sharp and funny writer for the New York Times. (It took me 20 minutes 
to navigate through the Times' horrible search facilities, but I 
finally found David's column online. You can read the whole thing 
here until the Times decides to put it behind their 
paid-subscribers-only firewall.)

Anyway, David's thesis was that TiVo (the company) isn't doomed, 
because TiVo (the gadget) is so refined and elegant and ingenious 
that nothing should be allowed to compete with it. And to prove it, 
he provides a laundry list of features that make the TiVo so hip it 
hurts. The list comes with a qualifier, of course: "I do realize that 
many rival boxes have some of these features. But none that I know of 
offers all of these them - and especially not in such an easy-to-use, 
brilliantly designed software package."

Well, it's a very good list. And since I am in the enviable position 
of owning a Series 1 TiVo, two PCs running Windows XP Media Center 
Edition 2005, and a high-definition Explorer 8300HD digital video 
recorder from Scientific Atlanta, I thought it might be instructive 
to compare all three.

...

http://www.edbott.com/weblog/archives/000509.html

 
 
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[opendtv] TiVo vs. MCE vs. cable

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