The Direct Tv and Tivo thing seems to be about support not new boxes. The old Tivo’s do not support MPEG 4 in hardware and that is what al the new direct tv channels are broadcast in. So unless something unpredictable happens I doubt we will see new tivo stuff through direct tv.

My whole point though was really that, if things spin out the way I want to see them, then you could use any box, like tivo, with any provider like direct tv and fire or hire content providers at will based on quality of service/price etc.

The current Direct TV offering is not bad. The DVR is not as good as Tivo but they keep making decent changes (though some of the UI alterations are fairly random). It dose a few things better then tivo and few things worse but it’s much closer to break even then the Comcast box we had which simple stunk. So bad in fact that when Direct Tv got the scifi channel and cartoon network in HD I happy to fire comcast.

Something pretty interesting on this front is in the works though. A number of blogs have are saying that MS is finally getting ready to release the Fiji beta of MCE. In theory this will have support for the Direct TV USB tuners for media center that made the CES news.

No one know how this will all shake out of course (including the folks hip deep into trying to cut the deals in smoke filled back rooms) but in theory this is a great chance for the summers to get some control back.

If this is done right consumers can own (probable have to buy because cable labs SUCKS) a Media center box. Ideally you would be able to have either cable card or Direct TV provide content service to this box and then run extenders or whatever through house. This would give us all centralized content for our home media and choice of providers. If that goes down right others will have to come the party and we might finally get to start to decouple ourselves from the crapy single silo provider for all parts methodology that has been steadily screwing us, and 3rd party providers like tivo, for decades. Once the lock is broken a lot of opportunity can be generated for Tivo and everyone else to get back into being truly main stream and just a box choice for any provider to serve content through.

Consumer utopia is vendors having to compete on price, features and services for us, instead of competing through who can have the harshest anti consumer DRM on their proprietary pipe .

We’ve had TiVo for years, lifetime subscription, 9th tee hard drive upgrade, etc. Loved the bdeeps and bdoops, season passes, and the fact that after we season pass’d 3 shows it could figure out whether we voted Republican or Democrat. Then dish network wanted us to upgrade the dish/dvr but no TiVo so switched to direct for their TiVo interface then bullied by them to switch satellite dishes and dvrs to continue HD channels, but, too bad, no TiVo (agreement ended) our dvr just as good. Looked into stand-alone HD TiVo box: card? compatibility? tech calls? No thanks.

Went with direct DVR. NOT as good. FAR from good. BAD. Missed shows. Awkward interface. Whole family frustrated, and angry and looking at me. I want to rewind 5 years please. Bdeep bdoop?