[ZeoTiVo]

I am going to try and hold out for 400$ after rebate, since I miss little now with my 4 TiVos and just use analog extended basic cable and SD.

how about adding a poll

 

[ZeoTiVo]

The big question will be monthly fee. I don't see how they are going to market this box with the current monthly fee. Since it will require users (who want digital) to rent a cablecard (and most people will want two), its going to be hard to keep the current price point. Asking people to invest a lot of money into a box and then still pay almost twice the current montly fee of a hd dvr from the cable money is going to be a hard sell. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

but they can return cable boxes and swap them for the cable card(s). People pay extra for digital cable, just the way it is and not TiVo's problem.

now selling a 700$ or whatever box with 12$ monthly or 300$ lifetime will be TiVo's problem, but for those that do not want that then get an SD TiVo and a cable box for much less adn give up HD as that will also cost more if you want it

 

[ZeoTiVo]

I thought the fees for Time warner and Comcast were like $2/month for cablecard. Where are you getting this "pay almost twice" estimate. Is there a table somewhere of cableco charges for CC?

he was referring to the TiVo monthly fee vs the Cable co DVR fee

 

[ZeoTiVo]

Thanks, makes good sense. So do we know if Series 3 compatible with either DirecTV MPEG-2 or MPEG-4? Or are we facing the end of Tivo / DirecTV forever and ever ahmen with the HR10-250 and other models from the last year or so.

follow the link in my signature for a detailed thread on why the series 3 or any stand alone DVR can not record HD from any receiver be it satellite or cable and that it is the cable card being able to decrypt digital signals from cable that makes the stand alone HD recorder possible for cable subscribers only.

also note that cable companies are very unlikely to go to mpeg4 anytime soon the cost and complexity of doing so out weighs any gain for them since they have the bandwidth on cable and the direction is to go all digital eventually anyway adn dropping an analog channel gives them room for 4 or 5 mpeg2 digital channels. They just have no need like the sat companies do. the mpeg4 playback on a sereis 3 is for downloadable content where file size matters in relation to downloading time.

all in all I can see the cost of the sereis 3 being high and fairly so to recoup R&D and startup costs but since my S2 TiVos record all I need then the two tuners are more convenience factor adn HD is worth only so much to me right now. I can hold out for 400$ for hardware.