Nicholas Petreley over at Linux Journal has a couple of good blog entries about the furor around TiVo, Linux, and the GPL:
A fight against evil or a fight for attention?
The Pet Peevo with TiVo

Warning, geeky content.

A press release I just caught on U.S. Newswire.

Press release…
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After years of bringing people together in living rooms across America for Super Bowl parties, Oscar parties, and countless viewing parties of every kind, TiVo is offering its fans the first opportunity to share their passion for the invention they credit with changing their lives with their wider circles of friends and family at official TiVo Tasting Parties. At these parties, which will be held in cities across the nation on Saturday September 30,th TiVo subscribers will offer a Taste of TiVo — fun-filled parties for their friends who have heard of the TiVo service but never experienced it for themselves. To date, more than a thousand TiVo subscribers have signed up to play party hosts.

Sling Media, maker of the placeshifting Slingbox device, on Wednesday released three new gadgets for watching TV remotely: the Slingbox Pro, Slingbox AV and Slingbox Tuner. Each product targets a different segment of the TV-watching market–home-theater enthusiasts; DVR or cable set-top box owners; and basic-cable subscribers.

I know I just posted about these yesterday, but it looks like they officially launched today. Dave Zatz has had one to play with for a while. He reports that the major changes are higher resolution (640×480) and higher bitrates (up to 8000Kbps). MacOS support is in beta and should release in the next 30 days, with Symbian support coming later this fall.

Now, where is that PalmOS support? How about the long rumored Sling Catcher?

The Slingbox is popular with many TiVo users. The TiVo does time-shifting, and the Slingbox does place-shifting, making for a good combo. It looks like the second generation of Slingbox products is hitting the streets. Dave Zatz, at ZatzNotFunny, reported finding one of them at his local Best Buy. They’re diversifying their product line, and there will be three different boxes now - the Slingbox A/V, Tuner, and Pro. The AV is similar to the first generation product, controlling an external source - like a TiVo. The Tuner has an internal analog cable tuner. The Pro can control up to 4 devices, and appears to include HD input. The new packaging also indicates that, in addition to Windows (including Windows Mobile) and MacOS support, Symbian support is on the way. (Now if they’d only support PalmOS I might buy one to use with my Treo.)

PVRWire also has a report. And Engadget has pictures of the packaging, which includes a feature matrix:

With the Pro supporting HD input, it’d be an interesting companion to the Series3.

The format war around next-generation DVDs may be over before it has begun, thanks to a breakthrough from a British media technology company.

Basically they’ve developed a way to produce multi-layer discs less expensively with higher yields.

In the early days of DVRs the two big players were TiVo and ReplayTV. A little while later Moxi popped up, promising all kinds of features. But then Moxi’s management changed, they were purchased by Digeo, and they’ve spent the past several years pursuing only licensing deals to put their software on cable DVRs, etc. They never released a standalone product, and their licensing efforts haven’t met with much success. ReplayTV, of course, crashed and burned, leaving TiVo alone in the market for full-featured, standalone DVRs.

Well, it looks like Digeo Moxi may be changing tack again and launching a standalone DVR product. TWICE (This Week In Consumer Electronics) has an article on it. They announced their plans during the CEDIA Expo last week. It sounds like they’ll have a box on display at CES 2007 - so I’ll be sure to track it down when I’m there.

Former Sony A/V marketing executives Mike Fidler, now Digeo’s CEO, and Greg Gudorf, now Digeo’s COO, said they will showcase at International CES in January a multi-tuner HD cable box with built-in DVR to be priced at around $1,000. Plans are to begin selling the product through consumer electronics retail partners by fall 2007, they said.

It will be based on the same software Moxi uses for the cable boxes. They currently have a total user base of around 400,000 - about 9% of TiVo’s current user base.

From the description it sounds like they’ve dusted off their plans from several years back and updated them for newer technology. The box will support broadband networking, and will contain an optical disc drive - at least DVD, and possibly Blu-ray or HD DVD. They’re looking to provide broadband media, similar to TiVo’s plans. It will use CableCARD, just like TiVo’s Series3, to access digital cable and HD content. They’re planning to use Multi-Stream CableCARD, so they could use one card for two tuners. By the time the box ships, in late 2007, that should be feasible. By then the Series3 should also have support for M-Card, via a software update. (M-Card is only now just starting to appear.) While they say they plan to support video-on-demand, etc, the standards for that have not been finalized yet, and may not be by the end of 2007 at the current pace. So they may not be able to offer such features until the standards are finalized and then rolled out by cable MSOs.