More information on the Moxi HD DVR

The Digeo Moxi HD DVR which was announced a while ago, and shown (in mock-up form) at CES 2007, got fleshed out a bit in an interview in Multichannel News with Digeo CEO Mike Fidler. Apparently, it will have a 160GB drive and an eSATA port for external expansion – tested with up to 1TB. The box will be marketed both to cable MSOs, like their current product, as well as directly to consumers. Pricing hasn’t been announced, but Mike said it will cost MSO’s 1/3 less than the current units. Of course, that doesn’t really say anything about the retail pricing. Past rumors have put it as high as $1,000, but there is no way they could sell it for that. The Series3′s $800 MSRP is widely considered to be too high, and by the time the Moxi ships in Q4, TiVo should have their new ‘lower cost’ HD box out. Moxi is going to have to be competitive with the new TiVo box to get any traction.

Digeo is also working on porting the Moxi platform to OCAP, just as TiVo has done with the TiVo platform. It may be ready as early as Q4. It remains to be seen how well Digeo does with the new effort. The existing Moxi platform has been available to cable MSOs for several years, but is only deployed to 400,000 customers with eight cable MSOs. Moxi is going to have to offer some real advantages to MSOs to land more licensing deals. If an MSO is going to license software beyond the default vendor DVR platforms, TiVo brings a lot of brand recognition and features as an option. And their software is already being deployed in tests by Comcast. Even if Moxi has OCAP code in Q4, by then TiVo’s software should be widely deployed by Comcast and started deployment by Cox. Though I could see Digeo/Moxi being acquired by the likes of Motorola or Cisco/Scientific Atlanta to become the ‘default’ software.

I picked this up from PVR Wire @ TV Squad.

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  • anonymous

    First off, thanks for including Moxi on your blog, we love to see enthusiasm and comments from those who watch the space!

    I did want to take a moment to point out one inaccuracy though… the recent article in MultichannelNews refers *only* to our cable product line up. As many of you already know, Digeo’s Moxi products have only been sold to cable companies to date. This article refers to the continuation of the product line that will be sold to cable companies (and in turn, leased to their subscribers). THis is *not* to be confused with the consumer products we announced at CES: Moxi Multi-room HD DMR and Moxi Home Cinema HD DMR.

    While there will be some similarities between the cable and consumer line (namely the Moxi UI) the hardware will have substantial differences. To date we haven’t announced the hardware specs for our consumer products, but when we do, you will hear it first on the Moxi Forum at http://forums.moxi.com/

    I’ll leave responding to the skepticism about our cable prospects for another day :-)

    Cheers,

    MoxiMessenger