A happy anniversary to TiVo, I hope you’re all enjoying Blue Moon X!

What am I talking about? Blue Moon is an annual TiVo holiday that celebrates TiVo’s first shipping of production units at the end of March 1999, the first Blue Moon day.

TiVoPony has a great explanation posted at TiVoCommunity.com.

Thank you for the TiVo Rewards Referral, Cameron. More points for giveaways!

In unrelated news, I got laid off today. *sigh*

I was just thinking about posting a reminder that the promotional pricing was about to expire on April 2, and TiVo goes and extends it through July 2. If you go to the ‘Choose a price plan’ page and then login you’ll see the text at the bottom now says: “These special prices expire on July 2, 2008.” Those prices are $9.95/month MSD, $99 1-year pre-paid, or $399 for product lifetime.

Note that the ‘Plan Details’ pop-up for lifetime still says the offer expires on February 13, 2008. TiVo forgot to update it the last time they extended the offer, and it looks like they’ve forgotten again. (*nudge*)

While I’m checking on things, it looks like they extended another offer as well. The offer to purchase a new TiVo HD and get three months of free service had expired back on February 17, but it has been resurrected and is now good through June 30, 2008. You buy the TiVo HD for $299.99, commit to one year of TiVo service @ $12.95/month, and the first three months of that year are free.

However, the TiVo HD with product lifetime bundle offer does still appear set to expire on April 1, 2008. That’s a TiVo HD with a TiVo WiFi adapter and product lifetime for $698.99. Or the TiVo HD with a TiVo WiFi adapter and a $100 service gift card for $399.99.

Of course, once the bundle expires existing subscribers will still be able to buy the TiVo HD and WiFi adapter, then pick up product lifetime for $399 when activating, as above.

Another deal that’s still set to expire, the factory-renewed TiVo HD for $199.99 deal is set to expire on April 2, 2008. That’s a factory-renewed TiVo HD for $199.99, with a commitment for 1-year of services at $12.95/month, or one-year pre-paid service at $129.

And if you don’t need the TiVo HD and a Series2DT would do you quite nicely, you can get one of those for free. There are various promotions out there to support different organizations which will get you a free S2DT, that one happens to be for the National Council of Women’s Organizations.

TiVo has their usual web specials as well.

Thanks to a reader for the tip on the July 2 extension.

Reports are surfacing on TiVoCommunity.com of a new 9.3 software revision which is starting to quietly appear on units in the field. And reader ‘mrmac14′ reported in a community comment that his Series2DT is now running 9.3.X.9-01-2-649. Early reports indicate the 9.3 updates brings progressive downloads to the S2 platform (the S3/HD got that in 9.2) as well as performance improvements with MRV transfers as well as with menu speed.

For those who are new to the process, when they’re getting close to a new release TiVo will first trickle it out to a handful of randomly selected boxes. Kind of putting a toe in the water to make sure everything is OK and no show stoppers were missed during beta testing. The next step is usually an early release, where they start a slow roll-out and put up a priority page for people who want it faster. And then, finally, the last step is full generally release where all the boxes are updated. So, barring TiVo finding an issue, it looks like 9.3 will be officially appearing on a TiVo near you soon.

Thanks to reader MickeS for calling my attention to this in a comment.

As reported by Multichannel News, cable MSOs have deployed 4.18 million CableCARD-enabled STBs in the last nine months. 1.9 million of those have been deployed since the last industry report on December 26th. However, as of March 19th, only approximately 347,000 CableCARDs had been distributed for use in third party devices, such as TiVo and CableCARD-enabled HDTVs. The majority of the cards have been installed in cable company set top boxes, since the FCC ban on integrated-security STBs went into effect last July 1st.

Still, that’s something of a good thing. I’d bet a majority of those 347,000 devices are TiVo Series3 or TiVo HD boxes, since they’re the leading CableCARD devices on the market. And being forced to deal with CableCARD in their own STBs should force the cable MSOs to wring out lingering issues in their systems, since they have to ‘eat their own dog food’ as it were.

Alexander, thank you for the TiVo Rewards Referral.

Keep the points coming for more giveaways. I’ll do another one soon after the Logo Contest is wrapped up.

This is a video of TiVo’s Joe Miller demonstrating TiVo at the Best Buy in downtown Toronto.

Picked up from TiVo Blog, who was tipped to it by Davis Freeberg.

Joseph, thank you for the TiVo Rewards Referral.

Keep the referrals coming folks - you can still do them through April 28th. I’ll be using the my remaining points for more giveaways, so the more referrals, the more loot.

Buy.com is running a Blu-ray sale through April 7th with 21 titles for $17.50 each. There is also a sale on PS3 accessories through March 31st, including the Blu-ray Remote for $19.99. And to calibrate your Blu-ray setup they have the newly released Blu-ray of Digital Video Essentials HD Basics, and decent prices on Blu-ray Discs in general.