PVRWire has rounded up a bunch of CNET videos. The main one of concern for this community is the video of the new TiVo Comcast software. But there are also videos of SlingCatcher, Hava, Moxi, etc. Check them out.

A while back I posted about Digeo’s announcement that they plan to get into the standalone HD DVR market in 2007. Several years ago Moxi was on track to release standalone DVRs, then Digeo acquired them and refocused on licensing the platform to cable MSOs. To date they’ve only had moderate success, deployed on a couple hundred thousand cable boxes. Meanwhile in just the past year or two, TiVo has landed major deals with Comcast and Cox, and now in Mexico. So Digeo is taking the Moxi platform back to the consumers directly.

Daze Zatz has some early info on the new Moxi boxes. Digeo will be making the full announcement tomorrow at CES, and Dave is having lunch with Digeo’s CEO Mike Fidler, so we should have more. Digeo will be releasing two boxes - the Moxi Multi-room HD DMR and the Moxi Home Cinema Edition HD DMR. Both systems will include a CD/DVD drive for media playback, support streamed content from PCs, and web-based scheduling. The Multi-Room HD DMR will use a CableCARD M-Card (Multi-stream) to support two tuners, and it will support use from multiple rooms in the home. (One expects, via some kind of client box on the other sets.) The Home Cinema Edition HD DMR is basically a media center PC running Linux with the Moxi interface, based on AMD’s LIVE! Home Cinema reference platform. Retail availability is expected in the second half of 2007, and pricing has not yet been announced.

The Multi-Room HD DMR seems like the most direct competition to the S3, with a similar feature set, at least from what has been revealed, with the addition of the CD/DVD drive. It remains to be seen how good of a DVD system it is - does it do upscaling, etc? I expect the S3 will also support M-Card before the Moxi boxes ship, since it was designed to do so by the specification was only finalized recently.

One benefit of all of these announcements, and Sony has also announced a CableCARD enabled Vista-based Media Center PC, is that there will be a lot of non-TV CableCARD devices coming to market this year. This will force cable MSOs to deal with CableCARD and provide better support for them as customer demand increases. A rising tide lifts all boats, and all that. This should relieve some of the issues that Series3 owners have had, due to MSO confusion and ignorance.

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.