How Stuff Works – DVR & TiVo

Posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 by MegaZone

Troy on TiVo had a couple of posts linking to articles on How Stuff Works on How DVR Works and How TiVo Works.

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$200 rebate on Series3 for Father’s Day

Posted on Monday, May 21, 2007 by MegaZone

Spotted on EngadgetHD, who picked it up from TiVoCommunity.com, TiVo has a $200 rebate coming on the Series3 – good from May 27th to June 16th. The rebate form hasn’t appeared on TiVo.com yet, but DVRupgrade.com has it up. The rebate form is available as a PDF. Note that it is only good on the Series3.

Amazon.com is currently selling the Series3 for $606.95, so, unless they raise the price this week, that’d bring the Series3 down to $406.95 after rebate! And there are others selling it for around $600 as well. DVRUpgrade sells several expanded Series3 options as well.

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Major change – WordPress!

Posted on Sunday, May 20, 2007 by MegaZone

Well, if you visit the site you’ll probably notice a major change. I’ve been working for a while on setting up WordPress to use on the site, and I just flipped the switch to make it live. To jump start things, I’ve exported all of my past posts from the Live Journal community and imported them into WordPress. Just the posts I made – it would not be cool to appropriate posts others have made in the community, of course. (And not quite all of my posts, I discarded a few that didn’t make any sense to bring over.)

What does this mean for the LJ community? Not much, really. I fully intend to keep posting TiVo-related posts to both the blog and the community. So why setup the blog? I’ve long felt conflicted about what I post in the community. While TiVo is my main focus, I’m also interested in many other products and technologies. However, since the LJ community is really supposed to be just about TiVo, I’ve always felt conflicted about posting on other issues, and so I’ve refrained from making a number of posts.

So, the blog will give me a place to post more freely about whatever tech catches my eye, while the ‘off topic’ non-TiVo posts to the community will drop off. I will continue to maintain the LJ community as a TiVo resource for the LJ users, while WordPress on the site will function as a more traditional blog.

Some of the posts came out worse for the wear after going through the LJ export, WP import meat grinder. I’ve fixed some of the recent posts, and over time I’ll try to go back through the archive and clean up the markup on the older posts.

I’m also still feeling my way with WordPress and I may be tweaking the layout and such over time.

Thank you, and welcome to the next phase in the evolution of TiVo Lovers. :-)

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TiVo Launches New Universal Swivel Search To Easily Find All the Content The TiVo Service Brings to

Posted on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 by MegaZone

Consumers are being presented with more and more choices of what to watch on television these days. With programming coming in from hundreds of digital cable channels, combined with movies, TV shows and high-quality video available for download through the TiVoCast service and Amazon Unboxâ„¢ on TiVo, with the latter alone now having thousands of titles itself, it is easy to get lost in this sea of choices. Enter the TiVo service’s new universal Swivel Search, the first truly TV-centric on-screen search tool that allows subscribers to explore and discover broadcast, cable and broadband-available content in one easy-to-use experience.

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Is Cisco getting into the DVR market?

Posted on Tuesday, May 15, 2007 by MegaZone

Well, that’s something of a trick question. Cisco owns Scientific Atlanta, so they’re really already in the DVR market. But are they getting into the consumer market? Possibly. Over the past few years, Cisco has made a number of acquisitions – Scientific Atlanta, KiSS Technology, and Linksys – bringing them into the consumer market. SA, of course, is one of the two major cable STB vendors for US cable MSOs, along with Motorola. KiSS has a presence mainly in Europe, and they make networkable DVD players. Linksys is best known for their networking gear, but they also make media extenders, etc. Business Week has an article on Cisco’s consumer play.

The rumor is that Cisco is preparing a consumer product that will combine the TV & DVR capabilities from SA, with networking and media extender technology from Linksys, and UI and DVD systems from KiSS. If it is true, their biggest challenge won’t be the hardware – that’s really the easy part. It will be developing the software to make the experience easy and enjoyable for consumers. Just throwing features into a box isn’t hard, but developing a well polished UI and a stable platform is no mean feat.

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