Recently ZDNet’s Ed Burnette lost a TiVo in a lightning storm. When that happened he decided to give Time Warner’s Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8340HDC DVR a try rather than having his old TiVo, which had lifetime but was not HD, repaired. Ed thought he’d try this because, as he puts it:

The Time Warner DVR box model was free, and the service cost $7.95/month. Also I was excited at the possibility of finally getting high definition content on my Sony HDTV. I asked some friends who used it and they seemed happy with it.

But the reality of the situation was not so rosy:

I can sum up my experiences with the Time Warner DVR in one word: Argh!

Ed enumerates the myriad of issues he experienced with the cable DVR in his article at ZDNet. From the terrible button-farm remote with unintuitive controls, to the lack of a priority list for the DVR’s version of Season Passes, to odd quirks during normal use (like the screen blacking when you pause playback and having trouble resuming playback), and more. And it sounds like his family agreed:

After two weeks of this I decided enough was enough. The family all agreed. We wanted TiVo!

Ed considered paying the $150 repair fee, which would really see him upgraded to a Series2DT with his lifetime transferred. But he’d had a taste of HD and native digital cable support, so he instead opted for the TiVo HD. After ordering his new TiVo HD, but before it shipped, TiVo announced the TiVo HD XL.

Knowing a good thing when he sees it, Ed canceled the TiVo HD and ordered a TiVo HD XL.

I think TiVo should send a nice thank you gift to Time Warner and Cisco/Scientific Atlanta for providing such a crappy DVR. The bad experience helped turn a potential lost customer with a dead TiVo into a high-end customer with the latest and greatest TiVo. Cisco’s bad DVR was good for TiVo.

It isn’t quite as good as the recent $131.99 deal at Buy.com, but it is still a good one. Amazon is selling the Western Digital 500GB My DVR Expander eSATA drive, compatible with the TiVo Series3 and TiVo HD (and Scientific Atlanta cable DVRs) for just $134.99. That’s 29%, $55, off the usual Amazon list price of $189.99.

The Motorola MTR700 and the Cisco STA1520, which we knew were slated for Wave 60 certification testing at the end of June, have both passed, as reported by Multichannel News. With both major vendors’ Tuning Adapters certified, cable MSOs should be able to soon begin offering them to customers soon to support Switched Digital Video (SDV). This is a little bit behind schedule, the Tuning Resolver (as the Tuning Adapter was then known) was expected in 2Q08. But even coming in a few months late it has been an impressively quick development cycle for the cable industry. It is known that Motorola started working on their unit last July, and they were revealed to the public last August. So it has been just about a year from the start of work to certification, which is really not a lot of time to develop, test, and certify a new product.

As recently revealed, the new 9.4 TiVo update includes Tuning Adapter support, so TiVo users will be ready for the TAs as soon as the cable MSOs make them available. As Bright House, Cox, Time Warner, and others all implementing SDV, the TAs will be increasingly important. Pricing for customers is not yet known, except for Cox which announced plans to provide the TAs to their customers free of charge.

From June 23rd through June 29th Buy.com is selling the Western Digital 500GB MyDVR Expander eSATA drive for just $149.99. They normally have it for $172.99, and the full MSRP is $199.99 – which is what TiVo.com sells it for. This is the only external eSATA drive officially approved for use with the TiVo Series3 or TiVo HD. It also works with the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 Series DVRs.

They’re actually have a sale on a number of Western Digital external drives, if you’re also looking for more capacity on your PC:
Western Digital 750GB My Book Essential Edition USB 2.0 External Hard Drive $139.99
Western Digital Elements 500GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive $89.99
Western Digital 500GB My Book Essential USB 2.0 External Hard Drive $96.99
Western Digital 320GB My Passport Elite USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive – Bronze $148.99
Western Digital 1TB My Book Essential USB 2.0 External Hard Drive $197.99
Western Digital 500GB My DVR Expander eSATA External Hard Drive $149.99
Western Digital 320GB My Book Essential II USB 2.0 External Hard Drive $79.99
Western Digital My Book Home Edition 1TB – Triple Interface (USB 2.0, eSATA & FireWire 400) External Hard Drive $237.99

Following up on his report on the Motorola MTR700, Ben Drawbaugh of EngadgetHD has posted photos of the corresponding Cisco/Scientific Atlanta STA1520 Tuning Adapter. While Motorola’s TA was part of a working demo, the Cisco box is just a static display, not connected to anything. While it has the same connections, the Cisco box is physically much larger than the Motorola TA. And while Motorola indicated that their TA could be available to cable MSOs in July, Cisco is only saying 3Q2008.

Still, progress is being made. Be patient a little while longer all you folks with SDV issues.

Following quickly after Motorola unveiled their MTR700 Tuning Resolver, Cisco has unveiled their tuning resolver as well, the STA1520, which looks like their RTG100 cable box. (Remember, Cisco purchased Scientific Atlanta, and they’re starting to use their own branding on products that formerly would’ve has the SA branding.) Cisco is calling it a ‘tuning adapter’ instead of tuning resolver, which I also noticed the NCTA reps doing during today’s conference call, perhaps that’s the new industry term? I wish they’d just pick a name and stick with it, I don’t think ‘tuning adapter’ is any better than ‘tuning resolver’, and at least the latter has been used for a while.

Like Motorola’s MTR700, Cisco’s STA1520 will be demo’d at the upcoming Cable Show, and it will be part of the Wave 60 certification process with CableLabs, so it too could be available by early July.

Via Light Reading’s Cable Digital News.

According to Multichannel News, Cisco is retiring the Scientific Atlanta brand in favor of their own. At CES next week they will be unveiling their new line of STBs, which will carry the Cisco brand in place SciAtl. Cisco acquired SciAtl in 2006 for $6.9 billion, but, until now, hasn’t changed the consumer branded on their products. Existing SciAtl product lines will retain the SciAtl branding, but all new products will be branded as Cisco gear. So the SciAtl brand will fade with time as the older product lines are refreshed. Cisco has dropped a press release about what they’ll be exhibiting at CES.

Picked up via Network World.

Don Reisinger at NewTeeVee has a quick tutorial on getting more HD resolutions out of your Scientific Atlanta cable STB. No hacking required, just a little back door into the configuration options. Pretty nifty. Via EngadgetHD.

SearchNetworking.com has an article about Cisco’s movies into the IP video market which contains a couple of TiVo mentions:

Second, the Scientific Atlanta deal helped Cisco find an ally in TiVo, the digital video recording company. “The combination of Scientific Atlanta technology and market girth and the user-friendly TiVo graphical user interface provides software and usability expertise,” Sizemore said.

And:

According to Sizemore, the Scientific Atlanta buy can vault Cisco into the interactive advertising market by enabling IP on set-top boxes. That method can give Cisco the ability to leverage its enterprise expertise to create a two-way marketing and sales engine directly into the living room, using a familiar and friendly interface from TiVo.

This is interesting because my impression is that TiVo and Cisco/Scientific Atlanta aren’t really partnered, but rather Comcast is funding development of the TiVo OCAP software to run on the SciAtl cable boxes. I’m sure that, as part of that effort, TiVo is working with SciAtl engineers on platform specifics, but this article makes it sound like a much closer relationship. It makes me wonder if the author, or at least the person he’s quoting, is reading too much into things, or if he knows more than has been public.