In a larger article in TWICE about the Community Broadcasters Association (CBA) joining with Dish Network to promote their digital-to-analog converter boxes was a little nugget I found interesting.

Dish Network is selling several converter boxes — the TR-40 CRA, DTVPal, DTVPal Plus and the DTVPal DVR (the latter available latter[sic] this month) — that will receive and convert digital TV signals to analog and pass through remaining low-power TV channels.

Information on the DTVPal DVR, introduced back at CES as the EchoStar TR-50, has been pretty scarce. It is an OTA-only DVR, basically a DTVPal (TR-40) converter box with added DVR features. So it’ll be interested to see those hit the market.

As for the main subject of the article, the CBA will be teaming with Dish Network to promote Dish’s lineup of converter boxes to TV viewers who will be impacted by the February 17, 2009 digital transition.

Disclaimer: I work for Sling Media, which is owned by EchoStar, who makes the boxes for Dish Network.

According to TWICE, Digeo has signed an agreement with BendBroadband to distribute the Moxi 3012 HD DVR to their digital cable customers in central Oregon. BendBroadband is a small cable MSO serving the Bend, Redmond, Sisters, Black Butte, Tumalo, and Terrebonne areas of Oregon. Digeo claims this is the second order and deployment for the 3012, I’m presuming the first is the previously reported deal with Charter. However, I still have not been able to find any indication that Charter has actually deployed the Moxi 3012 to anyone who isn’t an employee of Charter. It doesn’t seem to be available to consumers yet.

The Moxi 3012 will provide two-way communication with the BendBroadband head-end, however it does not use tru2way but rather the legacy communication channels. A Multi-Stream CableCARD enables dual-tuner support. Deployment is targeted for sometime this quarter (4Q08), we’ll see.

Normally I’d review something like this myself. But I not only work for Sling Media, but I’m the Beta Manager on the Slingbox PRO-HD. So that really wouldn’t be appropriate. Instead here’s a roundup of coverage I’ve seen so far:
SlingCommunity – Blog
SlingCommunity – Review
Zatz Not Funny
EngadgetHD
Engadget
PC Magazine
CNET Crave
CNET – Review
Washington Post
Ecoustics

EDIT: And more coverage:
The Gadgetress
Engadget
EngadgetHD
jkOnTheRun
Gizmodo
Obsessable
TG Daily
TWICE
Silicon Alley Insider
TVPredictions
TechSpot
SlashGear
Multichannel News
ZDNet – The Mobile Gadgeteer
TheStreet.com
Electronista
Electronic House
Boy Genius Report
eHomeUpgrade
ZDNet – The Toybox
Obsessable – Product Page

According to TWICE, Digeo is working on two Moxi cable DVRs. The first will be distributed through Charter later this month, to also be followed by ‘a second MSO’. It’s only four months after they announced this the first time. Back in May at The Cable Show Digeo announced that Charter would carry the Moxi 3012 HD DVR by the end of 3Q08. So they have less than two weeks to meet that goal.

Of course, back in January Digeo’s then COO, now President, Greg Gudorf told me that their cable DVR would ship by the end of 1Q08. So we’ll see how this roll out goes.

The other Moxi DVR will be a CableCARD consumer product sold at retail and expected to ship in January. That will be a year after Digeo suddenly canceled all of their planned consumer products, just days after showing them at CES and talking up the launch plans.

Details on the consumer product are thin, I’m presuming they’ll have something to say about it at CES in January. Of course, they did last year too. Unsurprisingly it will be a CableCARD-enabled DVR, and it will not be tru2way-enabled. It sounds like they’re pitching all the same features they were on the canceled products – music and photo access, content partners, home control integration, etc. For music content Digeo has lined up FineTune, Rhapsody and Sirius and they have Flickr for photos.

The one new item that I found interesting is that they’re implementing DLNA support. I’d like to see more products supporting DLNA, standards are good and DLNA has growing support across a number of products such as the Xbox 360, PS3, HP Media Smart TVs, Blu-ray players, etc.

Digeo is also apparently still working on their Moxi TV for PC software, which I was told was in beta and close to release at CES 2008 in January. Though according to TWICE they have it running on XP, Vista, and Media Center versions of Windows now, and not just XP as at CES. No word on when it might be available to consumers.

Gudorf told TWICE that Digeo is working on future products for post-July 2009 which will support tru2way. Digeo signed the tru2way accord in June. But I’m not even going to devote any mental energy to that until Digeo manages to ship something to consumers.

Digeo started talking about launching new consumer products two years ago, in September 2006. (Which I picked up, amusingly enough, from an article in TWICE.) I talked to them at CES 2007 where they were showing mock ups and no real products with the promise of shipping later in the year.

They insisted they’d ship in time for the 2007 holidays up through September. (Oddly enough, another article from TWICE. Is covering Digeo a September tradition for them?) Then in November they admitted they weren’t going to ship in 2007.

Then I talked to them again at CES 2008, and they were showing off some of the same mock-ups they’d had at CES 2007, as well as some actual products. Just a week later they canceled the products and laid off nearly half of their staff. Digeo’s Gary Gudorf talked to me the next day to offer clarifications, including that their cable MSO product would ship by the end of 1Q08, which it didn’t.

We didn’t hear anything else until April when details on the cable product emerged. And then in May they exhibited at The Cable Show and issued a press release announcing Charter’s intention to carry it. In June Digeo signed the tru2way accord.

And now here we are in September again, two years after they first announced their intention to enter the consumer DVR market, and they’re promising a box ‘expected to ship in January’. You’ll pardon me if I don’t hold my breath. Assuming they do exhibit at CES in January, I’ll check out their offerings, again. As I said when I covered them this year, I think they have some good design points. But none of it matters until they manage to get a box on retail shelves.

I hear it’ll come bundled with Duke Nukem Forever.

Tipped off by EngadgetHD.

EDIT: This got some attention in AVS Forum, including from a Charter rep, who wasn’t encouraging:

Ironically yesterday I got whispers from a contact in St Louis who works with someone who’s got a beta 3012 (Don’t get hopes up, so far it seems only a few elite managers and tech ops people in St Louis have gotten to beta this unit)

Apparently it’s still got quite a few bugs, which I think is very odd, given really all they needed to do was improve on the existing hardware and leave the software alone.

At any rate I don’t expect to see them in 2 weeks, heck at the rate things are going, I’d consider us lucky if we see them before Q3 2009

I’d say I’m surprised or that this is unusual so close to a planned release – but frankly this is what I’ve come to expect from Digeo. They’ve had one product actually make it to market, the BMC9000 STB series from Motorola running the Moxi software. But that launched back in 2004 and has been out of production for a long time now. At its peak it only reached around 400,000 users, and the number of Moxi uses is believed to be much smaller now as units have been replaced with newer, non-Moxi DVR models. Unsurprisingly the main MSO to use Moxi was Charter, which, like Digeo, is controlled by Paul Allen. But even with it being ‘in the family’ Charter’s use of Moxi was minor.

Moxi’s history since they were acquired by Digeo has been one of failed execution. Early on Moxi was on their way to being a competitor in the consumer DVR space and they had some cutting edge plans, then Digeo acquired them and refocused them on cable MSOs instead of retail. Digeo acquired Moxi way back in 2002 – and in six years what have they done? One product which never achieved more than minor market penetration, and is now well out of date and discontinued. Aside from that they have a history of press releases and announced partnerships, awards won for products announced but never shipped, staff layoffs, and repeated product delays and cancellations. If they didn’t have Paul Allen backing them I don’t see how they’d still be in business. Digeo needs to ship a product, a good product, to significant numbers of users, if they want to earn consumer trust again.

I posted this morning about LG Electronics signing the cable MOU on tru2way. Well, it looks like Funai Electric has also signed it. You may not be familiar with the Funai name, but Funai markets their products under the Philips, Magnavox, Sylvania, and Emerson brand names and also provides ’store brand’ units such as Insignia for Best Buy and Pye for Circuit City.

Picked up from TWICE.

Well, just the other day I reported on ARCHOS adding place-shifting to their 605 WiFi, 705WiFi, and TV+ systems with their ‘TVportation’ plug-in. And now comes news via TWICE that ARCHOS also intends to turn the 605 WiFi into an automotive GPS navigation device.

They’ll accomplish this via the release of a car cradle which will hold the 605 against the windshield while incorporating the GPS antenna and receiver as well as TeleAtlas maps of the US and Canada, an RDS receiver for live traffic updates, and an FM transmitted to deliver turn-by-turn directions via the car’s speakers. (They can also come via the 605’s speaker.) It seems like ARCHOS is really trying to make their PMPs into all-purpose gadgets.

TWICE is reporting on a study by J.D. Power and Associates and Market Force Information which shows that retailers have been heavily promoting Blu-ray to shoppers, even before the recent announcements. In January they sent secret shoppers into 200 retail outlets posing as consumers who recently acquired an HDTV and were looking for a high-def disc player to go with it. Around 25% of sales reps didn’t recommend a format, but of the 74% who did, 89% recommended Blu-ray. And, in fact, “very strongly recommended Blu-ray, to the point that a typical customer would have had to think long and hard before buying HD DVD in the face of what salespeople are telling them about the two platforms” according to Chris Denove, J.D. Power and Associates VP.

While Best Buy announced they would officially promote Blu-ray just this past week, de facto they seem to have been promoting it as far back as at least January. In the study, not one Best Buy rep recommended HD DVD. Reps were also quick to mention the format war, and were already declaring Blu-ray the winner:

“Without even being asked about the battle for DVD supremacy, half the salespeople told our shoppers that there was a battle going on and Blu-ray either was already the winner (or would become the dominant player in the end),” [Denove] said.

“About a third of all salespeople said our shoppers should choose Blu-ray because of the strength of the companies behind Blu-ray,” Denove said.

The only advantage mentioned for HD DVD in the 200 visits was pricing, and not one sales person suggested that HD DVD might win the format war. Combo players didn’t fair well either, only 7% of sales people even suggested combo players as an option. It seems that sales people were personally so convinced that Blu-ray would win that they didn’t feel the need to suggest combo players, or HD DVD.

Via EngadgetHD.

TWICE magazine reports that leaked NPD figures show Blu-ray is still dominating player sales. For the week ending January 26th Blu-ray claimed 65% of standalone player sales to HD DVD’s 28%. And 6% went to the combo players. (The other 1%? Rounding error I presume.) On a dollar basis BD took 69%, HD DVD 14% (reflecting the steep price cuts), and combo players 17% (reflecting their high prices). Note that the NPD figures count only standalone players and not game consoles.

The leaked NPD data broke down the sales by brand:

• Sony (32 percent unit share, 33 percent dollar share)
• Toshiba (28 percent unit share, 14 percent dollar share)
• Samsung (13 percent unit share, 23 percent dollar share)
• Sharp (17 percent unit share, 14 percent dollar share)
• Panasonic (8 percent unit share, 12 percent dollar share)
• LG (1 percent unit share, 3 percent dollar share)

That’s not a good sign for Toshiba, when Sony alone is selling more players than they are – despite the price cuts.

And, in the rumor category, it Home Cinema Choice is reporting that UK high street retailer Currys may be dropping HD DVD. HCC claims an internal source told them it is posted on the Currys’s intranet and is ‘100% certain’. But they’ve also updated to say that, since the news leaked a ‘certain manufacturer of HD DVD’ (which must be Toshiba, really) is lobbying Currys to keep stocking the format.