When I made the decision to be a DVR early adopter, I chose Replay-TV over TiVo. It’s just that I thought that the Replay was slightly better for the money. It wasn’t a Mac vs. PC decision: I wasn’t taking sides in some great cultural war or anything. At the time, if you said that you were getting a DVR, people had no idea what you were talking about, anyways.
Meanwhile, a lot of other people got TiVo, and fell in love with its easy-to-use interface, and its iconic boo-bop noise, so it became the verb, even while teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. I bought a second Replay — the one with the infamous commercial skip — just a couple of years prior to the company being sold, and being sold again. Now, it’s essentially a software company, and good luck to them — rarely does a technology change my life the way theirs did — but their PC Edition doesn’t fit what I need right now, what with my HD TV and everything.
What does fit, it looks like, is this new TiVo Series 3 with the HD. There is, however, a problem. There is always a problem.
First off, a skosh more backstory: I already have an HD-DVR. A cable company provided box from Scientific Atlanta that — what is the scientific term? — sucks total ass. I essentially traded usability for that beautiful HD output, and Satan just laughs every single day.
The point of all this is that I am absolutely the target market for the new TiVo. I would jump ship to this great sounding — Dual Tuners! HDMI! THX Sound! — box in about 2.3 seconds. Except for that one small problem that I mentioned earlier: the price. $800. Cut it in half, and I’m there. Cut it in half, and I’ll betcha that they’d sell more than double than they would at $800.
So please, TiVo, lower the price on Your HD-DVR and I promise that I will buy one, dump my crappy box provided by my cable company and love you forever!!