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.
