The Digeo Moxi HD DVR which was announced a while ago, and shown (in mock-up form) at CES 2007, got fleshed out a bit in an interview in Multichannel News with Digeo CEO Mike Fidler. Apparently, it will have a 160GB drive and an eSATA port for external expansion – tested with up to 1TB. The box will be marketed both to cable MSOs, like their current product, as well as directly to consumers. Pricing hasn’t been announced, but Mike said it will cost MSO’s 1/3 less than the current units. Of course, that doesn’t really say anything about the retail pricing. Past rumors have put it as high as $1,000, but there is no way they could sell it for that. The Series3′s $800 MSRP is widely considered to be too high, and by the time the Moxi ships in Q4, TiVo should have their new ‘lower cost’ HD box out. Moxi is going to have to be competitive with the new TiVo box to get any traction.
Digeo is also working on porting the Moxi platform to OCAP, just as TiVo has done with the TiVo platform. It may be ready as early as Q4. It remains to be seen how well Digeo does with the new effort. The existing Moxi platform has been available to cable MSOs for several years, but is only deployed to 400,000 customers with eight cable MSOs. Moxi is going to have to offer some real advantages to MSOs to land more licensing deals. If an MSO is going to license software beyond the default vendor DVR platforms, TiVo brings a lot of brand recognition and features as an option. And their software is already being deployed in tests by Comcast. Even if Moxi has OCAP code in Q4, by then TiVo’s software should be widely deployed by Comcast and started deployment by Cox. Though I could see Digeo/Moxi being acquired by the likes of Motorola or Cisco/Scientific Atlanta to become the ‘default’ software.
I picked this up from PVR Wire @ TV Squad.
