WOW! Gets Moxi, Retail Loses It – Thus The Balance Is Maintained

While EchoStar might be struggling with Aria, ARRIS is doing better with Moxi. They’ve placed the ARRIS Whole Home Solution with WideOpenWest Networks, aka WOW!. WOW! is a mid-size MSO, just a bit larger than RCN.

The ARRIS Whole Home Solution consists of a Moxi Gateway six-tuner DVR and Moxi Players to deliver the content to sets throughout the home. In addition to cable television the Moxi Gateway includes support for DOCSIS 3.0 data services and VOIP for telephone service, MoCA connectivity, media sharing, and an option for WiFi. The WOW! offering will have a 500GB hard drive, which doesn’t seem like a lot when you have six tuners. It will hold up to 300 hours of SD content or 75 hours of HD content.

WideOpenWest will be branding this new offering as WOW! Ultra TV. Pricing is $25/month for the gateway and two players. They even have a video introducing it:

This news comes on the heels of ARRIS announcing that they’re finally giving up on the retail market. As the Moxi website now states:“The Moxi HD DVR and Moxi Mate are no longer available for purchase.” That effectively leaves TiVo as the only advanced DVR available at retail, certainly the only retail standalone CableCARD DVR. (No, I do not consider the Channel Master TV to be in the same category.)

Since ReplayTV’s demise, Moxi has been the only real contender as a competitor for TiVo, but their history is like a Keystone Cops routine when it comes to bungled launches and incomprehensible product plans. When the finally brought a unit to retail it was basically not marketed at all and therefore only known to those who already knew to look for it, and at a fairly high price. Since ARRIS acquired Moxi it has been clear that they’ve been focused on bringing the technology to the MSO market, with little interest in retail. So it isn’t a surprise that they’re pulling out, more that it took this long.

They offer a real competitor to TiVo in the MSO market, which might be a factor in TiVo’s recent deal with Pace. Pace is a major player in the MSO market and makes integrated gateway units, similar in hardware capabilities to ARRIS’s Moxi Gateway.