Watch Out, TiVo! Better DVRs for 2005

For what seems like eons, I've been attending trade shows and seeing demonstrations of Digeo's Moxi, a slick-looking, next-generation set-top box for cable TV. Trouble was, it wasn't ever a technology that real TV watchers could get their hands on.

At this year's CES, Moxi looked at least as good as ever. And in the form of a Motorola set-top box called the Broadband Media Center, it's finally available to cable subscribers in a number of cities around the country, including St. Louis and a bunch of southern California towns. The box is being marketed as a TiVo-style digital video recorder, which it is--but it's really a lot more.

The Broadband Media Center provides all the standard DVR features, such as the ability to browse TV listings and record single shows or entire seasons of programming, and to pause and rewind live video. You can record both standard-definition and high-definition content to its 160GB hard disk.

The box also has a built-in DVD player that you can use to watch movies--or to rip your CDs and use the hard drive as a jukebox. There's a ticker feature that puts a scrolling information bar at the bottom of the screen--like the crawls on cable news channels, but totally customizable and interactive. There are even a bunch of built-in games, including an offbeat one that lets you hurl virtual tomatoes and pies at whoever happens to be on TV at the time.

If you've got multiple TVs around the house, you can use extender boxes called Moxi Mates that talk to the primary set-top box over your coaxial cable, replicating its functionality. And Digeo has plans for other features, such as Internet telephony and networked streaming of content from PCs.

For all of Moxi's power, the simplicity of its interface is also impressive, and there are lots of clever little touches, such as the ability to see what's coming up on a station without scrolling through programming grids, and to limit the programming guide to content in HD. The demo left me impressed--but also a little glum, since the Broadband Media Center, unlikea TiVo or ReplayTV box, isn't something you can just go out and buy. You only get it if your cable company chooses to offer it as an option (typically for around $8-$10 a month). Not to mention that I'm a DirecTV subscriber, not a cable customer.

But I cheered up when I got to DirecTV's booth and found that it too was showing off a new DVR, one that's scheduled to replace its current DirecTiVo box in the middle of the year. This box won't replicate Moxi's array of capabilities, but it has some smart touches, like "Mix" screens that show you picture-in-picture views of a bunch of channels in a particular genre all at once. (For football, the Mix screen even displays continuously-updated scores from all the games.)

At the moment, I'm still a happy user of an early ReplayTV. But it pales in comparison to the Moxi box, and the DirecTV DVR looks like it could be a tempting upgrade when it shows up. Not that TiVo is resting on its laurels--and that's not all the DVR news from CES. All in all, it feels like 2005 will be a good year for TV junkies...