Notes from a Carbon Based Life Form

We have an HDTV at home. More precisely we have an HD-Ready TV. A nice Sony 57" rear-projection monstrosity that really makes itself apparent in the living room of our tiny condo. But my gadget-hound wife got a good deal on it, and actually bought it before I met her, which may have contributed to the marriage itself. :D

We have not, however, had an HD tuner for the TV. Last year we decided to get the HD package from COX Communications here in Fairfax VA, and voila! we were finally able to watch HDTV on our HD-Ready TV. What a beautiful picture. With the Olympics, it felt like we were there, in some super-VIP box, where we could reach out and give the athletes high-fives when they won, the picture was that good.

Earlier this year, after COX had announced they had an HD-DVR available. The HD-DVR is the Scientific Atlanta HD DVR (HD8300). We got it home, plugged it in, and WOW! We thought it was great....

Dual-Tuners. Great Feature. Record two shows, or record one, and watch another, use picture-in-picture to bounce back and forth.
Stunning HD Picture. Truly a beautiful picture
Easy-to-Use. It's just like your ordinary Scientific Atlanta cable box that you're already used to, with just a couple of extra DVR options.

...for about 30 minutes. Then we started getting into the nitty-gritty finer details of setting up recordings, and setting up our preferences on the box itself....

No fine grained recording options. Season-passes, record first-run shows only, keyword searches, etc. All missing.
If you stop a show in the middle, you have to start over from the beginning and pick up where you left off. No mid-show resume!
No multi-box home networking available.
No (and this is a cable box standard) ability to filter the channel list for the Interactive Channel Guide. What the hell?!?! I don't want to scroll through 900 channels when I'm trying to find something to watch? I don't even subscribe to most of those channels. I only want to look at the channels I subscribe to.
Unstoppable Auto-Poweroff. Yup. The 8300HD turns itself off after a period of inactivity. That's a deal killer for anyone with a standalone ReplayTV or Tivo DVR. Who wants to record an hour of "No Signal Detected".

... and we realized that although it had a couple of good features, the cons greatly outweighed the pros. And it's not like the cons were minor... at least for us. Most of the cons are deal-killers all by themselves. None of the pro's are deal-makers. Not even all together.

So we dumped it back in the hands of COX, and went back to a regular cable-box. Not even the HD-box. We'll go back to HD when there are some better options for HD-DVRs.

And for me the Tivo Series 3 doesn't cut the mustard. $800.00? Really? The best deal available is the $800 Tivo Series 3, with 3 years pre-paid service for $300.

That's $1100.00
$30.55/month for 3 years

And that's just for the Tivo. Each Tivo Series 3 is capable of hosting 2 cable cards. Cable cards from COX Communications in Fairfax are $1.99/month according to their website. What their website doesn't mention is that, according to the COX ~~rip-off artist~~ representative I spoke with, each cable card also requires a device called a "Gateway". Each "Gateway" costs $5.99/month. And there is NO mention of that anywhere on the COX - Fairfax website that I could find.

For less hardware than a cable box, you pay 2x-3x as much. It doesn't make much sense to me, but I suspect it has to do with the lost advertising revenue due to people who don't see the Interactive Channel Guide, and lost pay-per-view revenue.

So, to recap, the average monthly cost for me to replace 2 cable boxes and 2 ReplayTV units would be:

$61/month for the 2 Tivo Series 3 units
$32/month for 4 Cablecards (2 per Tivo)
$63/month for the actual digital cable signal to come to my house
$156/month Total monthly cost

$6/month for 2 ReplayTV units. (Since I've had both ReplayTVs for over 3 year, and one had lifetime service, so I only pay the second box fee for the second box)
$70.87/month for the cable service, including 2 digital receivers
$76.87 Total monthly cost

Even $75/month for is crazy, but that's the rule of supply and demand. And they have all the supply here in Fairfax. Leaving me with only demand. That's not very good leverage.

It's better than doubling my costs for the next 3 years, just to have a great picture and really cool gadgets though.