Comcast TiVo part 500

Reuters reports that, though behind schedule, Comcast customers will be able to get boxes running TiVo software any time now. My hope is that in another year or two I’ll be able to rent a dual-tuner HDTV box from Comcast, rather than buy a box from TiVo and pay them for monthly service on top of my cable bill. Until then, I’m sticking to my standard TV setup.

Cable companies blame CableCARD for coming rate hike

Cable companies blame CableCARD for coming rate hike

This kind of crap makes me want to just start using iTunes for all my TV and avoid the cable companies.

TiVo says Comcast accepts software for DVRs

TiVo says Comcast accepts software for DVRs

Not much of a story, but good to hear the plan is moving along.

Comcast Internet vs. Airport Extreme

Saturday night I spent many hours trying to get an Airport Extreme base station to work with a Comcast cable modem. Comcast apparently implements DHCP slightly differently than the rest of the world does, preventing the Airport Extreme station from getting an IP address. The internet worked fine when hooked directly up to any computer or to an older Airpot base station, but the Extreme version couldn’t handle it. Sunday morning, the Mac Genius at the Clarendon Apple Store said that he had heard other complaints of the problem, and provided a solution: go get the cheapest router you can find ($20-30 range) and hook it up to the modem, and then hook the base station up to it. The router will get the IP address and the base station will work fine. Voila!

DVR

As Katherine discovered this weekend, Comcast is piloting a TiVo-like Digital Video Recorder (DVR). After digging on their website for a while, she found this page that has lots of info on the service. She called the number and the cable people came the very next day to give them a new box and set up the service. It costs ten dollars a month and seems to be put together pretty well. It isn’t as slick as TiVo, and doens’t offer nearly as many features, but it does seem to let you record two programs at once, or at least record one and watch another, which TiVo won’t do. More importantly, you don’t have to buy the box, which is the one factor that I think may mean that TiVo won’t ever catch on in the wide market. If TiVo would just collude with cable companies and offer their user interface with the company’s cable boxes, coupled with a month’s free service, I don’t think many people would cancel once they got used to the freedom it allows. As is, I’d recommend that people who want to try out the tape-less recording revolution but who don’t want to shell out money for a TiVo should check out the Comcast deal.