David Carnoy mourns the loss of his TiVo but says he simply had to replace it with the cable company’s HD-capable Scientific Atlanta 8300HD:

The long and short of it is, the 8300HD isn’t quite up to TiVo standards. But it does a decent job and offers significant feature upgrades over its predecessor, the 8000HD. The strides Scientific Atlanta has made in just eight months is impressive and should be of serious concern to TiVo. Yes, TiVo has cut a deal with Comcast to provide that cable giant with its boxes, and it’s also announced plans for a CableCard HD DVR. But with those products not due until late this year and early next year, respectively, the company’s left HD-enabled cable customers such as me no alternative but to look elsewhere.

My biggest quibble with the review is that it completely ignores the many reviews and how-to articles that have been written over the past few months by people who don’t work for CNET. Lots of good stuff at AVS Forums, and at the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 Yahoo Group, and even (ahem) this site.

You know the rules: Shuffle your entire music collection, click Play, and report the first 20 tracks, no matter what. This week’s list is formatted as artist, song title, and album (in italics):

1. Beneath the Southern Cross, Patti Smith, Live in Bethlehem, PA, 1995 (bootleg)
2. Dry My Tears and Move On, Richard Thompson, Mock Tudor
3. Mali Dje, Ali Farka Toure, Niafunke
4. Tonight’s the Night, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Weld (Disc 2)
5. Dante’s Prayer, Loreena McKennitt, Book of Secrets
6. Bears, Lyle Lovett, Mile Marker 383 (compilation)
7. Back Street Affair, Allison Moorer, Caught in the Webb: A Tribute to the Legendary Webb Pierce (compilation)
8. Livin’ On Dreams, Little Feat, Shake Me Up
9. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, Bob Dylan, Live in Bethlehem, PA, 1995 (bootleg)
10. Gramma: Maudabawn Chapel/Frank’s Reel, Natalie McMaster, In My Hands
11. Redneck Wonderland, Midnight Oil, Redneck Wonderland
12. Magdelina, Big Head Todd & the Monsters, Strategem
13. Noche de Tangier, Willie and Lobo, Caliente
14. I Want to Be Your Girlfriend, Mary Chapin Carpenter, A Place in the World
15. Smoke Signal, The Band, Academy of Outtakes (bootleg)
16. I’ll Never Smile Again, The Platters, The Magic Touch, An Anthology (Disc 2)
17. Aicha, Khaled, africaffe (compilation)
18. Time to Move On, Tom Petty, Wildflowers
19. Telegraph Road [Live, Remix], Dire Straits, Money for Nothing
20. Let the Good Times Roll, B.B. King , How Blue Can You Get? Classic Live Performances 1964-1994 (Disc 2)

I really enjoyed hearing some of these tracks that I hadn’t listened to for a while. If you like honky-tonk roadhouse music, I enthusiastically recommend the Caught in the Webb compilation. It positively smokes from start to finish and is ideal for blasting down the open highway.

Engadget’s Peter Rojas Stephen Speicher has a superb piece that explains why the CableCARD and OpenCable standards are seemingly stuck in neutral. The CableCARD eliminates the need to have a digital set-top box for your cable connection. Instead, by plugging the card into your PC or DVR or other compatible device, you get the direct digital stream from the cable company. Sounds great. Except the cable companies are fighting tooth and nail. Rojas asks the right questions:

Assuming that TiVo (due to its new relationship with Comcast) stops being the staunch advocate for advances in CableCARD technology, who will fight for the consumer?

That’s unclear – the FCC has shown no strong signs that they will be fighting for the consumer. Recently, a July 2006 deadline that would have banned cable companies from producing any new “integrated” (i.e., not OpenCable) set-top boxes was pushed back by at least another year. Many assume that the cable companies will use the delay to argue that the mandate for OpenCable is unfair and unduly regulates the cable segment of the market. Worse yet, they might be successful. After all, with the emergence of IPTV and the entry of SBC and Verizon into the subscription TV game, it’s hard to argue that only the traditional cable players should be bound by such regulations. In any case, few expect the ban to go into effect even by its delayed July 2007 deadline.

It might be easy to assume that with rumors of an OpenCable-compatible Media Center Edition in the works, Microsoft will be fighting for the consumers. However, in a recent letter to the FCC, Microsoft joined Comcast (never a good sign) in arguing that the ban on integrated set-top boxes be delayed. With Microsoft participating in so many different segments of the cable market (e.g. Comcast already runs Microsoft Foundation Edition software on many of its current boxes and Microsoft has signed deals with both SBS and Verizon regarding IPTV) it’s unclear whether Microsoft would be willing to rock the boat.

The persistent rumor is that this fall’s update to Windows XP Media Center Edition will support CableCARD-compatible hardware. Will it happen? I’m not betting on it.

Last week Napster announced a record increase in their subscriber base for the fourth quarter of last year. I was part of that increase. For three months, I paid $15 monthly for the company’s all-you-can-download Napster To Go service.

At the end of March, I canceled Napster To Go. Although I still believe the business model is sound, the implementation is too flawed to tolerate. Tracks I had downloaded to a portable player wouldn’t play, even though they were properly licensed. At one point the software stopped acknowledging my right to download music at all, and it took an hour on the phone with Napster support to get things sorted out. Mike Torres had the same problem several months ago, and came to the same conclusion.

The problem, of course, is digital rights management. As long as Microsoft and Apple and other big-media companies insist on treating their customers like criminals, this will be the result. I absolutely refuse to pay 99 cents for a music track that doesn’t give me full digital rights over the content, and even the limited form of DRM in Napster To Go doesn’t work.

Next stop: eMusic.

Wow. I just read this longish post by Matt Haughey at PVRBlog: DirecTV’s HD problem. And I am very glad that I chose not to drop a grand on a high-def TiVo/DirecTV combo box earlier this year, when it was on my short list. Matt’s post is worth reading in its entirety, but here’s a quick summary:

Unless you live in LA or NY, you can’t get local channels in HD via DirecTV. Matt says:

Local stations in HD format like Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC were subject to pending FCC approval even though DirecTV has a pretty page set up to sell it. I called today to see how that FCC ruling went and unfortunately, DirecTV lost. If you get local channels in standard definition format, you cannot get HD. DirecTV can only offer Over the Air (OTA) antennas…

Hey, I can put up my own antenna, thanks very much, and hook it up to a Media Center PC that costs less than the DirecTiVo box. Which is about to become technologically obsolete, apparently. Matt goes on:

DirecTV sent up a couple new satellites last year to increase their bandwidth for more HD channels. They’re talking about adding dozens-to-hundreds of channels in HD format in the next year, but (drumroll please…) it’ll be in a new encryption/encoding (MPEG-4) format which won’t work with $999 HD DirecTiVos… DirecTV will offer their competing NDS DVR for recording HD signals instead of TiVo, with no concrete plans for converting current owners from one to the other.

The Washington Post had this story last weekend:

DirecTV spokeswoman Jade Ekstedt said in an e-mail that owners of older hardware [Ed: this means you, TiVo owners] will still be able to watch the service’s current HD lineup, which includes high-def versions of ESPN, HBO, Showtime and other non-network channels, plus the standard-definition network fare it offers now. She added that those owners will get “an offer” to upgrade to the new service but didn’t say what it might be.

So, let me get this straight. I can pay $999 for a TiVo that will get five or so HD channels and won’t work with the exciting new features due later this year? And I will get a chance to pay more to “upgrade” to new equipment from DirecTV? Uh, no thanks.

This is certainly not good news for TiVo.

Update: In the comments, my buddy Michael says that DISH subscribers can expect the same: “DISH will happily sell you a $600 HD/DVR box, with no mention that it’ll be obsolete when they roll out their new mpeg4 technology in the second half of 2005. [The sales rep] tried to argue that their current box won’t be obsolete– you’ll still receive what you currently receive– you just won’t be able to receive any of the new HD channels they plan to roll out in mpeg4. (They must have similar plans to Direct TV’s new advertising campaign. The future is coming… you just won’t be able to see it.)”

Once upon a time, someone pointed out that Steve Jobs appears to be surrounded by a reality distortion field that makes it impossible for independent observers to see his actions clearly. George Hotelling has been following the remarkable disappearance of features with each new iTunes version:

It seems every new version of iTunes removes some feature in the interest of Apple’s suppliers. Are Apple’s customers filing bug reports saying “please make your program not work with my other programs” and “please let me do less with my music”? Is DRM a dealbreaker for the music industry? If people demanded that their music to work with every music player would the music industry respond by stopping production and sales of music?

It’s a lengthy list. All I can say is, if Microsoft did anything like this, it would be on the front page of Slashdot.

John Ludwig dashes a little cold water on my eagerness to bypass the cable company’s set-top box with a Media Center PC and a CableCard:

… it is a PITA to get these cards and to make them work. I have one TV limping with a card from Comcast — but the overall experience (ordering, install, daily use) is awful because comcast does not want you to use this product.

This is not surprising, unfortunately. Whoever owns the box, owns the customer, so it’s in the cable company’s interests to make any alternative to their box needlessly difficult. Of course, there’s no reason for this to be true, and perhaps in 6 or 12 or 18 months, when CableCards actually become widely available and usable in third-party DVRs, they’ll work properly.

My cable DVR just got a major upgrade, and it was ridiculously easy. The cable that I ordered last week arrived on Friday. I plugged one end into a 300GB external SATA hard drive, and plugged the other end into the SATA connector on the SA 8300 HD DVR. I powered up the DVR, and after a few seconds I saw a message that the drive was recognized and was compatible with the DVR. Woo-hoo!

For another 60 minutes or so, I saw a message telling me to wait. Eventually, I got tired of the message and just restarted the DVR, and when it restarted everything looked perfectly normal. The difference? When I checked the available recording time, it showed that I had used only 19% of the unit’s capacity. Before the upgrade, about 50% had been used.

Easy…

I first heard about this a couple days ago, but delayed posting anything until I was sure it was true. Well, the rumors have now been confirmed by the company.

TiVo began testing interactive advertising tools during the weekend as it looks to appease companies wary of users’ ability to skip over ads.

The company confirmed late Monday that it released the first in a series of advertising features to a random and limited number of subscribers to the digital-video recorder service. The first test feature–a tag–pops up on the screen when a viewer is fast-forwarding through an advertisement.

If viewers press the thumbs-up or select button during the half second the tag is displayed, they will be redirected to a menu that leads to more information about the advertised product. The tag takes up about 25 percent of the screen, according to the company. TiVo said it is working with only one advertiser, a movie studio, on the trial balloon.

This smells of desperation. It’s yet another reason why once-loyal TiVo users, including myself, are turning elsewhere.

Of course, the undocumented 30-second skip feature would allow you to work around this annoyance. But because it’s undocumented and definitely unofficial, this shortcut could be disabled at any time.

Update: You can see a couple screen shots of these pop-up ads at the TiVo Community forum. (Via PVRBlog)