And… it’s… outta here. TiVo is down to less than three million subscribers and they sold about 500 DVRs a day last quarter, giving it 8% of the 38 million US DVR market. That’s not much.

TVByTheNumbers has the numbers. They’re down 314,000 subscribers to 2.76 million and lost 146,000 last quarter. Rough stuff.

Listen: I loved TiVo for years, but after the TiVo HD rolled out to a resounding plop I knew the end was near. We just cancelled our account after years of accepting sub-par video playback – we stuck with the SD TiVo and never upgraded – and it can only get worse.

Godspeed, happy dancing TiVo mascot. We loved you, once.

TiVo has finally dropped the price on the HD and HD XL DVRs. These models have been rocking their initial MSRP for years now, but now they can be had for a little bit less. The 160GB HD model is now $249 and the 1TB model, $499 down from $599. Of course you still have to pay a monthly fee to use these DVRs, but I’m not one to snub a modest price drop.

I wonder if this was a reaction to the Moxi price drop from last week. Probably not because these things are usually planned months out, but you never know. Maybe TiVo is starting to feel a little heat from their closest competitors, who now have a 3-tuner DVR by the way…

The former Digeo has managed to stay busy despite going through an acquisition by Arris. The company just went live with a slew of updates that show the company is serious about the DVR game. First and foremost is a new HD DVR model. This boy is almost exactly like the current Moxi HD DVR except it comes equipped with three tuners that will allow you to record three separate stations at one time off of a single multi-stream Cable Card. Take that, TiVo.

The new three-tuner model is perfect for the somewhat new Moxi Mate that will soon be able to utilize the tuners in a Moxi HD DVR for live TV viewing. Picture this: you’re streaming a recording from your main Moxi HD DVR onto the Moxi Mate in your bedroom but the wife fails asleep. This means you’re no longer obligated to watch Gray’s Anatomy and instead of switching to your TV’s tuner, the Moxi Mate will act just like a full size Moxi HD DVR and stream content live from one of the free tuners located in the full size Moxi HD DVR. You can even change the channel, view the guide, and timeshift live TV all over magic of Ethernet.

Up to two Moxi Mates can connect to one three-tuner DVR but can access live TV only when the main Moxi has a tuner available. If the tuners are in use, the user will be notified of the conflict and given the option to cancel the recording to free up the tuner. The necessary Moxi Mate software update will be available within the coming weeks along with an update to the Moxi HD DVR that tweaks the menu structure a bit.

Of course the new three tuner Moxi HD DVR can do the standard DVR functions too. Except this model allows you to record on three stations while watching a previously recorded program.

With the new model comes price drops. The two-tuner HD DVR is now $499 down from $799 and the standalone Moxi Mate is $299 instead of $399. The three-tuner model is only available in a bundle pack with either one or two Moxi Mates for $799 and $999, respectively. Just like before, there is no monthly fee with any of these products.

Arris, and formerly, Digeo has been on a roll ever since the Moxi HD DVR was released last December. This is the 3rd straight quarter that the company has significantly updated its Moxi HD DVR product line. TiVo hasn’t done that in years.

New Three-Tuner Moxi® HD DVR and Reduced Pricing for Moxi Multi-Room Packages Unwrapped for Holiday Season

Under ARRIS Ownership, Moxi Continues to Innovate and Deliver New Features to Consumers

SUWANEE, GA – November 10, 2009 – As part of its first product update since acquiring the award-winning Moxi product line from Digeo, Inc. in September, ARRIS (Nasdaq: ARRS) today announced the introduction of a three-tuner version of the Moxi HD DVR as well as reduced pricing for its two-tuner Moxi HD DVR and Moxi multi-room packages.

• The new three-tuner Moxi HD DVR, which allows for recording of three channels simultaneously while watching a fourth recorded program, is available in a Moxi HD DVR plus Moxi Mate bundle for $799 MSRP.
• The price of the two-tuner Moxi HD DVR introduced earlier this year has been reduced to $499 MSRP (formerly $799).
• In addition, ARRIS is introducing a three-room multi-room bundle option—a three-tuner Moxi HD DVR plus two Moxi Mates that collectively serve three rooms for $999.

The company also announced plans to deliver live TV on the Moxi Mate via the Moxi HD DVR. The Moxi HD DVR will receive the update automatically through a software download. Additionally, the price of the Moxi Mate has been reduced to $299 (formerly $399).

“We’ve heard from consumers that they love the Moxi products but are looking for different price and component options to serve their individual needs,” said Marc Beckwitt, VP of CPE Video Business Development, ARRIS. “The recent acquisition by ARRIS brings the market presence and leverage required to drive cost out of the product, and consequently, we’re able to offer these very competitive prices to consumers.”

ARRIS continues to stand by the commitment to deliver the Moxi “all in”, with no monthly or lifetime DVR service fees. Moxi also has no in-menu advertisements.

The Moxi HD DVR is designed to appeal to the most demanding digital cable entertainment enthusiasts. Some of its key attributes include:

• A native HD interface and Emmy® award-winning Moxi Menu
• Up to 75 hours of HD recording space or up to 300 hours at standard definition, and expandable to 6.5 Terabytes for up to 1000 hours of HD recording with an external eSATA drive
• Access to many Internet services consumers already use, such as Rhapsody®, Flickr® and online video from Netflix®, Hulu™, and YouTube™ via DLNA server software such as PlayOn™ (currently provided at no charge) running on their PC
• Multi-room viewing with the Moxi Mate and the ability to record three channels simultaneously while watching a fourth recorded program on the three-tuner version of the Moxi HD DVR
• Remote and mobile browser scheduling to set recordings while away from home moxi.com
• MoxiNet for full-screen web browsing and SupertickerTM —a ticker widget that provides information, such as weather, sports scores and news along the bottom of the screen

The Moxi HD DVR makes it effortless for consumers to discover, experience and share high definition media from their digital cable provider, PCs on the home network, and the Internet.

Also scheduled for release later this month are additional software upgrades to Moxi, which include new search and record option menus. These software updates will enable users to specify preferred record settings that can be applied to any new recorded TV shows or TV series. The new menu structure delivers easier access and better visibility related to the DVR function of the Moxi HD DVR, such as available hard drive space and other Moxi HD DVR related recording and scheduling functions.

Software upgrades, which have been delivered each quarter since unveiling the Moxi at CES in January 2009, continue to be delivered to the consumer automatically and at no charge.

Taking advantage of ARRIS e-tail infrastructure, the company is also introducing payment via major credit card instead of the PayPal option previously offered. The new Moxi pricing and bundle options are available now at www.moxi.com.

For more details, technical specifications and screen images of the Moxi HD DVR and Moxi Mate, please visit: www.moxi.com. You can also follow Moxi on Twitter at www.twitter.com/moxi_hd or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/moxi.hd.

The Eris is basically a mini Hero. It’s slightly thinner and clad in all black and but the Sense UI is in place and all of the things that made the Hero great – responsive OS, apps, and social networking connectivity – are here. One thing lacking, however, is the “latest” version of Android with its superior navigation application and multi-touch.

I asked some HTC folks about what was going on and they informed me that HTC is sticking with Sense UI and that some of the tweaks they did to pre-2.0 Android didn’t mesh well with the latest version. The result is, as I’ve mentioned before, a new “branch” of the OS.

To be sure HTC can’t sit on the sidelines with this for long, but it’s abundantly clear that the issue of non-centralized OS development is rearing its head here. This is Anrdoids blessing and its curse and I think the real problems will occur when handset manufacturers try to hide Android behind their own proprietary masks, much in the way TiVo and Kindle use Linux on the inside but make not mention of it.

It’s a question of when, not if, HTC will go 2.0. But for now they’re sitting things out and perfecting their UI going forward.

Update: We just heard back from HTC, and it appears that the Eris does in fact have multitouch in certain areas. They (being HTC) added multitouch capabilities through their own coding using android 1.x, so as a result the code isn’t available to 3rd party developers. But for the record, the Eris does have multitouch in the photo album and a few other places.

Here’s a story I first heard on Figure 4 Daily last night while farming for mageweave (no, I’m not lying): not only have DVRs not ruined the TV businesses, as we had been led to believe for so many years, but it turns out that the delayed viewings, and more accurate ratings, have given the networks exactly what they’ve always wanted. That, of course, is the opportunity to squeeze more money out of their advertisers.

Some history: television networks had sued ReplayTV, once Tivo’s direct competitor before people even knew what “DVR” stood for, in 2001 because they felt its DVRs would let people skip commercials. There was also “share” function, which is bonkers considering the state of broadband in 2001.

The point is that the television networks hated DVRs since they thought people would record all this content (for free!), then skip the commercials. If people skipped the commercials then advertisers would become sad, and no longer hand over millions of dollars to the television networks for the privilege of airing commercials during The Office or some other hunk of junk.

Nielsen then stepped in and changed the way it measures viewership to include DVR viewings. The thing is, when you examine the data it turns out that people totally don’t skip commercials while watching DVR’d content.

TV, research shows, is still primarily a passive medium, That is, you’re sitting on your couch just watching. You’re not picking up your remote control to change the channel, you’re not pressing fast-forward to skip any commercials. TV = sitting down and not lifting a finger, it seems.

So the television networks were freaking out over nothing. Now they can turn to their advertisers: “See, even more people watch this junk then we ever thought! Pay us, please.”

Gather round, everyone. Gather round. I’m going to show you a trick that 98% of you will never use. But for the 2% of you that actually use the information contained herein, I hope you’ll consider removing at least part of the CrunchGear staff from your “People to Punch” list.

Why?

If you’re like me, you have multiple computers scattered about your house — not because you need them but because every time you get a new computer, you can’t bear the thought of getting rid of the one before it. And every once in awhile you want to access one of your old computers, but not nearly often enough to keep it hooked up to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard all the time.

Windows’ built-in Remote Desktop Connection software makes it easy to access all of your old computers from your new computer but, traditionally, the old computers that you want to access need to have user accounts with passwords for security’s sake.

This presents a problem when one of the old computers that you use for, say, some auto-start task either gets rebooted automatically because of a Windows update or the power goes out or whatever. In my case, I have an old computer I use as a TiVo Desktop Plus server. When the computer gets rebooted, the TiVo server doesn’t start back up until someone logs in with the correct username and password. This can, of course, be done via Remote Desktop Connection from my main computer but I wanted to just be able to reboot the machine all the way into Windows with no password so everything starts humming along automatically.

Like I said, only 2% of you will use this trick. But here it is.

How to Allow Remote Desktop Connections with Blank Passwords (Easy)

This is the easy way, but it requires that your target computer is running a big-boy version of Windows XP, Vista, or 7 – namely Professional or Ultimate. If your target computer is running a Home or Premium version, skip to the next section.

For Vista or 7, click Start then type gpedit.msc into the search box. For XP, click Start then Run, then type gpedit.msc into the Run box.

That’ll open the Local Group Policy Editor. Drill down through the menu like so: Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options.

In the right-hand pane, double-click “Accounts: Limit local account use of blank passwords to console login only” and change it from enabled to disabled.

That’s it. Now make sure the computer’s user account isn’t password protected (Control Panel > User Accounts > Remove your password) and from now on, you’ll be able to use your new computer and Remote Desktop Connection to access this old computer without a password.

How to Allow Remote Desktop Connections with Blank Passwords (Hard)

And it now for the rest of us; the huddled masses with run-of-the-mill Windows operating systems (Home, Basic, Home Premium, and so on). Our task involves registry editing.

First, a little test. Open your registry editor. If you don’t know what that means or you don’t know how to open your registry editor, then that’s a pretty good sign that you probably shouldn’t be trying to do something like this. It’s not rocket science by any means, but I’d feel pretty bad if you messed up your computer because of this post.

If you’ve actually opened your registry editor, please navigate as follows:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > ControlSet001 > Control > Lsa

Find the registry key labeled “LimitBlankPasswordUse” and change the value from 1 to 0.

Then you’ll need to repeat the above steps using the following registry path as well:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Control > Lsa

Again, change the registry key “LimitBlankPasswordUse” from 1 to 0.

That it, we’re all done. Now make sure that this computer’s user account doesn’t have a password set (Control Panel > User Accounts > Remove your password). Once that’s all taken care of, you should be able to use Remote Desktop Connection from your new computer to log into this old one without a password.

Special thanks to Dan Dar3 and My Digital Life for the above info.

Every few months we get a press release about some great device from a no-name manufacturer who promises to change the world. One example was the TXTR reader from Germany last January. Another is zzzPhone, a company selling dual-SIM Android powered smartphones from China. Neither company produced much of anything.

Era of the Silicon Valley success story – two guys making something cool in a garage and selling it – is over, at least in hardware. The costs of making consumer electronics, including cellphones and computers, on a small scale have risen so much as to be prohibitive and then the marketing costs of that same hardware is even more prohibitive. Whereas, once, two nerds in a basement could build a computer company I worry that it takes more resources than any one man or woman can muster these days to even approach something like success.

DOA

The first sad truth is that most consumer electronics cannot be made in “expensive” countries like the US or the Euro zone. During a visit to the Suunto watch factory in Finland, for example, I learned that while many of the watches are made near Helsinki a large percentage of them are made overseas and drop shipped from Asia. The company just couldn’t make anything in bulk without resorting to off-shoring. This means you either invest in an expensive small run of hardware overseas, something the Asian manufacturers do not do particularly well, or invest in a massive run of inexpensive hardware in Asia that you risk having to recycle if your company goes belly-up.

This doesn’t mean you can’t make it big anymore. Take TiVo, for example. It sprung out of obscurity a decade ago and filled a niche in the living room that has yet to be challenged by any manufacturer. Unfortunately, when someone – probably Samsung, LG, or Apple – figures out how to take over the DVR market, TiVo is toast. The same is true of Palm who, to all intents and purposes, is now a small company. The big guys are eating their lunch thanks to Android and it will take some fancy footwork to survive. The small guys are, sadly, always at the precipice of failure.

Other companies like Neuros and Slingbox simply sell a wrapper for their software. Sometimes this works but sadly it also leads to retrenchment when companies like Slacker pull out of the hardware business due to lack of interest and cost. Then there are success stories like like FyreTV [NSFW] which will do well because they focus on porn. Not everyone can focus on porn.

When in doubt, do this.

The second problem facing small CE companies is marketing. Micro-companies like Zeo and FitBit get a huge initial boost thanks to online media but then disappear once the news cycle has moved on, leaving the companies with amazing technology in the dark. This is an era of constant marketing, a situation that forces companies like Apple and Sony to put their message in front of consomers almost constantly in multiple media.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen companies receiving 8,000-10,000 pageviews with one good launch, more if its an interesting product. That initial boost translates into a percentage of good sales – those are good eyeballs, not just random traffic – but it rarely turns into repeat or continuing business.

That said, here are some of the best practices I’ve seen from small to medium CE companies who know how to do it right. This may not apply to you and yours, but it’s something to think about when you get excited about a product (Gizmondo anyone?) only to find it has crashed and burned.

1. Tell multiple stories. When you start out you have one story: Why your product is good. Prepare multiple stories for the next few years including ideas tagged to pressing issues of the month or year. Do you have a fitness gadget? Work on a story about post-holiday stress and weight gain. Have a DVR? Put yourself in the Super Bowl frenzy with blogger outreach and giveaways. That first boost is nice but if you’re a small company it’s the next four boosts that will push you through the rest of the year.

2. Price yourself competitively if not suicidally. Even if it’s suicidal, price yourself at just above the average price in your market. Aiming at rich, cosseted professionals is nice but the sharper Image model of doing business is over. Consumers want more for their money (even if they often get considerably less) so while $999 might seem like a nice number for a NAS or a piece of audio gear the consumer is more accustomed to $499.

3. Be quiet. Hide your light under a bushel. Patent your idea and don’t launch until the product is completely ready. I’ve seen too many companies splattered with the vaporware monicker because they failed to deliver on time or at all. Once you’re done, support your product forcefully and quietly. If someone has a problem, address it quickly. Send out new hardware before putting someone through tech support hell.

4. Change your trade dress regularly. This fickle market thinks anything that looks the same as it did last year is old. Why do iPods change every few months? People want to think they’re buying the new hotness, not the old and busted. If you can’t change your trade dress, change your website.

5. Slow and steady wins the race. None of the greats made it overnight and it’s harder than ever to truly make it. If you’re a small CE manufacturer, Godspeed. It’s a tough race so don’t sprint it.

For a great look at this topic, read The Song of the Powersquid, our 6-part story on the creation of a CE product.

For weeks – months even – analysts have been telling Apple to make a netbook for the masses, a $299 junker designed for those who surf the web on the couch, their Cheeto-stained hands scrabbling for the TiVo remote while they incessantly refresh Reddit and hope against hope that their Craigslist Missed Connection emails them back. The Air, they said, was too expensive, designed for the frou-frou quiche-eaters of Silicon (V)alley while the MacBook Pros were too overpowered for the likes of Flyover Sally and her sad-eyed brood of younglings. They needed to sell something to the masses, something solid, American, and corn-fed.

Well, now Sally, the quiche-eaters, and the Cheeto dude – and the rest of us – have the new MacBook. It offers a bit less power and peformance than the Pro line, a little more of the styling of the Air line, and sells right at $999, a magic marketing number that is neither North of $1000 (before taxes) and South of corporate financial suicide.
[UPDATE - Added battery test.]

I recall in about 2003 when Wal-Mart first breached the thousand dollar mark in a laptop, a defining moment in the marketing of laptops. With the advent of cheap networks, that mark is now, in short, the high water one while sub-$500 is the norm. The breach of a $1000 meant that manufacturers had to cram cheaper hardware into cheaper cases in order to turn a profit.

Apple never went that route and for good reason. By selling lots of cheap netbooks for no money, big manufacturers like HP and Dell could squeeze profit out of a tight market. Apple, on the other hand, squeeze profit out of a constellation of products, iPhone included, and they hope that the social, societal, and mental pressures to make the earbuds match the laptop are enough to make people switch. For the most part their plan is working.

Designed for students and entry-level users, think of this model as the Mac Mini of laptops. The new design is quite smooth with rounded edges on the bottom – the old model was squared off – and an internal battery thart can hit about 7 hours on one charge. The ports were slightly changed in this model with two USB ports, a DisplayPort, and a combination headphone/line-in jack. The laptop also doesn’t have an IR sensor, presumably because you can now control iTunes with the iPhone or Touch. There is also no Firewire port. From an aesthetic standpoint, the battery/active light on the front which winks playfully through a slit in the metal in MacBook Pros looks like an accident on this model. Apple made it large and brooding rather than thin and charming and it seems like the materials limited their design choices.

Geekbench maxed out at 3258 (the 2008 models hit about 3139) thanks to a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 2GB of RAM. This is more than acceptable for most users considering a new MacBook Air clocks in at 2762. The battery lasted for five full hours of video playback with wireless on. I noticed that the bottom of the laptop stayed cool throughout the test.

The large, spacious trackpad is just like the MacBook Pro’s and seamless aspect of the build ensures there’s little to break in a backback or laptop bag. A few caveats: there is no external battery indicator and the bottom panel can be removed but the battery, technically, cannot be changed by mere mortals.

Another caveat is that this thing will get dirty and scratched almost immediately. Polycarbonate is not related “carbonite” or “polyadamantium” – it’s related to plastic. As such, your beautiful white MacBook will soon be a beatiful gray MacBook if you’re not careful.

Obviously you get Snow Leopard with this version and it comes with a power supply, longer power cable, and little else. For example, this model does not include the remote although included remotes seem to be extinct allowing Apple to charge $19 for the new remote.

Bottom Line
This MacBook is not for everyone. It’s a great addition to the MacBook canon, an effort to appease the analysts with an entry level laptop, but don’t ever expect something like this to drop past the $500 mark. Apple doesn’t deign to play in those muddy fields, leaving that to the PC makers in their race to the bottom.

Surprise, surprise, more people are buying Blu-ray players this year over last year. I guess that’s to be expected. In all, retailers have ordered 13 percent more Blu-ray players this year. That’s 3.3 million for those keeping track. So this brings the total amount of Blu-ray players – including PS3s – in American households to a whopping 11.7 million and in nearly 25% of homes that own an HDTV when considering that 45 million US homes have high-def sets. Yeah, that’s cool. But I still don’t want a Blu-ray player.

There was a time when I was totally in the HD DVD camp. I was yelling its virtues from atop a mountain. It was going to revolutionize home-based HD viewing. But then I got fed up with the whole HD DVD vs Blu-ray thing. Why in the world would I invest money into equipment and discs that might be obsolete one day. The day I came to that conclusion was the day physical media died for me.

Sure, some folks will still buy Blu-ray players and I won’t try to stop them. It’s the only way to get the very best HD audio and video at home. Hell, most of the time it can be a better picture than from your local cinema. But I’m totally content with the HD picture that streaming media services like Netflix and Vudu offer. The point and click convenience is so much more satisfying that a higher quality picture to me.

So while Mom and Pops will still buy Blu-ray players from slightly pushy Best Buy salesmen, the rest of us will probably be just fine without a Blu-ray player at this point. Maybe, just maybe, if the players and titles drop in price even more, I’ll pick one up just because. Maybe.

I’ve been angling to get rid of my TiVo and cable for some time now and I believe I’ve finally figured out a solution that works best for me. It involves a lots scripting, Sabnzbd, and HandbrakeCLI and I’ll tell you what I ultimately did next week once it’s stable but it seems to be working as well as can be expected for these sorts of hacks.

I posit that the TV industry is about to face the same threat dealt the music and movie industries but they still have a chance to make things better for themselves when the world changes around them. First, let’s rehash the old arguments.

What I’m doing is downloading TV shows and sending them to a media player near my TV. I’m doing this because there exist two separate infrastructures that interface imperceptibly at one key point – the official cable and online distribution networks and the shady underworld of pirate distributors. Right now that interface is a trickle, but it will soon be, pardon the pun, a torrent.

The first infrastructure is the studio system. While I’m talking specifically about TV here, we can also extrapolate to talk about movies and music. This infrastructure is based on the advertising or distribution model in that they make all their money placing advertisements around their content or by placing their content onto physical media. But what is important to note is that the TV industry is in a completely different business from the music and movie industry. They’re not “selling” a product. They’re selling the space around a product. They they commission artists to make that product better in hopes of raising the price of the space around that product. They sell DVDs, sure, but that’s a sideline.


But when I take that content out of its context, like meat out of an oyster shell, I strip out their value and shuck the rest. But technology has outstripped that analogy and television has evolved into a processable set of events – shows – whereas before it was an event, each show linked together into infinity.

TiVo, to continue the analogy, created a way to sell jarred oyster sauce. The device contained the content, sure, but it tried to keep some of the advertising intact. However, what I’m attempting to do buffets into an entirely new infrastructure, one none of us wholly understand.

It consists of two disparate parts. The first is a shady underground that can offer these shows, stripped of commercials, a few minutes after they’ve aired. How they do it is a topic for another story, but needless to say popular shows are available in less than ten minutes after they air on the Eastern Seaboard. It is a testament to the dedication of a few TV lovers that these shows are available, for free, as they happen.

Then we have the web arms of the major TV studios as well as the clips cable stations post on their sites. These are, to a lesser extent, a re-canning of those same oysters in the hopes that the shorter advertisements wrapped around them will maintain the revenue offered by TV broadcasts.

So what’s my point? First, I believe some media will survive the move to the web better than others. Book publishing, for example, may change formats but the inherent problems of pirating a physical book make them weak targets for piracy. I also believe that the medium of television is also not conducive to large scale piracy because there is so much of it. I can shuck all the oysters I want but there will still be 24-hour news channels, old movie networks, and sitcoms that someone out there will watch even if the pirates are uninterested in recording and distributing them.

Now, back to that interface between the two worlds. Because pirates can’t steal everything at once there is no impetus to stop up this hole. The highly regimented and very well organized system of content capture that is going on exists as a labor of love and not as a money making venture. It allows guys like me, guys who no longer want to be beholden to a wonky TiVo, for example, to get HD content quickly and easily. However, there are more guys like me every day. To say that television as we know it won’t exist in a decade is quite far fetched but it is a possibility. How, then, should a TV broadcaster react?

First, I think TV broadcasters need to take a page from the pirates playbook and make their hit shows available online in downloadable form sooner than later – and not on iTunes for $2.99 an episode. The process I went through was relatively painless but decidedly nerdy. The next generation, however, will find new and better ways of doing the same thing, thereby stripping out the content with reckless abandon. TV studios still have some time to save their skins, just like the book industry, but it won’t be long before something comes along and ruins the party. They need to do what the music industry didn’t do – make getting sanction, high quality content convenient. It took me a week to set up my little Rube Goldberg DVR but there’s no telling how long it could take someone with a little more savvy.

Why not, for example, offer TV subscriptions to individual series. The era of channel surfing is almost near its end and discovery of new content through mere chance will soon be gone. This would allow for absoltute control over a series and reward popular series month after month. Sadly, cable companies just won’t do this. As Doug noted in our chat room “Cable companies keep saying a la carte wouldn’t work but in reality they’re saying it wouldn’t work for them because its too much work.”

Second, television needs to play to its strengths. As Harry McCracken pointed out during the balloon-boy debacle, the first on the scene wasn’t some blogger with a Flip but the television news crews with their trucks, helicopters, and satellite dishes. But even in the vacuum created by the death of local newspapers it seems that local TV stations aren’t able to appreciate their value. For example, I was in Columbus, Ohio a few months ago and I saw the same reporter on two different channels reporting on essentially the same thing. This sort of cost-cutting is detrimental to the brand and is cheapening TV journalism. We all laugh at the 24-hour news channels and their bloviating blowhards, but those are the news networks of choice for millions of people daily. There is value there. TV studios need to give us this content in a way that makes it a win-win for all parties involved. If not, it will be a lose-lose as their content is stripped and stolen and their revenues tank over the next few years.

TiVo users have known that Blockbuster On Demand was coming to TiVo for a while, but the service just went live. So, does it have the goods to put up a fight against Netflix or Amazon On Demand that have been streaming content on TiVos for months already? Nope, not at all.

My main issue with the Blockbuster On Demand on TiVo is that it doesn’t offer any titles in high definition. That’s a problem for a lot of folks including me. But besides that, there are only 652 titles available right now, which pales in comparison to Netflix’s 17,000 streaming library.

Sure, I know that Netflix is a subscription service that requires a monthly plan, but even the $4.99 per month plan will get you all you can watch streaming content. Compare that at the $2.99 or $3.99 rental price per title of Blockbuster and tell which is the better deal. There are a few free movies on Blockbuster right now, but they seem like D-run flicks.

At least the interface seems sufficient. It’s about the same thing as Amazon On Demand actually. It’s nothing fancy, but it gets the job done.

The Blockbuster On Demand set-top box was a great first step, but a lot of people do not want another box to clutter up their AV rack, but simply an app that works with devices they already own. Hopefully soon more content will be available as well as HD streaming. Digital delivery is the future and this service shows that at least Blockbuster has seen the light.

Don’t look now, but your Series 2, 3, or HD TiVo is probably getting the Blockbuster On Demand update right now. Actually, go look now because while I couldn’t get a picture to show this accurately, the screen above looks slightly different than other TiVo screens. It’s tad higher resolution and there is just something different about it. Maybe a TiVo GUI refresh is just around the corner…

Update: Blockbuster On Demand is now live. Hands-on coming soon.

The movie rental fees range from $2.99 for “classic” or old films to $3.99 for new releases. The library will be expanded over the coming weeks to include more content.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for digital delivery. It’s the future, but Netflix and Amazon already seem to have a wide selection of content with some available in HD. I doubt Blockbuster will be able to provide a better experience than those two and there isn’t even any mention of HD content in the press release, which kills any appeal at all to me. If it’s not HD, I’m not going to spend money on it.

Check back later for a hands-on with the new service. Hopefully that will be sometime today.

[AOL Money via Engadget]

It’s 11:30 PM. You’re all alone. Suddenly!! A knock at the door!! “Who could it be?” you wonder. Oh, two large pizzas just for you. That’s right. You ordered them directly from your TiVo in a fit of self loathing. Better make sure it’s the pizza guy, though. Oh, actually it might be the frozen yogurt you ordered too. Time to use the digital peephole viewer.

Yes, for $138 you too can have your very own digital peephole. Is it far more expensive than the standard peephole? Absolutely. But was it high time that peephole technology finally got an upgrade? Sure.

The thing installs just like a regular peephole and then the camera apparatus snaps into place. The result is a 1.3-megapixel CMOS lens that sends images of whomever’s on the other side of your door directly to a 2.5-inch LCD – no weird peephole angles, either.

Looks like it’s out of stock right now but it is a new product so it might still be slowly making its way to the marketplace.

Product Page [Brinno via Likecool/Red Ferret]

The two previous series were might have been dry at times, but the overall story is by far the most complex and complete in the sci-fi genre. Hopefully the story and character development hasn’t been sacrificed for a more edgy show. We’ll see tonight.

The show will be shown in Stargate’s usual Friday night 9:00 PM slot on SYFY, with an encore at 11:00 PM. Thankfully SYFY HD is up and running so the show will be available immediately in HD unlike Atlantis’s first couple seasons where US fans had to wait until it was picked up by Universal HD to see the show in high-def. Let’s just hope the show lives up to the hype.

The timeshifting stat is important to networks because advertisers look at it as well. They would much rather give networks money whose programs are watched live and therefore isn’t a way for viewers to fast forward through commercials. To be honest though, only about half the time I watch something off my TiVo do I skip the commercials. IDK why, maybe I’m just that lazy.

So when Epson sent us the PowerLite Home Cinema 6500UB, why wasn’t I excited? Well, like a boy offered a M242 25mm chain gun when he only asked for BB guns to plink cans with, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

The PowerLite is a beast. It weighs 16 pounds and is 17 inches across by 5 inches high – without the little legs. It has native 1080p using 3LCDs with 2 HDMI ports, RCA composite and component ports, S-Video port, and VGA-in. It outputs at 1600 lumens and blows out a 1920×1080 pixel image at up to 100 inches diagonal. Unless you live in a hangar, this is clearly too much projector for one man.

The projector costs $2,999 online with free shipping.

I plugged the projector into a Blu-Ray player and an XBox 360 and saw excellent picture from both. We did see a stark 120Hz “soap opera effect” due to frame interpolation before I changed the settings.

Once I removed that stumbling block, which others seemed to find as well, you’ve got yourself a mondo projector.

1080p projectors are now fairly common. However, this model has a striking contrast ratio, 75,000:1, and ultra blacks which offers a picture more like an LCD flat screen than a projector. Even during set-up you notice a definite sharpness around the edges of text and images on screen. This is to be expected from your average business projector but for a model specifically aimed at the home it’s pretty great.

Unfortunately, unlike the average business projector, this thing is huge. It requires some sort of mounting system to get it out of the way and is definitely suited more for a large, long room than the average New York apartment. Our house here in Brooklyn is pretty darn big but it’s still a stretch to call it usable.

The projector also doesn’t have built-in speakers, a minor issue of you were thinking of using this as a self-contained device in lieu of a full home theater setup.

Bottom Line
Overall, however, I’m totally down with a $3,000 1080p projector, especially with HDMI in. It’s cheap enough to look into as a TV replacement and it’s sharp enough to warrant a long look.

If you have to wear a tie on a regular basis, it might as well be awesome. In that spirit, Argentina’s “Sinapsis” studio designed this “After Office Tie” for a recent DesignBoom.com competition. It’s a simple concept that makes a lot of sense: a tie with a bottle opener built into the bottom of it.

The tie will be exhibited at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts from September 30th to October 4th. Whether it’ll become an actual product someday is another story. I could see people buying them, though. Or you could probably make your own if you’re ambitious.

[via CraziestGadgets.com]