Digeo's Multiroom DVR: $400 Per Room
Paul Allen’s Digeo keeps doggedly flogging its high-end DVR, evidently hoping more than a few well-heeled home-theater buffs will cough up the coin for its products.
The company this week is launching its multiroom-DVR “Moxi Mate” (pictured below), a small non-DVR set-top that accesses recordings on a primary Moxi HD DVR over a home network.
The price tag for the Moxi Mate? $400 each. That’s on top of the $800 for the Moxi HD DVR. For a limited time, Digeo will sell you a Moxi and a Mate together for (just!) $1,000. (It’s also proferring an interest-free plan of $49.95 per month for 20 months for the bundle.)
Digeo notes that competitors — i.e., TiVo — require customers to purchase multiple DVRs to get multiroom functionality. But at $400 a pop for its non-DVR set-top, Digeo’s not much of a bargain.
Also this week, Digeo is announcing support for the Motorola and Cisco SDV tuning adapters. And, it says the Moxi DVR is now compatible with the LaCie 4big Quadra 6-Terabyte drive for up to 1,000 hours of HD recording — a little number that’s only gonna set you big spenders back $1,400.
Reaper commented:
Richie: With Digeo's current offer, you could get the Moxi Mate for $10 month for 20 months (when purchased with a Moxi) and then have to pay nothing else. It would only take a little over a year to break even with the FiOS multi-room DVR, and then you'd own it.
Reaper commented:
Paul: If I had more storage, there are many HD movies that I would not only record but keep. I have a DVD/Blu-ray/HD DVD collection of more than 800 discs but if I had a big honkin' hard drive I doubt that I'd buy optical media again.
Paul commented:
Expandable to 6.5TB? I have more than 40 season passes scheduled in my 320GB TiVo with a mix of HD and SD content (we record the better shows in HD, stuff like Judge Judy/the news/cartoons in SD). My wife and I watch 1 to 3 shows together each night before bed and still have trouble keeping up on everything that's been recorded. 6.5TB though? That's 20x the capacity we have now and it seems unfathomable to me that anybody would really need the ability to record and save that many shows on one DVR. I understand 6.5TB is probably the theoretical upper limit of capacity for this device (for now) but does Digeo really see a market for this? Also, I don't have much practical experience with the Moxi but would the LaCie mate with the Moxi like external drives do with Ciscos Explorer 8300HDs? My concern at 6.5TB is that if the internal Moxi drive crashes, it takes all the externally saved programming with it (as was the case with my Explorer 8300HD). On top of being able to watch everything, I can't imagine having to rebuild/re-record a 6.5TB video library.
Richie commented:
Uh, last time I looked Verizon's FiOS TV multi-room DVR only costs about $15 per month with no equipment to purchase. Why would I want to own this stuff anyway?
paulie commented:
paul allen's continued track record of bad investments and ideas. look at what happened to tech tv, charter communications , ASCN, and on and on.
Reaper commented:
There's no doubt that Digeo has to change their pricing model if they want to become competetive but 6.5 TB of DVR storage (including the 500 GB internal storage) is pretty darn sweet!
