Well, it’s finally been announced. It’s been long expected, but DirecTV is finally dropping Tivo. For now, it’s just plans to stop marketing the Tivo service; it’ll still be available if asked for. I’m sure that in 2007, when the contract Tivo has with DirecTV expires, Tivo support will also expire.

This makes me sad, as I’ve found nothing with the quality and usability of my DirecTivo. To me, the killer feature is that you can record two raw DirecTV at the same time. There are no re-compression artifacts as you get with stand-alone (SA) Tivos, even at “best quality” settings. Plus, the raw signals are already compressed some, so not only do they look better than the “best quality” SA Tivo recordings, but they take up less space.

I have no love for DirecTV, only the DirecTivo. Cox, my local cable provider, seems to have greatly increased in quality since we moved into the area. If they were to ever produce a box similar to the DirecTivo that could record their raw signals, I’d be all over it. I’ll be interesting to see where the CableVision Tivo goes.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll start looking more seriously at other PC-based PVR solutions. Here’s what I’m looking for:

• Dual tuners — necessary
• Raw signal recording — big plus to have
• Network features
• Nice, user-friendly interface
• Local recording of programs, but as long as I can export them to a computer, this isn’t too important.

Got any suggestions?

I’d love to see this become popular. Think of the time saved and the pointless hassles you could avoid.