Yesterday TiVo announced their new HD DVR so it looks like today DirecTV has started accepting orders country-wide (DirecTV started accepting LA only orders on August 30th).
So how does the DirecTV HD DVR stack up against TiVo’s offering? First of all, the DirecTV HD DVR is $199 for new customers or can be leased or bought for $299 for existing customers while the TiVo HD DVR is $799! There are of course other costs to consider such as additional receivers and HD through DirecTV as well as the TiVo subscription for the TiVo unit. Both devices support dual tuners (Dual CableCARDs for the TiVo and Dual tuners for DirecTV) and provide digital video through HDMI. The DirecTV version supports Dolby 5.1 while TiVo’s is THX Certified. So, how many home theater owners have had the THX engineers certify their home theaters?
Perhaps TiVo and DirecTV would like to provide samples of each product so I can do a comprehensive test and review… 🙂