HDTV, Tivo
“Santa” brought us a new 50” Sony projection HDTV for Christmas, which raised the question of where to get HD content from.
We’ve been a DirecTV customer for about 5 years now, and have had no issues other than a few outages during big snow storms. We use a Tivo receiver model, and are totally hooked on Tivo. However, the HD options for DirecTV were not very attractive: buy a new HD receiver with Tivo for $300 or more, pay more per month, and only get a couple of channels in HD, but not including our local channels.
The good news is that this would give us HD Tivo, but DirecTV is dropping Tivo as a partner, so who knows what the long-term prospects are. Also, DirecTV doesn’t support all of the Tivo features, requiring some low-level hacking. I’ve done this on our current one, but it takes work for every upgrade, and can be a hassle. The other thing is that we really use the Tivo for kids shows, which aren’t HD.
So I’m thinking of going to Comcast HD, and use a standard Tivo for awhile until the HD Tivo comes out. We’ll have Tivo and HD cable as separate inputs, and see how that works.
Final note: even though we get awful reception from an antenna for standard Boston stations, we get great pickup of the digital versions of over-the-air stations. Right now I’m watching the Patriots in 1080i HD. Pretty good! If you buy an HD TV, give your local stations a try with an antenna!
Update: We’re getting such good reception from the antenna, we’re rethinking what we want to do. May wait a month or two and see what happens with HD Tivo in general…
