Whoa, whoa, whoa, back it up… beep… beep… beep. So DirecTV and TiVo have run back into each other’s loving arms despite a pretty ugly separation back in 2005.
Back in the day, you could get DirecTV service with the very-excellent TiVo interface loaded into a pretty powerful dual-tuner box. Then all hell broke loose as DirecTV abruptly announced that it would be making its own DVR boxes, leaving TiVo scrambling to make up for more than half of its 3+ million subscriptions it’d be losing.
Anyway, it seems that TiVo and DirecTV bumped into each other late-night at a bar somewhere and started making out in the corner. Some of their friends gasped, while most of them had lovestruck tears in their eyes.
So the deal is that DirecTV and TiVo are developing a broadband-enabled HD DVR box that’ll use DirecTV service. Unlike TiVo’s current arrangement with Comcast, you’ll actually be able to hook this DirecTV box up to your home network and use TiVo’s online features and services. DirecTV, too, will include its services on the box as well. I’m guessing that means the on-demand over broadband stuff that we heard about back in March. The new DVR box is slated for release in the second half of 2009.