For years I have been a loyal DirecTV customer. A few years back when the offered a receiver with Tivo integrated with it I jumped at the chance. My life has never been the same. I had my Series 1 receiver for about two years before I started to modify it so that I could connect it up to my home network and use the internet to dial in. Of course, this led to other modifications.
I believe that it was Mark Cuban who wrote about how Tivo should take a look at all the open source applications that people are writing for Tivo. This would give Tivo a good sense of what functionality that the customers are looking for. As always the stand alone Tivo had more functionality than the DirecTV did so this left those of us with DirecTV a little upset. Tivo and Yahoo enter a partnership so that you can program your Tivo via the web, oh wait
stand alone units only.
Now DirecTV has altered their relationship Tivo and are marketing their own brand of DVR. All the feedback that I have read is relatively neutral. I know many DirecTivo owners who are very pleased with their units and will continue to modify them with the many open sources software packages that are available. For me, I will be switching to FIOS TV soon so I can enjoy a healthy dose of HDTV.