Via PVRBlog, Tivo is giving away free 40hour Series 2 Tivos to residents of the Bay Area that come to their company headquarters tomorrow (Friday) between 11am to 1pm, armed with a gift to give to The Family Giving Tree charity. To be eligible, you must be a Comcast cable subscriber (you need to bring your latest cable bill) and you must not already be a Tivo user (no free upgrades or second Tivo DVRs).

I really think this was a great idea for Tivo. Not only will it generate a lot of positive buzz on the Internet and in the local press, but it gives Tivo employees a chance to see happy Tivo users face to face. As someone who has worked for consumer products, there is nothing better as an employee than seeing satisfied customers who use the products you’ve worked long and hard to develop.

Kudos to Tivo!

PS. I wonder if these Tivos qualify for the Tivo Rewards program? If so, don’t be afraid to send those referrals to the TVHarmony.com’s Prize Pool to share the love!

UPDATE: More info from CNet.

eMarketer.com has a great article on the current DVR market penetration. According to their data, Time Warner has made the biggest inroads with 16% of cable subscribers using one of their DVRs. That’s triple the number of subscribers that use other DVR brands (read Tivo there). That’s also much higher than other cable operators.

The article has some great charts and is well worth a quick browse.

eHomeupgrade has some thoughts on this article from Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research who does a weekly column in Engadget. Jupiter Research found that 55% of people would like to watch video on a mobile player (as opposed to 79% who would like to listen to music). That’s a high number, but as Walter Mossberg, columnist for the Wall Street Journal mentioned previously, the difficulty of getting content on to a device is too high to make it ready for primetime.

It will be interesting to see what happens. When asked about these things without a price tag, it’s easy to incorrectly extrapolate whether users will pay an additional premium to have that functionality. I’d love for my MP3 player to bake chocolate chip cookies, but if it cost another $100, I’ll stick with a traditional oven.

On the other hand, buying decisions can be quite different than the way people actually use a product. Many people buy 4 wheel drive vehicles but never actually use the feature. All else being equal, people will purchase a 4 mega-pixel camera over a 3 mega-pixel if it’s the same price, regardless of whether they need the extra pixels or not. The point being that if people think they need video features on their MP3 player, it may not matter in the long run if they rarely use it.

Assuming PVPs fall into the same product category as MP3 players, the real issue could very well rest on what the cost difference is between video-capable and traditional MP3 players. At the current $100 difference at retail it’s a hard sell, but if the differential is reduced, it might very well become a checkbox item.

Many regular readers of this blog realize that grammar has never been my strong suit, but Tivo is giving a helping hand to journalists on the proper way to use the word “Tivo”. To reduce the dilution of their trademark, they suggest that using “Tivo” as anything other than an adjective (i.e. not a verb, noun, or dangling participle) is not only improper, but a form of copyright infringement. Tivoblog.com, my prime source for all Tivo (adj.) things has more, including this article from Slate located in the comments.

I can understand the need to protect their copyright, but I continue to feel that the managment and PR dept. are tone deaf. In general, I find the media reporting of Tivo DVRs very favorable, and I think they squander some goodwill, particularly in this sensitive time when Tivo needs to grow marketshare to survive. I don’t think telling journalists they can’t use “Tivo” as a verb helps. [Editors Note: check if we can still recklessly use “BYOPVR” as a verb]

Few products have given me as much emotional satisfaction as XPlite from the Australian company LitePC.com. It’s an absolutely brilliant application that makes deleting unnecessary system components easy to remove. Just the progress dialog alone featuring two gears grinding up system icons is enough to pay for this product.

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With the cost of solid state disks like Compact Flash and USB thumb drives coming down in price, they have become an attractive option to use as a replacement for hard drives on home entertainment PCs. They are noise free and generate very little heat. This article describes how I was able to get BeyondTV Link, a .Net application, running Windows XP Home using an inexpensive compact flash card. As a disclaimer, please not that your mileage may vary when doing this procedure so please don’t blame me if things go badly, your spouse leaves you, and/or your dog bites you as a result of this article.

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In a previous review, we looked at SnapStream’s BeyondTV 3.5 and found out how easy it was to setup a multi-tuner server. BeyondTV 3.5 Link, software which can be installed on another PC to control and view BeyondTV, turned out to be just as easy to setup and use.

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Maury Wright from EDN.com has some advice for Tivo. The mentions two things I’ve also found needed. The first is to have a standalone Tivo with dual recording capability, something long overdue. The second, which hopefully Tivo will soon addreses, is the ability to open the system to allow storage and transmission of recordings to any PC on a home network.

TivoToGo will hopefully help with accessibility, especially if a user can move recordings off of the Tivo, back them up on a centralized server, and then have access to them from any Tivo or PC in the house. The encryption will always be annoying, preventing one from switching to higher compressed formats like XVID, but at least it’s a big advantage over the current state.

I’m actually surprised that Tivo hasn’t created a standalone unit with two tuners, given how obviously needed it is. Within two days of installing our original Tivo, my wife was complaining that she couldn’t watch live television and record another show at the same time. The feature can’t be that hard to implement, given the dual tuner DirecTV model, and it certainly would be worth the extra price at retail.

While we are on the subject, another headscratcher to me is the lack of support for external USB drives. It seems like another obvious upgrade and revenue source for Tivo, particularly if they keyed it so that you couldn’t just buy any external enclosure down at CompUSA. For people like the my wife and I, which got our toes wet by buying the cheapest 40hr unit we could find, the first thing I ended up doing was replacing the drive. If I didn’t own a torx wrench or have a penchant for living life with voided warranties, I would have gladly upgraded my system with a USB external drive.

PCWorld has a short review of the Humax DRT800 DVD Recorder with Tivo Service. They liked the unit but thought they should have added some simple editing tools so that users could remove commercials from recorded shows or home videos (which you can transfer to the unit via firewire).

Additional Info:

TVHarmony Product Tracker: DRT800

There’s a good primer in the Chicago Tribune on Motorola’s Broadband Business which includes set-top boxes, cable modems, and DVR technologies. Motorola and Scientific Atlanta are the two behemoths in the set-top box industry.

One interesting tidbit was phone giant Verizon’s investment in this market:

On the other hand, set-top box makers can see opportunity in another market shift–the arrival of phone companies in the TV business.

Phone giant Verizon recently chose Motorola to help build its TV system and supply set-top boxes to its customers.

Verizon plans to spend $2.5 billion by 2006 to run fiber-optic lines directly to customers homes, allowing for television service.

The whole article is a good read.