I’m a bit of a Woot.com fanatic, and I was surprised to see the TivoHD for $179.99 inlcuding 90 days free service.  As with all woot.com purchases, you can order up to 3 of them all for $5 in shipping and handling.  It’s a “one deal a day” type site (although they tend to offer some deals over and over again in certain circumstances), so it won’t be here tomorrow (today is 3/5/08).

I love my TivoHD so I’d highly recommend it.

Via Build Your Own PVR.com, Plextor and SageTV are offering a new $99 product including a USB driven Capture Card with Divx support and a lite version of SageTV, breaking the $100 price level in the process.

Sounds like a great entry for those people who want to dip their toe in the build your own PVR waters.

Also via TVPredictions.com, Netflix announced a new cheaper, $11.99 plan as an option for users. According to the story, the plan will be:

The cheaper, $11.99 plan allows two discs at a time and a total of four per month.

I don’t want to be a naysayer, but I’m not sure this plan will be very successful. I can understand that there likely is a demographic of people who watch one DVD movie a week, but I think many people would find the four movies a month limit not worth the trouble of setting up an account and not having the flexibility of picking a movie at one’s whim.

I think a smarter strategy would have been to have the typical entry level plan (e.g. 3 DVDs at once) start at $11.99 and charge users extra (eg $6) if they take more than four movies out in a month. That gets the people who are resistant to $17.99 a month in the tent to try out the service, and if you believe in the Netflix model (which I do), they’ll quickly turn into full paying members without having to do anything.

If you haven’t already, now is a good time to go through the free registration at BYOPVR.com since now you have a chance at winning a cool $179 case from Alchemy.com.

BYOPVR.com is one of my favorite websites. It not only has a great news section, but also an active forum, a good review section, and a user blog section that has some useful ideas on how to setup and use various PVR products. BYOPVR has helped me out of a jam once or twice trying to get some PVR software to play nice, so along with Mr. Google, it’s one of the first places I look to help solve a problem.