Yeah, I’m a TiVo believer. This thing liberates me from thinking about television shows and schedules - I live my life and watch what I want when I want to instead of thinking “gosh, I better get home Wednesday night or I’ll miss Lost!”

I finally jumped on the Series 3 TiVo in June when they offered a $200 rebate. This is the ultimate TiVo unit - dual tuner, cable and antenna HD, CableCards, nifty OLED display, THX certified… It’s simply to die for. Watching Jon Lester return to the Red Sox last night in 1080i with surround sound was a real treat (once I located the non-blackout channel!) Sadly there’s much less over-the-air HD content here in Ohio than there was in Massachusetts - I’m only picking up PBS, if you can believe that! At least my cable company offers 5 networks (if you count MyNothingTV and CW) and two ESPN channels!

Well, today TiVo released the TiVo HD. My college buddy, Megazone (yes, that’s his real name), released a full review of the unit, and it looks to be a keeper at $299. It still has an eSATA port for adding storage, and rumor has it TiVo will offer a 1 TB RAID array at Best Buy soon. A TiVo marketing guy interviewed at Engadget also slipped in that TiVoToGo will soon be enabled for both the original Series 3 and the new HD.

I still like my plush Series 3 (which came out at $406 after rebate), but if you’ve been waiting to pick up a TiVo, wait no longer. This thing is everything you were looking for!

Unless you have Comcast, that is. They’ll be releasing a software-only TiVo on their OCAP boxes soon that’ll cost you zilch…

Or unless you have SDV cable (which is rare).

Hu Yoshida speculated in his blog that most folks would rather outsource their home media storage than keep terabytes of storage in their home. Sure, he was speaking for HDS, which has no home storage ambitions, but I respect him and can understand his point. I already outsource my personal email because I can get better features, access, and reliability that way. But there’s no way I would outsource my media, and this is the real storage king in my multi-terabyte home.

Back in the 1990’s, I marveled at the fact that every PC I bought had more storage than all others I had ever owned, combined. But then came the Nomad Jukebox and its hard drive hack and suddenly my portable personal music player had more storage than everything I owned. My AT&TiVo easily eclipsed that, especially once I added a second drive. And the majority of the 320 GB in my home PC is used for media files too. My new HD TiVo promises to soon become the first terabyte-in-a-box computer in my house.

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