Digeo Now Offering Monthly Payment Options for its Moxi HD DVR

In an apparent acknowledgement that many consumers might find the $799 price tag of its retail-targeted Moxi HD DVR hard to afford in the current difficult economic climate, Digeo has announced new “flexible payment options” for the box. Consumers who cannot afford to buy the box outright now have the options of making–via PayPal–four interest-free monthly payments of $199.75 or 20 interest-free monthly payments of $39.95. However, because of legal restrictions, the new payment options are not currently available in Washington, DC and 13 states.

Digeo Unveils New Features for its Moxi HD DVR

–Enhancements Enable Users to Access Over-the-Top Video Services on their Living Room TV

Paul Allen-owned set-top box vendor, Digeo, announced a series of new features and enhancements for its Moxi HD DVR Thursday, that appear to be designed to transform the device into a platform for bringing over-the-top video to the living room (much as rival TiVo has transformed its DVR into an OTT device). The new features, which the company says will be available automatically to Moxi HD DVR customers via a free software upgrade, include:
–Support for MediaMall Technologies’ PlayOn media server software, which will allow Moxi HD DVR customers to use the box and its distinctive Moxi Menu interface (allows end-users to store, access and manage a variety of entertainment content through a single, unified menu; and replaces the standard “spreadsheet” EPG interface with a so-called “cross-hairs” configuration, consisting of two intersecting animated lines at right angles to each other) to view broadband video from YouTube, Hulu, CBS, Netflix, CNN, ESPN and other programmers and services, provided that their box is connected to a PC on their home network. According to Digeo, the software automatically converts formats, so that users can watch broadband video on a widescreen HDTV. Digeo says that it will offer new and existing Moxi customers a PlayOn license key (officially priced at $39.99) free-of-charge for a limited time.
–Support for the Rhapsody on-demand digital music service, which claims to offer over 7 million songs from all the major record labels and hundreds of smaller, independent labels. The service allows end-users to build their own playlists, as well as listen to professionally programmed music channels. Digeo says that it will offer Moxi HD DVR users a free 30-day trial of Rhapsody (officially priced at $12.99).
–Media Link, a DLNA-certified solution that will allow Moxi HD DVR users to connect their TV or home entertainment system to PC’s on a home network. According to Digeo, this will enable users to easily stream digital movies, videos, music and photos from their PC for viewing or listening on their living room TV.
–eControls, which Digeo says will allow Moxi HD DVR users to manage their home entertainment experience through the Moxi menu. According to the company, users will be able to use this feature to adjust most Z-Wave-certified products–for example, dimming and turning on and off lights, controlling volume and power on AV devices, and monitoring IP baby-cams or outside cameras, all from their remote control.
–Mosaic, a new browsing feature for the Flickr online photo service that will be available through the Moxi menu. According to Digeo, it will allow users to rapidly scroll up, down and across their photos as they are displayed as mosaic tiles on the TV screen.
–An enhancement to Digeo’s MoxiNet service (currently provides access through the TV to news, sports scores, movie times, weather and other information sourced from the Internet) that the company says will allow Moxi HD DVR users to bookmark Web sites on Moxi.com, and then browse them on their TV screen using the Moxi remote as a “virtual mouse.”

The Moxi HD DVR, which was launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and which is available in retail to date exclusively through Amazon.com (Digeo says that it plans to expand the box’s retail distribution), is part of a new strategy on the part of Digeo to target the retail market, and is the first Moxi box to be sold directly to consumers. Features claimed by Digeo for the Moxi HD DVR include:
–Dual tuners, allowing users to record two shows while watching a third pre-recorded show, all in HD.
–500GB of storage, allowing 75 hours of 1080 HD recording or 300 hours of SD recording.
–The ability for end-users to expand the box’s capacity by adding up to two hours of external eSATA drive storage.
–Remote scheduling via PC or mobile-based browsers.
–CableCARD functionality.
–Substantial HD rendering power, thanks to a Broadcom BCM7400 chip.

Digeo has announced plans to implement Switched Digital Video support on the box later this year.

BendBroadband Deploys Digeo’s Moxi HD DVR

–Digeo to Unveil New Retail HD DVR at CES

Paul Allen-owned Digeo says that BendBroadband, a cable operator that has a history of deploying innovative products, is deploying its new dual-tuner Moxi Cable HD DVR. This represents the second order and deployment of Digeo’s second-generation box (the first was with Digeo’s sister-company, Charter Communications, which features the company’s Emmy-winning Moxi interface (note: the interface, which allows end-users to store, access and manage a variety of entertainment content through a single, unified menu, replaces the standard “spreadsheet” EPG interface with a so-called “cross-hairs” configuration, consisting of two intersecting animated lines at right angles to each other: customers use the left and right arrow keys on their remote control to scroll through a series of customizable categories–dubbed “filters” by the company–on the horizontal line: e.g. HDTV, sports, news, movies, photos, games, MP3 Jukebox, etc.; they then use the remote’s up and down arrow keys to scroll through the sub-listings of the currently highlighted category, which appear as a vertical line intersecting the line of categories), as well as CableCARD multistream two-way support, support for remote Web scheduling, and external storage options (for up to 1 terabyte). According to Digeo, the box will also support “extensive data mining through the Moxi portal.”

In other Digeo news: The company will unveil a new HD DVR for retail at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, according to a report in the blog, Zatz Not Funny. It is already offering the box on Amazon.com and has prepared a product homepage for it at http://moxi.com/moxi/discover_moxi_hd.jsp

Digeo Restructures, Focuses Development Efforts on Fewer Products

Shortly after unveiling a new “featured services” strategy at CES 2008,
and announcing alliances with four companies–Flickr, Finetune,
Accedo Broadband and CloverLeaf Digital–that it said would be
providing content services for its flagship Moxi platform, Paul Allen-
owned Digeo announced a major restructuring that saw CEO, Mike
Fiedler, leave the company, along with half of its staff, and president
and COO, Greg Gudorf take over his role. (Note: the Moxi platform
allows end-users to store, access and manage a variety of entertainment
content through a single, unified menu. The platform is notable for its
interface, which won Emmy awards in 2004 and 2005, and which
replaces the standard “spreadsheet” EPG interface with a so-called
“cross-hairs” configuration, consisting of two intersecting animated
lines at right angles to each other: customers use the left and right
arrow keys on their remote control to scroll through a series of
customizable categories–dubbed “filters” by the company–on the
horizontal line: e.g. HDTV, sports, news, movies, photos, games, MP3
Jukebox, etc.; they then use the remote’s up and down arrow keys to
scroll through the sub-listings of the currently highlighted category,
which appear as a vertical line intersecting the line of categories. Digeo
has secured a number of patents for the technology, and recently settled
a long-running patent-dispute with Gemstar-TV Guide.

Digeo says that it will now focus its product-development efforts on
fewer platforms: it has abandoned plans to release a number of
previously announced retail products, including its Moxi Multi-Room
HD DMR and its Moxi Home Cinema Edition DMR. Instead, it plans
to focus its efforts 1) on its “next-generation consumer DMR,” which it
says has been in development for some time now, is targeted for retail,
and will be announced later this year; and 2) on the Moxi HD DVR for
Cable, which is targeted at cable operators, and which it says is
currently in trials and should be released as planned. The company
claims that all its current content and development partnerships,
including its product collaboration with Monster Cable, will remain in
place, and that the employees whom it let go were “not critical to
development of the new products.”

Digeo’s corporate reorganization has also seen it restructure its
development team: three new engineering groups now report directly to
the office of the CEO, in order, the company says, to ensure greater
accountability and transparency. “As we assessed our situation, it
became clear that the best action for Digeo was to focus our work on
the next-generation product for the retail market,” Gudorf said in a
prepared statement. “Building the software and hardware for this
category is a complex endeavor, with dynamic technical standards,
regulatory issues and content considerations. Previously, we were
spreading our energies across too many platforms. This focused
strategy promises to bring a set of advanced and compelling DMR
features to consumers, at the right cost and at the right time. We remain committed to bringing the best television experience to our customers and we are confident that we’ll emerge even more successful as a result of this focusing effort.”

CableNET Line-Up Announced

The NCTA and CableLabs have announced the line-up of companies
that will be participating in CableNET, their annual showcase of new
cable technologies and products at the NCTA’s Cable Show (takes
place May 18th-20th in New Orleans). A number of participating
companies, including UniSoft/Strategy & Technology, Sigma Designs
and Zodiac Interactive, will be demo’ing tru2way-based technologies,
and several other companies, including Digeo, Motorola, Pixel3 and
Symmetricom, will be demo’ing other advanced video technologies. In
addition, there will be a number of presentations on tru2way at a
CableNET Theater.

CableNET participants that will be demo’ing interactive TV-related
technologies include:

• Digeo, which will be demo’ing its latest DVR for cable, the Moxi HD
  DVR 3012. The demo will feature the box’s Emmy-winning interface,
  its dual digital tuning capability, and its integrated CableCARD.
  According to Digeo, the new DVR includes a streamlined processor
  and a high-capacity hard drive.

• Digital Fountain, which will be demo’ing DF Splash, billed as an
  end-to-end solution that streamlines the most complex elements of
  delivering and measuring a high-quality video experience. According to
  the company, the technology provides viewers with an instant-on,
  full-screen, TV-quality experience, and significantly improves “the way
  we watch streaming video over the Internet.”

• EchoStar Technologies (i.e. the company that was formerly the
  hardware arm of the satellite TV provider now called DISH), which
  will demo SlingModem, a product it acquired through its recent
  purchase of Sling Media. According to the company, the product is the
  first DOCSIS cable modem to fully integrate the place-shifting
  capabilities of the original Slingbox. It is billed as allowing viewers to
  watch and control their TV programming on any Internet-connected
  computing device just as they would in front of their livingroom
  television set.

• Motorola, which will be demo’ing its MTR700 Tuning Adapter.
  According to the company, the product connects unidirectional UDCP’s
  (in this case, a TiVo device) to a cable network, accessing multimedia
  content in the cable network’s switched digital video tier. It says the
  demo will showcase “seamless tuning of the TiVo device across both
  broadcast and SDV tiers.”

• Oversi, which will be demo’ing its OverCache multi-service caching
  and content delivery platform for Internet video and P2P traffic.
  According to the company, the platform enables cable operators to
  relieve heavy network congestion, while improving customers’ quality
  of experience and monetizing over-the-top video traffic.

• Pixel3 (formerly Clique Communications), which will be demo’ing
  ImageIQ, an application which is billed as taking SD video and
  upgrading it to HD quality. The company claims that the resulting
  video “is not just a scaled-up version of low-definition content, but an
  actual, full-bandwidth 1080p image” with high-frequency detail.

• Samsung, which will be demo’ing downloadable conditional access,
  and digital program insertion for advertising.

• Sigma Designs, which will be demo’ing an integrated, tru2way-based
  set-top box that features four narrowband tuners that can display three
  video channels (HD as well as SD). According to the company, the
  tuners can be linked to enable channel bonding based on DOCSIS 3.0,
  enabling high-speed throughput.

• Softel-USA, which will be demo’ing its MediaSphere TX carousel
  playing both tru2way and ETV applications, as well as what it
  describes as the “flexibility and ease-of-use” of the system’s Web-based
  configuration tools. According to the company, the carousel has been
  integrated with Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta headends and set-tops,
  and with various automation, scheduling and billing systems. The
  company also bills its MediaSphere product line as fully supporting
  DSG delivery via GigE and ETV I04 updates.

• Symmetricom, which says it will be demo’ing “the importance of
  video QoE from a viewer’s perspective.” According to the company,
  mean opinion scores from a streamed video signal, along with video
  quality results, will be displayed to indicate perceptual video quality,
  and validate video quality as perceived by end-users.

• Synacor, which will be demo’ing various new features of its consumer
  portal, including Web DVR scheduling.

• thePlatform, which will be demo’ing an integrated delivery
  framework, jointly developed with Cisco Systems, that it claims gives
  service providers a mechanism for seamless delivery of broadband
  video to multiple screens. The company says it will also be exhibiting
  technology that allows cable operators and programmers to create a
  branded, customized broadband video channel “in minutes,” and that
  can also manage the entire logistics process and enhance the overall
  online video experience.

• UniSoft/Strategy & Technology, which will be demo’ing various
  aspects of tru2way and ETV application creation, testing and delivery.
  The demos will include the company’s TSBroadcaster 2.0 delivering
  multi-service transport streams containing a number of OCAP and ETV
  applications; ETV-based ad insertion and splicing; validation of ETV
  and OCAP applications using XFSI’s XAV; OCAP benchmark testing
  using Sofia’s OCAP Benchmark system; and generation of
  authenticated OCAP applications using UniSoft’s OCAP Security File
  Generator.

• Zodiac Interactive, which will be demo’ing its tru2way Zidget
  framework, which utilizes a plug-in architecture to support such
  applications as local search, weather, traffic, sports scores, and local
  news, without disrupting the TV viewing experience.