TiVo-powered Comcast DVRs finally reach Boston

After a nearly three-year delay, Comcast just today has begun to market the TiVo upgrade for its Motorola boxes to customers in Boston.

TiVo functionality is being added to the Comcast set-top box through a software upgrade, and customers get a TiVo-branded remote to go along with it.

The main "grid guide" looks the same as the standard Comcast menu, with a scaled video window in the upper right hand corner. But across the bottom of the menu are buttons that correspond with the "a-d" buttons on the remote that manage search filters on HD programs and channels. The search function has also been improved to search for user entered text in titles, episode names, and descriptions.

Unfortunately, Comcast's TiVo boxes lack many of the important features of TiVo's standalone DVRs, notably: music and picture browsing from the user's PC, Web video, and content transferability between other rooms, computers, or mobile devices.

It's taken just short of three years for the market to see its first deployment of Comcast TiVo hardware, and it still appears to suffer from some bugs: One user posted a video on YouTube at the end of December of the HD content menu taking 53 seconds to load. Several additional software releases are planned in coming weeks to address this and other issues.

[portfolio_slideshow id=28207]A BetaNews slideshow from way back at CES 2007 shows what Boston area Comcast customers are perhaps just now being treated to.

A TiVo agreement with Cox Communications was announced in August 2006 has also been slow to develop. With few updates being made public, some have been left wondering what happened. Cox TiVo is reportedly still in trials, with boxes by Scientific Atlanta in development.