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$400 dollars plus monthly fee and doesnt even include any programming

and your cable company passes them out for free lol

your cable company passes out a crappy SA box for "free", and then charges you a DVR Fee, a lease fee, and a digital set top fee that is higher than a tivo fee.

My only problem with the S3 is that most cable providers are using the latest CableCard standard with SDV, which this can't use. So you won't be able to get all your digital cable channels with this.

Im pretty sure this has a OTA HD tuner so if your pissed off at your PC based HT setup, cause the ATI HD wonder w/ BeyondTV never really worked, this might work for you. But then again Im too cheap to shell out 4 bills for this too. And the AITC tuner based DVD-R boxes are just hitting the shops but many (Panasonic, LG) dont have TVguide++ or whatever which is crazy stupid but they are in the $200-$225 price range now.

Or for roughly the same price you can build yourself a nice low-end X2 3600+ based PC and use it as a DVR.

Or call Dish/Direct TV and get a free DVR without a monthly fee.

To borrow a phrase from my indian friend, TiVO and this deal smells like horse thumbplum

What is the best HD DVR option these days for DirecTV? I have a series 2 tivo and love it but its not HD. I am not wanting to shell out $400 for this either.

I like Tivo and paid several hundred bux for an S1 and lifetime service. Still, the s3 is a tuff sell even for me. I just don't know how Tivo can make money.

what video card/tv card/hardware specs do you guys recommend for a pc dvr/media pc setup?

I was just comparing cable/directv/dish today.
dish has a pretty good deal. signup for 18 months, first 10 are $30, after that is is $50 per month.
You get an HD DVR, 100 or 150 channels, 27 are HD. If you are new you get a premium channel for 3 months too.

may be time to upgrade my dish that I can only get to point at one sattelite at a time (119 degrees) (had this setup for 9 years!)

I have had it with the high monthly tv bills. I just bought one of these for $400 and shut down my direct tv $60 per month bill. $400 + 300 (for three years of tivo service) = 700 for a very good HD product. This will pay for itself in the first year. I figure all I am missing is espn which I will have to deal with.

So my question (I must be stupid), is with the dish.....how does it work with multiple tvs? Do you have to pay for a separate box for each tv in the house? We have 6 tv's in our house. Also, I have always hear with a dish you cannot receive local programming (ie...local news channels).

Some dish lover school me on this stuff.

bohemianpasha - you CAN get local channels, directv requires a box at each tv, Dish has dual tuner boxes that can work 2 tvs but only 1 HD per box ( can be 1 HD and 1 standard from the same box though ) DVR's DO cost a monthly fee of around $6, but it is a billion times cheaper than the ridiculous price Tivo wants!

someone said $700 for 3 years - well that equals $19.44 a month for a supposedly FREE OTA hd channels - hmmm, somethings wrong with that picture!

Tivo is a joke since it got rid of the lifetime subscription. Wether or not it is better than the dvr boxes from cable and sat providers, who cares? They are so much cheaper that you would have to be a total moron to pay the money to Tivo!

Mike

Coming from someone using the HDTV Comcast Moto DVR the Tivo S3 is worth every bacon double bacon burger. If you can afford the S3 it makes for a much more pleasant TV viewing experience. My Moto box freezes all the time, the interface sucks, it ignores half of my remote button presses, the sound with HDMI rarely works correctly, and it doesn't have near as many features as my Tivo S2 in my bedroom. If you can spend $3,000+ on an HDTV with 7.1 stereo an extra $400 for Tivo is no big deal.

Now that its down to $400 I am ready to dump this POS Moto box and get the S3. Considering I only have a limited amount of time to watch TV the last thing I want to do is waste time frustrated with this Moto crap.

No one mentioned that you can actually lower your cable bill by using a Tivo series 3 because it's cheaper to rent 2 cable cards at $1.50 per month than it is to get the 'HDD Package" that includes fees for programming, set-top-box, and DVR. My cable company offers an $84/month HD package, but using the S3 I'm only paying $50 and still receiving all HD programming. Add the $12/month tivo service fee and I'm saving $22 per month to apply towards the cost of my TIVO. That's a payback period of about a year and a half.

Not to mention that the Tivo service POWNS any cable provider's.

Kels83, Unfortunately Comcast in Atlanta doesn't work like that. The HDTV service costs $12.95 regardless if you use their box or Tivo S3 and you have to pay $6 extra each month for a second cable card. Still Tivo is worth it!