Digeo To Ship Full-Featured Linux-based PVR

Gentu writes "Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has embraced Linux in his latest product offering, Moxi. Moxi is a PVR system from Digeo with some additional cool features, like wireless ethernet support, internet/router/firewall/gateway capabilities, DVD playback and more media functionality in general. OSNews has the article, screenshots and more information. "

Comments

Re:Anyone else find this a little suspicious?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Moxi was Reardon-Steel which was in bed with Echostar. The Moxi was supposed to borrow work from the Echostar DP721.

Moxi ran out of money, their BoM was way too high for a consumer product in the current market. Digeo bought them and it's a major effort to rebuild.

Re:Anyone else find this a little suspicious?

[LostCluster]

Paul Allen is not being friendly to Microsoft at all here, because this product is also a direct competitor to Microsoft's Ultimate TV product.

Re:Anyone else find this a little suspicious?

[BrK]

The "technological" reason is because Digeo started out as Moxi, which was another Steve Perlman venture. By the time that Digeo/Motorola bought Moxi they had already invested significant R&D into a mostly-working platform that was based on linux.

Who knows what Perlman's motivation for linux was over Windows (my guess would be all the obvious stability, resource requirements, licensing issue), but at this point Paul Allen's associations with any other OS have nothing to do with why the box runs linux today.

I'm anxious to see when/if these boxes actually show up en masse in consumers homes.

What's the point?

[xchino]

My Freevo box is Linux based, and can act as a firewall/gateway/router. Do I get a slashdot article too?

First commercial HDTV PVR

[-tji]

If this actually ships near the first of the year, like the article claims, it will be the first commercial HDTV PVR.

Of course, since they mention that it will be sold as a customized box for cable & satellite services, it's not clear what 'shipping' means. Does that mean that Moxi is done with the platform, or that DirecTV/Dish will be ready to ship a unit that I can buy?

If it's the former, it will be quite a while until we see these.

Re:I'd still rather roll-my-own

[tmhsiao]

For five to six hundred dollars, if you're unscrupulous, you can buy a TiVo with lifetime subscription, and add a TiVo network card, and load software to download your shows to an existing computer.

You could also try a TiVo with lifetime sub, and a video capture USB device (like a Dazzle or Pinnacle), and add it to your existing computer.

Both will guarantee that you'll get a far better interface than one that you could build, plus an exceedingly rich featureset.

But rolling your own does have a "I want to figure out how this works" appeal, as well...

TiVo vs. Moxi

[Q3vi1]

Ah yes, another epic battle is about to commence. Similar to how TiVo and ReplayTV started battling. The biggest problem I see with Moxi is that their business structure doesn't allow people to actually 'own' the boxes. The whole craze about TiVo is it's expandability and their functionality as a stand-alone product. I'm sure when they come out with the Series3 TiVo, they will have incorporated several of the features that the general public are crying for.

Re:It runs Linux and plays DVDs?

[jkf]

Here is a company making a legal Linux DVD player. Its not available to the public, but its possible it could've been licensed in this case.

I did

[schlach]

Part of the reason why this isn't exactly true is because Microsoft announced [techcentralstation.com] it is completely dropping UltimateTV

I noticed that when you said "Microsoft announced..." you pointed to a news article on another site, rather than a press release on UltimateTV's site. So I read that article, and sure enough, the author of that article says "Already, Microsoft has announced that they're discontinuing their UltimateTV set-top box,". So then I clicked his link to UltimateTV's site, and found absolutely no mention of any supposed discontinuation.

The Press Releases section bears no mention of any discontinuation. You can still buy it. If the company discontinued the product, it wouldn't make much sense that they'd still be promoting it.

This ZDNet article mentions some restructuring:

But UltimateTV didn't take off as Microsoft had hoped, and the company recently announced it was restructuring that division and laying off some workers.

So I found that article.

And then what may be the source of this rumor. A ZDNet "Story" by David Coursey entitled, "Why UltimateTV was an ultimate failure." From the piece: "If you call Microsoft, as I did, you will find the company disagrees will [sic] my assessment that it is getting out of the DVR business."

So as near as I can tell, some guy thinks Microsoft is getting out of the market because they cut their staff from 500 to 160. I dunno, maybe they are, but my point is that there was never a "Microsoft announced..." moment. At this point, it's still rumor. So let's keep the facts-to-speculation ratio as high as possible on slashdot. You too, moderators.

Paul may piss off the people working on the X-Box, but he's not going to affect UltimateTV one iota.

If your speculation is what you were basing your conclusion on, then I must disagree. I doubt Microsoft is really all that happy that a founder's company is using Linux on anything, regardless of their relative strength in that market.

Re:I did

[GLX]

I looked at what you linked to, and you're partially correct - however there are many more references to MS "restructuring" and "disbanding" the UltimateTV unit than you lead on to.

There was this in DotCom Scoop, pointing to an article in the SJ Mercury. Unfortunately the article has been archived and they charge to see archives, but the beginning states:
"Source: KRISTI HEIM, Mercury News Seattle Bureau
Microsoft plans to cut more than 150 positions in a major restructuring of its troubled television business based in Mountain View, sources close to the company said Monday.The reorganization will eliminate Microsoft's UltimateTV division in Silicon Valley, which has about 500 employees. About two-thirds of those employees will be consolidated automatically into other Microsoft groups. The remaining 168 employees will be given three months to find other jobs within Microsoft or face"

That certainly sounds like they're doing away with it to me. As well, a search on buy.com yielded no results for UltimateTV and amazon.com has three matches that all read "This item is not stocked or has been discontinued.". Tweeter.com stocks no UltimateTV devices, yet they were listed along with the Tivo receivers last year during X-mas.

So, before you cast stones, check your facts. It's obvious that MS has canned the current Ultimate TV platform as we know it.

The last press release on the Ultimate TV site is from Jan 7, 2002... They knew they were in for it when DirecTV officially partnered with Tivo because satellite was their biggest market.

Maybe a little bit more research was warranted other than going to the UltimateTV.com website before countering - if we all believed what manufacturers had on their websites, we'd all have 100% Herbal Viagra + Huge penises.

Re:It runs Linux and plays DVDs?

[Wesley Felter]

Of course it's not open source. Legal DVD players cannot be open source, period.