Between my Western Digital external hard drive failing right outside of warranty, my frustration with TiVo’s decade-old interface, and service provider DVRs coming-up short, I’ve been thinking a lot about the personal TV choices available to me. And when I think about something a lot, it frequently leads to charts. Especially when money is involved.

So, during the process of sorting-out if I’m going to keep TiVo or ditch it for Moxi, or even a Vista CableCard Home Theater PC, I ran some numbers and came to some interesting conclusions. I compared the overall cost of ownership of different digital cable-ready HD DVRs, including a TiVo HD with and without expanded storage and 3rd party upgrades, the TiVo XL HD, the newly launched Moxi DVR with and without expanded storage, the average cost of CableCard equipped HTPCs, and a service provider rental DVR. The total cost of ownership was figured at 1, 2, 3 and 5 years, with both prepaid and monthly service plans calculated. I also took a look at multi-room DVR solutions. A brief summary is below, and the actual numbers and more comments are after the break.

  • First of all, the TiVo HD by itself is not worth the price. It has the same stock hard drive space as standard service provider DVRs, which is to say, hardly any, but it costs more than the most expensive provider DVR out there ($19.99/month). TiVo’s extras don’t justify the price premium when your provider DVR gives you access to free and pay video-on-demand that you still can’t get with TiVo. If you don’t care about HDD space, you’re probably not recording very much in HD, and you’ll probably be perfectly happy with your provider DVR rental. It’ll save you money and you don’t have to worry about equipment failure or the pain of a CableCard install.
  • The terrabyte-loaded TiVo HD XL, on the other hand, is probably the best DVR value for the dollar. In fact, the HD XL more or less takes the steam out of 3rd party DVR upgrade shops like WeaKnees and DVRUpgrade. And you can easily add another 500 GB externally for a minimal cost.
  • The TiVo HD with a Western Digital DVR Expander isn’t a bad value, either, if the up-front costs of the HD XL are just too steep. It’s too bad that the only drive certified to work with the TiVo HD is the WD drive, as more options and brands could make this an even more economical option.
  • Gigabyte for gigabyte, the Moxi DVR costs more than TiVo in most single-room situations. You’d have to keep a TiVo HD XL on a monthly service plan for around three years for the cost difference to catch up. For the most part, Moxi’s price structure is competitive in the long-term, but still a premium over TiVo. It’d be nice to know if it was worth that premium, but so far there’s just been one real review of the Moxi that I’ve been able to find.
  • HTPCs (that are CableCard ready) are very expensive, and if you’re planning on using it primarily as a DVR, it’s really not worth the money. While you get all the stuff that a computer can do, for single-room setups it just may not be practical.
  • However, a multi-room DVR setup changes the picture quite dramatically. It’s in multi-room setups that the Moxi – presumably – will shine. The Moxi Mate is Moxi’s solution to multi-room streaming: a headless unit that streams from the main DVR and doesn’t require any additional subscription (although, the Moxi doesn’t require a subscription to begin with). I say it will presumably shine, because the Moxi Mate hasn’t been given a release date or price yet. I guessed it would cost $100 – reasonably, it should come in cheaper than that, considering the high cost of the main DVR itself – and even at this price, things work out very much in favor of Moxi. In fact, Moxi ends up being cheaper than renting a Verizon FiOS whole-home DVR with an HD box, and has tons more room!
  • Multi-room also works out well for HTPCs, since Xbox 360s are cheap extenders that also function as DVD players and, of course, game consoles. You’re still paying for a computer in addition to a DVR, but it makes more a lot more sense if you don’t plan on typing long blog entries about DVR costs from a wireless keyboard on your couch.
  • Conversely, multi-room is definitely not TiVo’s strength, by any means. Each unit requires a subscription, and because of the way TiVo handles room-to-room transfers (copying the show instead of streaming), you’re at the mercy of content and service providers to not copy block shows and prevent multi-room from working. If you want to watch your recorded shows on different TVs, consider TiVo a last resort.

So those are my conclusions, and here are the numbers that got me there. Instead of using the MSRP, I went with Amazon prices as of 3/16/2009. While these prices are typically in flux, if you’re reading this, you’re smart enough to pay “real world” prices instead of MSRP, and this will give you a better idea of what that real world price will be. This first chart is comparing single-room DVRs on a month-to-month price plan.
DVR monthly cost comparison chart
CableCard rentals typically run about $2.95, and the TiVo and Moxi only need one M-Card to run dual tuners. Currently, the only way to record two digital cable programs on an HTPC is with two separate ATI TV Wonder tuners, which each require their own single-stream CableCard. The FiOS Home Media DVR was the price I used for comparison, most cable company DVR rentals actually come in cheaper than this, closer to $16 a month. HTPC prices are hard to estimate since there are so many configurations from a handful of vendors. I think the lowest I was able to price a decent, two tuner CableCard ready HTPC was around $1200, and that was in need of additional hard drive space. I priced the Moxi with iomega’s DVR expander instead of Western Digital’s mainly because I was pissed off that my WD hard drive failed, and if I weren’t locked into WD by TiVo, I probably wouldn’t buy another one. Technically, the iomega costs a little more than the WD – and you could probably save a few more dollars if you bought your own HDD and stuck it in an enclosure – just make sure it’s certified for DVR operations, which can be really hard on disk drives.

This next chart compares the same DVRs when TiVo’s pre-paid service is used instead of month-to-month pricing.

DVR pre-pay cost comparison chart

You can see here that Moxi doesn’t come out nearly as well when you take advantage of TiVo’s pre-pay service discount. Around 5 years, Moxi finally beats even TiVo’s lifetime service price…but that’s a long time to wait.

Finally, this last chart compares various two-room DVR setups.

Multi-room DVR cost comparison chart

Like I said, TiVo comes off really poorly here. I didn’t run the numbers with prepaid and lifetime subscription numbers which may have helped a little bit, but only in the very, very long term. The 360 pricing here is the Pro console, if you want a second console for another bedroom you can save $100 by only getting an Arcade instead. *Again, the Moxi Mate pricing isn’t available yet, so I chose $100 because it’s about the most I would pay for it. A more reasonable price would be between $50 and $70 considering the bloody DVR costs $800 to begin with…any more than $100, and Moxi probably won’t have a prayer.