TiVo recently announced that they have come out with a new HDTV capable DVR recorder.

The retail price for this has been reported to be at $300 and has been scheduled for an August, 2007 release date

I know some of you are wide-eyed at this cost, but look on the bright side. The previous product (TiVo Series 3) cost $800, so at least we know that the price has come down quite a bit.

Due to the sincere competition that Dish Network has been giving to TiVo, it will also be interesting to what their response to this product is.

The new DVR has quite a few similarities from its predecessor. It comes with dual ATSC tuners and CableCARD support, but you can say good-bye to the THX certification, the 250 GB hard-drive and the front OLED display. The latter was found to be displeasing to consumers and pushed the price up quite a bit.

TiVo decided to lessen the amount of space on the hard-drive for the new DVR. What the company found was that many of the customers simply were not going to use 32 hours worth of content. So TiVo decided to take down the size of the hard-drive to 20 hours.

In my opinion you really don't need to worry about the size of the hard-drive. 20 hours is plenty!

Some of the other more noteworthy features on the new HDTV TiVo are the direct downloads from movies and Television services. This should prove to be the gateway for more services to start being offered in an "On-Demand" basis. Other key offerings include the ability for online scheduling of your television, music and image streaming for your own computer.

If there is one complaint that I still have with the original TiVo is that the $13 a month subscription fee still applies. I find this amazing as the company is really trying to compete with Dish Network who are stealing away TiVo's customer base. I would have hoped that the level of competition would have done away with this.

Overall, the new HDTV TiVo is a step in the right direction. While we have not seen TiVo address all of the complaints the previous model had, lowering the price and coming out with a more basic offering should give the new product a "thumbs-up".