Cable transmission and video-on-demand supplier Arris, which in September acquired digital video-recorder (DVR) supplier Digeo for $20 million, has followed through with its previously promised support for Digeo's "Moxi" line of retail DVRs by introducing new products and pricing.
Arris has developed a new three-tuner version of the Moxi HD DVR that gives viewers the option of recording three simultaneous live programs while watching a fourth prerecorded program off the device's hard drive. The company has also lowered the prices of its existing two-tuner HD DVR product, from $799 to $499, as well its companion Moxi Mate device that enables multi-room DVR functionality, from $399 to $299.
The Moxi Mate device, which connects to the main DVR through DNLA home networking, will also benefit from a software upgrade this fall that will enable it to access live TV programming. Previously, a Moxi Mate could only access prerecorded shows off the hard drive.
Arris will not sell the three-tuner HD DVR product, which records up to 75 hours of HD and up to 1,000 hours by adding an optional eSATA drive, as a standalone product. Instead, Arris will market the device bundled with a single Moxi Mate for $799 in a two-room configuration, or with two Moxi Mates for $999 in a three-room configuration. The Moxi devices, which are sold online through moxi.com and amazon.com, do not bear any additional subscription fees to support their program guide service, as TiVo's DVRs do.
While Digeo had added new features to the Moxi HD DVR earlier this year, such as the ability to watch online video from Hulu, Netflix and YouTube by connecting it to a home network, the move to three-tuner functionality is probably more important, said Marc Beckwitt, VP of CPE Video Business Development for Arris.
"In listening to consumers, there's always a desire to record more shows at one time," said Beckwitt.
Digeo had initially marketed its DVRs to cable operators before introducing a retail product, which it began selling last winter as a high-end DVR. The Paul Allen-backed company supplied its Moxi DVR set-top and unique user interface to Charter Communications but gained little traction with other cable operators as a supplier of leased set-top boxes.
At the time of the Arris acquisition, Digeo CEO Greg Gudorf said the company had shipped about half a million Moxi boxes in total and was maintaining 300,000 active Moxi boxes via a two-way broadband connection, with the lion's share being Charter subscribers. The consumer business accounted for very little of that total, according to Gudorf.
Beckwitt did not provide any updates to those numbers, saying only that Arris continues to support those boxes and talk to cable operators about its products, though it won't be marketing the three-tuner DVR to the multichannel operator market.
"The basic message here is that it's business as usual," he said.
