Not so fast. If you go up to the appropriate consumer page, TiVo is giving you a Series-2 (80-hour) free. This is meant to compete with the traditional cable box rental charges. TiVo is aiming for "free" TiVos for Christmas in order to get some kind of massive build-up in market share. TiVo is trying to follow the standard business plan for cell phone providers. The prices are pretty reasonable on the base model, but if you want the HD Series 3 box, then you're paying $800 up front. That's less pleasant. Still, when I got my DirecTV HD10-250, I paid more than that up front, plus my monthly fees to DirecTV for "TiVo service".

Let's assume that pre-existing customers see their original pricing (which isn't entirely clear, but is likely to be true), then that would mean Engadget is blowing this out of proportion. Now, if we're lucky, the TiVo people will realize this for the PR disaster that it still is (i.e., with a non-trivial overlap between Engadget readers and premium TV gizmo adopters), and will find a way to sweeten the deal.