TiVo is dead. They know it and most of the public is now finding out. This is their last ditch effort to get some cash but it's going to backfire like every marketing mistake they've made since they started. It was a good technical idea based on work being done in the PC space by companies like ATI. TiVo wrapped it all in a nice usable UI.

They were too early to productize however and decided they'd market it as a service. No innovation since the early days and marketing decisions only further in the wrong direction. TiVo has now become a catch-all term for DVR and there's no way they will ever come back from it.

Satellite PVRs keep getting better. Solutions from PC software companies are slowly getting better (Sage if better than BeyondTV in almost every way). Microsoft will ship MCE capabilities in everything. ReplayTV probably did a smart thing moving to a software solution.

Video recording is not a service, so stop paying for it as if it were. Don't sign up for a TiVo contract that may end with the company folding before you ever see your money's worth of "service."

TiVo has demonstrated they're anti-consumer and have shown over the past six years they can't make enough money to grow the company let alone invest in R&D to really move the technology forward in significant ways.