I will kick and scream before a Tivo leaves my house. Yes, I have to deal w/ Comcast but in the SF Bay Area, I have no choice.
Granted it's aging hardware but the GUI is untouched. I know the latest Media Center is good and so are some of the features of UVerse and DirecTV's H10 or 20 (I forget), but Tivo's always been consistent. Pair that with Neftlix, Amazon Unbox, and as of today, Blockbuster on Demand, it is a very good streaming client.
Network your Tivo and the door opens. You can use Tivo Desktop on a PC to move the shows to your PC and then transcode them for your iPod/iPhone/Touch/AppleTV, Zune, etc. On a Mac, you can use the open source iTivo to do the same. Use pytivo and then you can stream your PC or Mac's media (photos/vids) to your Tivo. Network multiple Tivos and you can share shows between the boxes and not have to record shows in multiple places. I go a step further and pair it w/ a Slingbox and now I can see multiple Tivos when I'm on travel. No more channel surfing on the hotel TV.
There are a ton of references on how to upgrade your Tivo HDD on your own. Weaknees.com or DVRupgrade.com are good resources. I've taken bare drives and used InstantCake to format. Easy peasy.
There are apps on the iPhone so you can have a Wifi remote to control the Tivo. And it's FAST because you are using a network connection, not infrared commands. You can also use an iPhone app or web browser to program your Tivo when you're not home.
Try find all of these features on any other box. Yeah, maybe you can build it into homebrew Media PC (there's even a Mac Mini version), but it'll never be as good as a Tivo.
And no, I don't work for them.
Does Tivo have staying power? Maybe, maybe not. But remember that this platform runs Linux. If Tivo dies, there's a HUGE dev community that'll keep this alive for a long time.
Moxi intro'ed their idea several years ago and tried to make it work. Much better in concept than Tivo. If you've never heard of them, then you now know how hard it is to compete against Tivo. Tivo's biggest hurdle is the carriers and their hesitance to support Cablecard.
