Advantages of DirectTiVo
1. The video stream is delivered as a compressed digital stream by DirecTV for all their customers. Instead of the satellite receiver decompressing the stream to a raw analog video output, and then having it immediately re-compressed by a separate box, the DirecTiVo directly records the compressed digital stream on the hard drive. This means that there is no quality loss from a re-compression step, so watching recorded programs looks exactly the same as watching it live from DirecTV. There is no need to choose a trade-off between storage capacity and desired playback quality, as with the traditional TiVo and traditional tape-based VCRs.
2. Only one device on the shelf. Simplified cabling; integrated user interface; only one remote control; only one modem needs a telephone jack to call into a data service.
3. Only one bill for services. Traditional TiVo boxes may be billed a monthly fee by the TiVo company separately from any programming fed into them; the DirecTiVo combination is billed as an added line item on the DirecTV bill, and the customer doesn’t really interact with the TiVo company at all.
Dual tuners. If a dual-tuner DirecTiVo is provided with two inputs from the satellite dish (easy in most cases, since the dish usually has dual outputs, so it’s just a matter of running two parallel coax cables to the same place), then it can decode two programs independently at the same time. It has sufficient processing power, buffering RAM, and hard drive performance to record two programs on two channels at the same time (in case the customer wishes to record two programs which the TV networks have scheduled at the same time), or to record one program while watching another program live, or even to record two programs while playing back a third already-recorded program from the hard drive.