CES: Digeo offers ‘Fee-less’ Moxi HD DVR

What makes more sense? Renting an HD DVR from the local cabler for maybe $15 a month, or skipping rental fees altogether and just purchasing your own HD DVR? Digeo, which makes HD DVRs after all, naturally chooses the latter.

The dual-tuner box offers 1080p HD recording (of basically 1080i and 720p content), and features the ability (as do some cable and DBS boxes) of scheduling recorded content remotely via the Internet.

The Moxi HD DVR has storage capacity of about 500GB—which Digeo says is more than 70 hours of HD content, or 300 hours of SD. (Storage can be expanded up to 2TB using an external eSATA drive.)

The new Moxi, which the company unveiled at CES carries no monthly fees, of course, but the box’s MSRP is $800. And while the Moxi can access a few content sources that most rental HD DVR boxes cannot (currently Flickr and Finetune music streaming)—based on today’s typical cable/DBS monthly HD DVR rental fees of $14-$18, it would take about 4.5 years for the Moxi to pay for itself (and by then, hope it has a middleware upgrade for 3D).

Read all of HD Notebookhere.