Moxi DVR

» see moxi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Two companies started in 1999 and both were about television. Paul Allen founded Broadband Partners in Kirkland, Washington, later renamed Digeo. Steve Perlman, who had built WebTV and sold it to Microsoft, started something called Rearden Steel under enough secrecy that people wrote articles guessing at it. In 2000 Rearden Steel became Moxi Digital and unveiled a media center meant to sit between the computer and the television. Digeo bought it in 2002, kept its own name, kept the Palo Alto office and most of the staff, and made Moxi the name on everything it shipped.

For six years Moxi was a thing you could not buy. Digeo sold the boxes and the Moxi Menu interface to cable operators, who put them in subscriber homes under their own branding, and the product built a reputation among the small number of people who noticed which DVR their provider had given them. It picked up an Advanced Media Technology Emmy in 2005 for the interface. The retail version was shown at CES in 2007 and finally went on sale in december 2008, available from Amazon and nowhere else.

What you got for the money was a Broadcom-based box with two or three CableCARD tuners, 500 GB of storage, external eSATA expansion, and no subscription fee at all, which was the sharpest thing it had against TiVo. Arris International bought Digeo's assets on 22 september 2009 and said it would keep selling to both retail and operators. It added the Moxi Mate that august, a cheap satellite box that pulled recordings off the main unit over the home network so you could watch in another room.

The whole DVR argument skipped a lot of the world, and turkey was part of what it skipped. Time-shifting there did not arrive as a box you bought. It arrived as a file. By the university years, with TTNet broadband at home, the answer to missing an episode was to download it the next day, which required nothing from the broadcaster and no card from anyone. A machine whose entire job was to hold onto a broadcast you might have missed only makes sense in a market where the broadcast is the only copy.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the box itself ~

Underneath the interface it was Linux on a Broadcom BCM7400 with a multi-stream CableCARD slot. The three-tuner model could record three high definition programs at the same time, which was one more than most operator boxes managed, and it would take an external drive up to several terabytes when 500 GB stopped feeling like enough. None of that was the selling point. The selling point was the Moxi Menu, a horizontal card interface that looked nothing like the grid every cable box used and was the reason it won a technical Emmy.

The CableCARD is worth explaining because the product does not make sense without it. US regulators required cable operators to support a removable card that would let a customer put their own equipment on the line instead of renting the operator's. Moxi existed inside that rule. It was legal to build only because a regulator had made a hole in the cable industry's box monopoly, and the industry spent the entire life of that rule making the hole as unpleasant to use as it could.

~ the decline ~

Every structural problem was visible on day one. The box cost several hundred dollars up front against a rental fee of a few dollars a month, which is the correct deal over five years and the wrong deal in the shop. It could not be bought in a shop anyway, because Amazon was the only channel. Installing it meant calling the cable company to request a CableCARD, then waiting for a technician who had no incentive to make third-party hardware work.

TiVo had already run this experiment with a much bigger brand and actual shelf space, and TiVo was struggling. A pricier mail-order alternative with no shelf space was not going to find the customers TiVo could not. Meanwhile the operator side of Arris's business was doing fine, selling whole-home DVR systems to the cable companies directly, which is a business with a few dozen customers instead of a few million.

~ what really happened ~

Arris posted a retirement notice for the consumer Moxi HD DVR on 11 february 2012, saying program guide data and technical support would run until 31 december 2013. Then it took part of that back, telling reporters a few weeks later that the notice had been posted incorrectly and there were no plans to discontinue service. Wikipedia dates the market withdrawal to november 2011 and the end of retail sales to early 2012, so the exact hour of death depends on which document you believe. The retirement notice is the last dated public act.

What the confusion actually showed is that the retail Moxi had stopped mattering to the company that owned it. Arris kept the Moxi name and moved it onto operator gateway hardware, which is where the revenue had always been. The boxes people had already bought kept recording. The product was not switched off so much as quietly stopped being a product, which is how most hardware in this graveyard actually goes.

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