CNet’s News.com division has the story of how Dell is going to begin selling the DirectDVR with Tivo Service (“DirecTivo”) units on it’s website shortly.
Here’s the juicy part though:
Dell’s home products will be augmented by music content and DirecTV and tied together by the Dell Media Experience, a multimedia user interface designed to simplify sharing files between devices. Dell will partner with companies such as DirecTV and Musicmatch to deliver content to the devices.
One has to presume, this means that DirecTV has given the greenlight (at least to Dell) to power up the USB connectivity and networking in the DirectDVR units. While this is a top feature of the stand-alone Tivos, it is currently not available on the DirectDVR units at all.
Once the software release with this functionality is “in the wild”, it certainly won’t be long before it reaches most of the DirectDVR owners – either from DirecTV firsthand or through back channels.
Yahootie!