On the other hand, our cable company lost big. Instead of paying for all our cable boxes (we had six), I yanked them all out and replaced them with my old TiVos, recording just basic cable. I can use TiVo-to-TiVo networking to send programming from my two terabyte TiVo HD to the older Series 2 TiVos, so we'll have video throughout the house without needing any of the cable boxes. All told, that single change saves us $84.07 each month, or $1,008.84 per year -- covering the cost of the new TiVo box after about 15 months of savings. If I use this solution for three years, I'll come out about $1,725 ahead of the game.

And that's where it cost my cable company in a big way. Because their boxes broke my boxes, I was forced to pull their boxes out of my house. As a result, they're going to lose more than a thousand dollars a year from me. I'm happy because that's more money in my pocket, but it also showcases how mission conflict is costing the cable companies revenue even as they fight to hold on to it.

Mission conflict also costs the cable companies, because I never considered replacing my TiVo boxes with their DVR. I did briefly consider the excellent Windows Media Center option and even the Linux-based MythTV, but I never, not even for a second, considered using the cable provider's DVR.

That's because the cable provider's DVR sucks. As ZeoTiVo said, there's no incentive for the cable box to be any good. Scientific Atlanta, makers of my cable boxes, is really a networking company, like its parent, Cisco. Scientific Atlanta makes network nodes on the cable company's network. Out of all the products they provide, DVR functionality is simply an add-on option, fulfilling a check-box requirement some customers demand.

By contrast, the people at TiVo (and the people on the Windows Media Center team), live and breathe personal video recording. Everything they do and everything they think about is aimed at improving the user experience recording and playing back live TV. As a result, products made by true believers in DVR technology are going to be better and more pleasant to use than products created by a company that simply knocked one off to shut up a few whining customers.

How a Flexible Enterprise might do it better
As best as I can tell, there really are no bad guys here, although sometimes cable TV companies seem to go way out of their way to act like jackasses to their customers. Our cable provider (and all the others throughout the country) are doing their best to provide a service in a very changing world. Remember that not only are we seeing a change from analog TV to digital TV, but we're also seeing a change from standard definition analog to high-definition video.

It's up to the cable companies to make sure their infrastructure can take it.

But they're also facing increased competition. The Internet itself is beginning to compete, with video-on-demand provided by more and more companies: