grah

I prefer Dish Network's approach. Instead of replacing your internal drive with the external (and therefore losing all recordings on the internal drive), the Dish receivers use the external drive as an archive. You can use multiple drives if you want to. And it doesn't require a special drive, almost any external USB hard drive will work. I've been using a 1TB drive with my VIP 722 for months, and have about 200 High-Def movies archived for my HD projector.

Grah!

Before the cable company gets too carried away with this advertising business, they should really think about updating their DVR interface.

I had Insight Cable and then Comcast, and they've been using the same ugly, crappy interface for years. It looks like a throwback to 1993. It doesn't even let you choose which channels to display in your guide. You can flag channels as favorites, but when you push the guide button, it shows ALL of the channels, even the raunchy adult programming that you don't subscribe to. Not exactly family friendly. It requires additional button presses to get to your list of favorite channels. That is the main reason I left cable.

But seriously, they can't even update the EPG to fill a 16x9 screen! The most widely used DVR in the world, and they don't even bother giving it a facelift after all these years.