The agreement’s in place, and Comcast is planning to make TiVo-on-Comcast available everywhere, but it will take some time. There is a fair amount of infrastructure that needs to be in place at the Comcast regional headend in order to support the TiVo features.
I have both a Comcast DVR and a TiVo HD DVR. The differences between the two, for me, are mostly that the TiVo has far better ease-of-use, more features, and is better at handling recordings.
Ease-of-use: The TiVo menus are laid out better, it’s easier to find what you’re looking for and to do what you want to do.
More features: TiVo has wishlists, meaning that you can, for example, tell it to record anything with Jennifer Aniston in it, or anything with “Justice League” in the title, or all children’s animation shows, etc. TiVo’s program guide shows you far more channels at once, something like eight vs. Comcast’s four. So with Comcast, you have to scroll around a lot more just to see what’s on. TiVo has more options when you search for something, too.
Better recording handling: TiVo remembers what it has recorded, even after you’ve watched it and deleted it. Comcast doesn’t. Many of the cable channels (USA, Discovery, A&E, etc.) will run the same episode of a series multiple times per week. With Comcast, if tell it to record a series – and even specify that it record only the new episodes of that series – and it records the first showing of an episode, and then you watch it and delete it, the Comcast DVR will happily record that same episode the next time it’s on, because it just looks at the recordings you have, doesn’t see it there, and so records it for you. So you either have to leave that episode on the box, even after you’ve watched it, or get used to deleting the same episode six times. With TiVo, on the other hand, if you set up a Season Pass, and it records an episode and you watch it and delete it, TiVo remembers that it recorded that episode and won’t record it again.
The Comcast box is even flakey about what you specifically tell it, frequently just forgetting. For example, if you try to solve the above problem by going through the week and specifically marking the duplicate episodes as “do not record”, that will sometimes work, for a while, as long as you don’t set up any new recordings. But if you do, say, tell it to recording some other show (completely unrelated), those episodes that you marked as “do not record” will sometimes come back and get recorded.
TiVo also has a MUCH better “to do” list, showing everything it will record over the next two weeks. It’s really easy to go through that list, and it takes two key presses to remove something that you decide you don’t want.