Bob Congdon illustrates what I've been somewhat worried about:

Cable companies aren't exactly beloved by most people. Cable service is expensive and sometimes flaky or troublesome. It's pretty easy to find people who don't like Comcast . That said, our recent experience with Comcast was pretty good. We added HD and DVR services to digital cable. The DVR is nice — it stores up to 80 hours of standard broadcasts or 20 hours of HD content. We've never owned a TiVo so I can't compare the two services but with Comcast DVR there's a single box and single remote for both cable and DVR. Not sure if it's Comcastic or not but we're pretty happy.

The thing is, the Comcast DVR blows. I guess it seems ok if you have nothing to compare it to (and, to be fair, it does have some nice things that ReplayTV doesn't - HD recording and the ability to browse future recordings easily). However, those nice things are outweighed by some of the really stupid things:

• No skip. Yes, it has fast forward, but it would be very nice if it could just jump 30 seconds
• No ability to jump to minute X of a show. Instead, you have to forward/reverse.
• The second problem is more irritating due to this: Say you are watching a show as it records. Now the show ends, and the DVR starts recording a new show. You are behind, due to a few pauses. Bam - it skips to the start of the new show. Because, you know, that's what you want. Have fun getting back to where you were.

I'm finding that I prefer to watch non-HD versions of things simply so that I don't have to put up with that stuff. The Comcast DVR doesn't have to suck - it's got three tuners and a few nice features. The tragedy is, the flaws outweigh all that.