Boxee’s Cloud DVR now comes with a limited free service tier.

The new Boxee Cloud DVR box offers users unlimited storage for their TV recordings in the cloud. Unlimited playback, as well as the capability to view recordings on computers and mobile devices, costs users $10 a month. The new free service tier offers up ro five hours of DVR playback every month. There is still a free test period while the service is in beta.

So why did Boxee take the unusual step to rebrand a product just months after launch? The company’s VP of communications Andrew Kippen told me Tuesday that the previous name didn’t accurately capture the device’s functionality, letting consumers to believe that it was primarily a media player similar to Apple TV or Roku. The new name is meant to emphasize the DVR functionality as a key differentiator.

However, It’s worth noting that the company’s DVR service is currently just available in eight markets. Kippen told me that the plan is to extend the service to 26 markets by the end of the year, which should cover most of the country.

As part of the rebrand, Boxee seems to also have toned down its cord cutting rhetoric. The company made its ability to replace cable a key selling point when it unveiled its new device last fall, even promising “Free TV” prominently on the Boxee TV packaging.

On its newly-launched website, Boxee instead compares the device to TiVos and cable DVRs, touting unlimited storage and not free broadcast content as the key differentiator. That has likely to do with the fact that Boxee wants to get access to cable content as well. The company struck an agreement with Comcast to access encrypted basic cable signals last year.

That’s a decidedly different path than the one taken by Aereo, which has been battling Comcast’s NBC and other boradcasters in court for its take on cloud TV. Check out our paidContent Live conference in New York next week for a fireside chat with Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia.

Take a look my Boxee Cloud DVR unboxing video below:

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The report quotes unnamed “people with knowledge of the matter” as saying the two companies are in talks over the potential sale. Neither company would comment on the report when I asked them today, but the idea of the sale is perfectly plausible.

Mediaroom is a customizable platform that is mostly bundled by telcos, who want to take on more traditional TV service providers with their broadband services — customers include AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and Telus. As it also comes with DVR capabilities, Mediaroom is in some ways a competitor to TiVo .

According to Bloomberg’s source, Microsoft wants to focus more on delivering IPTV through its Xbox consoles. Swedish networking equipment vendor Ericsson, meanwhile, is all about servicing its telco customers, so the addition of Mediaroom to its lineup would make a lot of sense. The company could integrate the software with its existing IPTV managed services and systems integration portfolio – in February, Ericsson said it had signed 240 IPTV contracts with various service providers.

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With every major event we now experience as a country, whether it’s the Super Bowl or the presidential inauguration, it becomes more evident that the conversation on social media is as tied to the event as is the process of physically tuning into the broadcast. There’s nothing new about this — the rise of social media and the second screen has been clear for years — but as soaring numbers for social media sharing are revealed after each event, we shake our heads at just how quickly things have changed.

Even within a year, the connection between television events and their small screen counterparts has grown at a remarkable rate (13.7 million Super Bowl-related tweets in 2012 versus 24.1 million last night, and from 100 million active Twitter users in September 2011 to 200 million in December 2012).

That growth is changing how we view and consume media and how advertisers work to reach us. Suddenly, they can fairly reliably cross-promote between television and online, and consumers are increasingly sucked into experiencing both events in real time. And I say events, because watching Twitter during an event like the Super Bowl is an experience in itself.

One predicted trend that hasn’t come into existence yet is the merging of the television and social experiences into one, as Om once predicted and brought to my attention this morning. People are still pretty much watching television on televisions and tweeting from phones or laptops. As we wrote this morning, the majority of Super Bowl viewers did so through traditional broadcast methods, and tweeting from your TV still hasn’t exactly caught on.

But with every event comes the inevitable blog posts from Twitter and Facebook and Instagram about how this was the most-tweeted or the most-photographed or the most-shared event EVER. Frankly, those posts will only be newsworthy if the numbers ever decline, but that seems unlikely at this point. The dual forces of television and social media are dragging us into experiencing live events as they happen, turning on its head the idea that portable computing devices and streaming will let us watch whatever we want whenever we want. And they are setting different standards for how viewer engagement is measured: we all know the Nielsen ratings are a bit of a joke in this day and age. With Twitter’s reported acquisition of social tv analytics company Bluefin Labs, it’s something everyone is interested in figuring out.

My friend’s attempt to watch last week’s heart-wrenching Downton Abbey episode a day later was cheapened when a pivotal plot point was spoiled by a parody account for the Dowager Countess on Twitter (obviously do not click that link if you live under a rock and haven’t watched yet). It was a rough way to find out. And the experience cured my friend of wanting to DVR an episode ever again.

Because if you care about the content and you’re tied to the internet as so many of us are, saving anything for later is a losing battle. And the rapid wit of the Oreo jokes on Twitter during the Super Bowl can’t really be appreciated at a later date. Even as the Dowager Countess parody tweet ruined the episode for my friend, it probably entertained thousands of Downton fans who felt more in the know when they saw it, and felt more connected to the show as a result. There’s nothing like seeing a witty remark from someone you follow about an event you’re also following — suddenly it’s a joke you share with other people. And that experience is extremely hard to replicate after the fact.

Most of us will have to accept the fact that seperating live events from their social media counterparts is a losing battle at this point, but for brands like Oreo, the knowledge that they have a dual-platform audience creates real possibilities. And as they proved last night, can be a delicious combo, both for advertisers and witty twitter users who want in on the joke when it happens.

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Show notes for this episode:

• Support for live TV viewing was added to the WD Live TV and the WD Live TV Hub with the latest firmware update (1.12.14). More info on that update can be found on the WD website.
• To watch live TV on the WD TV, users need to plug in a USV TV tuner adapter from Hauppauge. Officially, only two models are supported – but I found that the Boxee live TV dongle works as well.
• Check out our previous review of the WD TV Live.
• Also worth reading: Our story about Skitter, a service that streams live TV to WD devices.
• To learn more about over-the-air broadcast and DIY DVRs, check out our new e-book Cut the Cord: All You Need to Know to Drop Cable, which is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iTunes.

Are you watching over-the-air TV? And if so: what does your setup look like? Please share your thoughts in the comments, get in touch with us on Twitter (@cordcutters) or email us at cordcutters @ gigaom.com.

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If only they had gone all the way with that case …

The rumination stems from a new commercial-deleting feature called “Auto Hop” introduced last week by Dish Network for its Hopper DVRs. The feature essentially strips out commercial pods for shows recorded on the major broadcast TV networks.

Once again, broadcasters are facing a DVR function that undermines their ad-supported business model. And once again, they seem poised to litigate over it.

”I think this is an attack on our eco system,” NBC Broadcasting chairman Ted Harbert said during a Monday conference call held in conjunction with NBC’s upfront presentation to advertisers. “I’m not for it.”

Also read: Forget Mad Men, does Dish hate all advertising?

With subscriber growth for satellite TV services stagnating, Dish undoubtedly sees such a consumer-friendly feature as a way to differentiate itself and expand on its current count of 14 million U.S. customers. Neither Dish’s chief satellite competitor, DirecTV, or any rival cable or telco pay TV operator has been bold — or disrespectful enough — to undermine programmers in this way.

“Auto Hop adds to an already long list of broadcast-unfriendly features of Dish’s service, including 30 second skip buttons on their remote controls (other DVR services, including DirecTV and TiVo, have ‘locked’ this feature out of sight; Dish boldly promotes it on a button on the remote),” wrote Sanford Bernstein senior analyst Craig Moffett last week.

Should broadcasters seek legal remedies to stop Dish, they will have to battle a determined adversary, led by chairman Charlie Ergen, who’s no stranger to protracted, nasty media litigation.

But as the Hollywood Reporter noted, it didn’t have to be this way. In 2001, the networks sued ReplayTV parent company Sonicblue over a DVR feature that let users fast-forward through commercials with a press of a button.

Sonicblue filed for bankruptcy in 2003, before a federal court could decide the case, and the general perception was that the networks managed to sue ReplayTV out of existence. With ReplayTV vanquished, broadcasters never followed through on their quest for a ruling that commercial-skipping DVRs indeed undermine economic underpinnings of — and thus violate — copyrighted material.

In the interim, legal precedent unfavorable to broadcasters was established, such a 2009 federal appeals court ruling that Cablevision did not violate the copyrights of network shows when it offered its subscribers a remote-storage DVR.

Meanwhile, Dish promises to be a tougher adversary than Sonicblue.

Dish’s ongoing court battle with AMC Networks over defunct HD programming service Voom HD is just once example of its pugnaciousness. Earlier this month, a New York court ruled that Dish intentionally destroyed evidence in the four-year-old, $2.5 billion case, which stemmed from the satellite company’s decision to drop carriage of the AMC channels back in 2008. The court upheld AMC’s case, which now appears set for trial.

Perhaps coincidentally — perhaps not — Dish revealed last week that it doesn’t intend to renew its carriage deal for AMC’s cable networks, which expires June 30, despite the fact that ratings are up big on the AMC flagship channel.

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Boxee recently released its Live TV tuner, which allows owners of the Boxee Box to receive over-the-air TV programming through the device. The tuner currently doesn’t support any DVR functionality, but there have been numerous requests to add this to the Boxee Box, and the startup has said that it is looking into such a possibility.

The survey asked owners of the newly released TV tuner about their experience with the device, only to finish with a very specific question about a DVR service offering: “How much would you be willing to pay for the ability to record 300hrs of TV,” it asked, with possible answers being $5, $10 or $15 per month.

A DVR subscription would pit Boxee against another startup, Simple.tv, which announced its own DVR geared toward the cord-cutting crowd at CES last month. The company is selling its hardware for $150 and will charge users an additional $5 per month for access to its programming guide.

Boxee also hinted at the launch of further broadcast TV-related products in a recent, heavily redacted FCC filing. A company spokesperson told me last week that Boxee is not yet ready to comment on its future product roadmap.

Check out our Boxee Live TV tuner review below:

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