TiVo vs. Comcast: The gloves are coming off

So it's not unusual for us for readers to tip us off on stories (we couldn't do our job otherwise), but we thought there was something funny about someone from OutCast Communications, TiVo's PR agency, sending us a link to a piece in the San Jose Mercury News about the problems people are having with Comcast's new digital video recorder set top box (basically, buggy software = freeze ups). Not that we blame them, it's just that usually when PR people bug us, it's to pitch a story about a company they work for, not to dust up some dirt on a competitor. We figured there was probably some bad blood after the news got out that outgoing CEO Mike Ramsay pulled out of a deal to put TiVo's software on Comcast's boxes (obviously Comcast managed to figure things out on their own). We have this funny feeling that the gloves are about to come off, but we hope that TiVo will simply would focus on making their product better rather than trying to highlight the flaws in somebody else's efforts.