1 - I would have to say 'no' to this. The other option - the HR21 - is pretty good, but it's definitely not as great as TiVo, both in features, and in interface. They are both equally reliable.

2 - Can't help you much there. And Comcast's pricing is different in each market they serve, as far as I know.

3 - Yes.

Hr-21

I have a Sony Hi-Def LCD that i purchased a few months ago and needed the Hi-Def service to go with it. I loved my series 2 Tivos that I had for two separate tv's. I called DirecTV and they only had the HR-20 boxes so I jumped in and figured I'd keep the Series 2 for the back room TV. Switching to cable wasn't an option since I hate Cablevision and the Dolan family, and Fios ain't quite here yet. I never had any issues with DirecTV so I figured I'd give it a try.

I hated the box at first if for no other reason then it wasn't a Tivo. I got so fed up I switched to Cable and ordered a Tivo HD with cablecard technology and a regular series 2. The Series 2 worked fine just like the old DirecTV Seies 2 but the HD Tivo had a bad cablecard slot and wouldn't work right despite multiple cablecards being used. When it did work it was painfully slow compared to the Series 2. I mean painfully slow... But it didn't work correctly anyway so I sent it back along with the Series 2 and went back to DirecTV after one week. The channel lineup on Cablevision blows compared to DirecTV not to mention the difference in Hi-Def content so the choice was easy plus my hatred of the Dolan's came back full force.

I got the new HR-21 from DirecTV and like the black color. After getting used to it for a week or so I have learned to live with its non Tivo functionality, but also gotten to like a few of its better features. It is considerably faster than an HD Tivo and has a lot more storage space for the base models (upgrades aside). It records two channels at once and plays back a previously recorded one. The scheduler feature is easy to use to set up season passes. It has the thirty second skip, and the caller ID feature. The one shortfall is the buffering of two live programs. This it does not do. Unlike my Series 2 which I could toggle between two stations without "recording" either one, with the HR-21 I must record one to do this. The buffering is better though as far as time is concerned since the HR-21 buffers 90 minutes instead of 30.

All in all if you are a sports fan and don't care about the Tivo networking features (if I want to listen to music I put in a CD or plug in my camera to see photos) then the HR-21 is a viable option until Tivo and DirecTV learn to make nice again.

Hope that helps...