Never heard the term SDV till today...
From Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched_video
The concept is more than familiar and we have been associating this capability with IP based cable services rather than QAM. For other readers, we are talking about your cable company ending their inefficient broad band distribution system of sending you each and every channel you could receive and instead sending only the channel you are watching providing more bandwidth for their internet services.
Based on the Wiki entry, QAM can also be setup to operate in this manner but the achilles heal requires two way communication of the Cable Card. That by itself is not the problem, the hardware capability has always been there, but it has not been supported by Cable Card ready products or the cable companies. Wiki covers some of the trials and tribulations going on.
Checking all kinds of stuff at the TIVO site I can't find anything that says it supports VOD or PPV which requires two way communication. Based on that, nothing has changed and TIVO still does not support this Cable Card feature on their hardware which makes sense if the cable companies will not support it. That infers the answer to your question is, no QAM SDV support. In my area, Charter and Comcast are still broad band old school for distribution and I have not heard anything about that changing. Recently Charter did change to QAM only shutting down their analog cable distribution so maybe it's just a piece down the road for SDV.
I think TIVO is making a good bet that they can replace VOD and PPV with their internet capability and streaming support if they can only get the customer to change their habit and access such content this new way.
The Tivo Premier requires an M-Card, multi-stream cable card, to record two premium channels. Does your cable company support M-Cards? If not, you will be forced to use the older single stream Cable Card limiting you to only one channel. BTW, I am looking at one page that says
multi-stream only as the label for the back yet I am looking also looking at a picture of the back of the product and that just says
Cable Card. On another FAQ page it says this slot accepts either Cable Card. This last statement is likely true and makes sense.
I did see a statement that they do not support ATT Uverse. Either ATT did not want to play with TIVO or TIVO did not find it a worthy investment to support their network. I'll go with the former rather than the latter.
I agree TIVOs marketing blurb is merely shinola... As you say,
evolutionary is far more appropiate.
