said by cdru 
:said by MacLeech :It's an ADDED service, not a replacement for the equipment in your home, if you don't want it to be.
Presuming you are only renting the CableCo's hardware and don't have your own Tivo or equivilent, it's only an ADDED service as long as the cable company wants it to be. Since Time Warner owns the cable box that they provided, if they want to get rid of it and provide you with a different one, there is nothing stopping them.
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If they ever decide to take away the hardware DVRs they will wait until all of them are broken, because otherwise they are looking at 2 options - send techs to every house that has one to replace it with a new box, or suffer the hordes of angry customers in walkin centers to replace their boxes. 
