The new cable box from Shaw Cable is pretty cool. It is a PVR like Tivo or ReplayTV meaning you can pause live TV and record shows to the units internal hard drive. You can record around 25 hours of regular TV 30-60 hours of a digital channel or 10 hours of the HD channels before filling up the 80G hard drive.
The box as Shaw is shipping it is not fully functional, the USB and firewire ports are disabled this means you can't hook up an external hard drive to the device to get more capacity. The Shaw sales rep I spoke to implied that they were working out something with the MPAA before enabling the port in the firmware of the device. I hope they enable adding an external harddrive soon as the current capacity is too low it would be imposible to grab the entire season of any one show. Tivo is having similar issues with the MPAA.
The six HD channels Shaw currently broadcasts are amazing, they even make DVD's look bad. It is to bad that there are only six channels and two of them are usually showing something that is on the other four anyway so there are really only four channels. I would like to see them add a FOX and WB channel to the HD lineup as most of the shows I watch are on one of those two networks.
I bought the DCT 6208 instead of a Tivo, ReplayTV, or Media Center PC primarily because it is an integrated device, with one of the other machines I would need to figure out how to get it into my current A/V center which is already overly complicated. The other solution also don't currently pick up any Canadian TV listing automatically so you need to generate your own listing somehow. There are tools out there to do this but it seems like a bit to much effort to set up.