Congrats Matt,
I am totally jealous. We moved to the sticks about a year ago so I could have a stand alone shop and to get away from some of the things that we did not like in our small city. I have that same 1.5mb (sometimes) DSL from Frontier. The last time I called Comcast they told me there were no plans to expand service to my area even though it is about a mile down the road. I think that 1 mile difference starts the zoning change which calls for 5 acre minimum lot sizes. So the lack of population density may be a deal breaker for Comcast. Anywho the point I wanted to make was that I too have a satellite service for TV but when I was on cable I had a much better dvr service using a home theater PC and cable card tuners from Ceton. I had 8 independent tuners which I could share between 4 media center extenders. The whole thing was based upon a windows 7 media center HTPC and windows media center extenders like xboxes, etc.. I just read now there is a 6 tuner offering in both PCI and USB flavors and with some tweaking (tuner salad) you can bypass the tuner limits. My point you may want to take a look at the Comcast offerings with cable cards. no service fees, no equipment fees, you can share you entire media library to boot.