All "outdated" receivers have Rovi. I don't think a lot of users knew what Rovi was unless they watched their cable-box reboot. Maybe they did...I can't remember...Rovi may have been emblazoned in the Guide somewhere.
Anyway, it's not that Rovi is outdated. It's that your cable-box is outdated because it can't decode the low-bandwidth compression of MPEG4 programs...that's why you're missing channels...and I’m sure Cox no longer wants to keep paying the licensing fees to keep using Rovi.
I just swapped boxes and Contour is okay. I waited a long time to "upgrade" because Rovi was initially only available with DVR service. And it hate replacing something that worked.