At the CEDIA home electronics show in Indianapolis, TiVo announced a new TiVo: the Premiere Elite. It’s a high-end upgrade to the company’s current DVR with four (!) tuners, 2TB of storage, THX certification, and compatibility with the MoCA standard for networking over coaxial cable. It’s $499.99 plus TiVo’s $19.99 monthly fee, and clearly aimed at the customers of the audio/visual installation pros who attend CEDIA. TiVo says it expects to ship it later this year.
Tag Archives | DVRs
TiVo Prepping Four-Tuner HD DVR?
The new TiVo Advisors survey is far more interesting than most, spelling out a number of “potential products and features.” On the hardware front, two very specific devices are described:
- A companion device for your DVR. It allows a second TV (in another room) to watch live TV (in HD) and also watch the recordings from your DVR.
- A 4-tuner high-definition DVR that allows you to record up to 4 shows at one time (and watch a 5th show that is previously recorded).
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What’s Next for TiVo: Hulu, Streaming, Extenders
While we generally shy away from rumor and speculation, TiVo’s been pretty quiet as they approach the one year anniversary of Premiere retail availability. Given our site heritage and interests, the lack of news out of Alviso can be frustrating. So we’ve whipped up a post based purely on hearsay, but one that hopefully gives some indication what TiVo is quietly working on.
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A Few FiOS TV DVR Notes (vs. TiVo)
As regulars know, we recently left the cable hegemony behind in favor of Verizon’s FiOS TV…. to overcome switched digital video (SDV) tuning adapter flakiness and a CCI Byte content lockdown that essentially neutered our TiVo ecosystem. And, on the technological front, we couldn’t be happier. (But I may follow up with a less glowing billing and support post, as many of you cautioned.)
We’re a three TV/DVR household, although currently only possess two televisions — one powered by a TiVo Premiere and the other powered by the Verizon FiOS DVR shown above. So the question is, what DVR will power TV #3 when the time comes?
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TiVo's iPad App Now Available
TiVo’s iPad app, announced in November, is now available via the the App Store.
I’ve had app on hand for several weeks now, and I quite like it. Whereas TiVo has been lagging the competition in providing this sort of functionality, they may have just leap frogged nearly all contenders in producing both a beautiful and functional television companion. Of course, it’s only a companion for TiVo Premiere owners. But perhaps there are a few more this week given that amazing $65 Woot deal.
The app itself is quite comprehensive. Who needs picture-in-guide when you can manage just about every meaningful element of your TiVo from an iPad without interrupting the television viewing experience. Remote control? Check. Guide? Check. Season Passes, To Do List, Now Playing? Check, check, check. Plus, you know no app is complete these days without the ability to share on Twitter and Facebook. So they’ve checked that off, too. Bonus — portrait and landscape views for any/every screen.
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TiVo’s New Pricing: Both Cheaper and Pricier–and Definitely More Confusing
TiVo, the original personal TV box, is facing new competition from Apple TV, Roku, the Boxee Box, Logitech’s Google-based Revue, and other Johhnie-come-lately gizmos. Most of them cost less than TiVo, and none of them require a monthly fee. And the company is responding with a holiday offer–good through December 31st–that brings the price of a TiVo box from $299.99 down to $99.99, the same amount you’d pay for an Apple TV or Roku’s midrange version. It’s calling this an “instant savings” of $200. And there’s even an option to pay nothing up-front at all.
Except…it’s nowhere as simple as that. Actually, figuring out how much TiVo costs, and which version to buy, just got more confusing.
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IBM Storage Tech: DVRs in the Cloud, SSD Replacements
An IBM data center in North Carolina
How is IBM funneling its vast resources into research around future products and services? At a press and analyst day last week in New York City, the company talked up projects around replacing today’s flash-based SSDs (solid state drives) with new PCM (phase change memory) technology and dropping DVRs (digital video recorders) in favor of video storage clouds.
IBM is about to start field tests with cable TV companies around new cloud-based video storage services for consumers, said Steve Canepa, general manager for IBM’s Global Media & Entertainment Industry Division.
Meanwhile, for businesses, Big Blue is eyeing the release in another four years of new storage servers based on PCM, according to other speakers at the press event on Thursday in midtown Manhattan.
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TiVo Gets QWERTY
TiVo has begun selling the $89.99 slider remote with a hidden QWERTY keyboard which it first showed off back in March when it launched its new Premiere boxes. Our friend Dave Zatz has tried one and mostly likes it. It has the signature TiVo “peanut” design, but is 25% shorter–presumably to allow for a keyboard with a width that lends itself well to thumbtyping.
The TiVo Slide uses Bluetooth to talk to all recent Tivos (the Premiere, HD, and Series 3), which means you don’t need to worry about pointing it at the DVR or whether there’s any furniture, pets, or children in the way; it comes with a USB Bluetooth adapter, which presumably helps to explain the pricetag. (The Slide costs almost a third as much as a Tivo Premiere itself–it would be nice if TiVo offered a Tivo-plus-Slide bundle at at least a modest discount.)
For as long as people have been entering alphanumeric text on TVs–which would be since home video games got high-score features, I guess–they’ve mostly been doing it via arrow keys and cumbersome on-screen keyboards. TiVo’s standard text-entry system isn’t bad, relatively speaking, but I’m always in favor of physical plastic QWERTY keys when available…
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DirecTV's Whole Home DVR Now Available ($3)
After several months of private testing, followed by an open beta, DirecTV has formally introduced their whole-home DVR service. As a fan of the ‘hub and spoke’ digital distribution model, the MoCA-based solution looks quiet compelling. Of course, DirecTV subscribers would need at least one HD DVR. But each additional room (up to 15!) can be outfitted with a less pricey HD receiver to schedule or view recordings from the primary DVR. Free would be nice, but you really can’t go wrong a low $3 monthly surcharge.
Thanks, Jon!
(This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.)
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5Words: Snapstream’s DVR Records Fifty Shows
Snapstream’s 50-tuner DVR demo.
Gmail’s spam filter: too aggressive?
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