Come Thursday morning, your TiVo is your Slingbox… with both live and recorded digital cable becoming available to us outside the home. Assuming you have TiVo Roamio Pro/Plus DVR hardware and an iPhone or iPad. Unfortunately, Android support has been pushed to 2014 and it’s not yet clear if Premiere units and the base Roamio will also receive placeshifting functionality via the TiVo Stream accessory this week. Regardless, this is a pretty dramatic move and one we never thought TiVo would make. So we’re hoping they’ve taken the last two months since Mossberg’s review to significantly improve upon his “terrible, almost unwatchable” experience… as I’ll be borrowing my wife’s iPhone for awhile.
This is a nice little step but I use my slingbox on my laptop when traveling, more then my phone or tablet. Having access to my content on the biggest screen I have with me is always preferred. The lack of ability to transfer show via the stream function to Android after a year is very disappointing.
I agree. I hope that they eventually release a Windows (and then Mac) client for this. That will allow me to view on an external HDTV…
I agree. I hope that they eventually release a Windows (actually, hopefully web so I can also use it on my Mac) client for this. That will allow me to view on an external HDTV…
will you still need to start a recording every time you open a streaming session? this is painful if you just want to channel surf or watch several live shows without creating recordings every time you want to change the channel
this won’t replace the slingbox functionality, feature set or scope of devices (including pc or any browser for that matter) for a while. The experience hopefully, will be more seamless and user friendly than a slingbox and having it built in to the highest end Roamio is going to bring availability to more people (and I guess they were giving the tivo stream away to some lower end Roamio buyers at first)
It would be very nice to have this play in a browser, as plex does. Too much to hope for?
As to the Stream update to this functionality for Base Roamio and premier, A tivo rep asked me on the phone on Friday 10/18, when I called with a different question, “if I had seen the update to my stream yet?” When I pressed for what he meant, he said they were updating the software in the stream and if I had seen this update. I then asked what software the stream had in it and what an update would do and he explained that this update will allow me to stream outside of my wifi network.
What (if any) content restriction will there be for out-of-home streaming. In other words, will the CCI byte setting be a factor in what channels can be streamed out-of-home?
t’s not yet clear if Premiere units and the base Roamio will also receive placeshifting functionality via the TiVo Stream accessory this week.
Margret (@tivodesign) says that the Tivo Stream will handle out-of-home streaming with an upcoming Stream update “most likely in early November.”
So even Premiere users get some love.
Anyone know the software version number for this update?
“What (if any) content restriction will there be for out-of-home streaming. In other words, will the CCI byte setting be a factor in what channels can be streamed out-of-home?”
Yes. CCI byte restriction. And my worry is that TiVo’s pushing the boundaries on out-of-home will result in more restrictive CCI byte usage going forward. (I still think HBO’s decision to force FIOS to move the CCI byte on their channels was a direct response to the original TiVo Stream.)
Well, I’ve got a Stream, so I’ll try this when it comes out. I won’t be updating to a Roamio just yet. Will wait for the reviews to come in. But if they do a decent job and get the dynamic tuner allocation for Minis done at some points soon I’ll punt an HD and a lifetimed Premiere for a Roamio and another Mini. The response time, the improved Netflix app, the non-line-of-sight remote, the out of home streaming, the single DVR without having to manage two sets of Season Passes, a lower monthly bill with Comcast etc etc. Need to go through CableCARD hell with Comcast again though. Or at least potential hell. Last time (Premiere) was multiple visits and calls to get it right.
Oh and Dave, thanks for the link to Uncle Walts review of the Out of Home streaming experience. The caveat I’d put is that lots of those places might not have worked that well with Slingbox either. The apps he’s comparing to did offline compression, e.g. HBO creates multiple versions of Game of Thrones at different bit rates using very expensive hardware doing non-real-time compression using multiple passes etc to deliver that stream to you over HBO Go. Slingbox and Roamio do it using cheap hardware. The proper test is how Roamio compares to Slingbox. If it does mostly as well, I’ll jump and it’ll be a big deal. If they stumble (I expect they will out of the gate) then not so big…
@glenn
Netflix does the same thing as HBO. The company prepares “120 different versions of each movie to deal with different screen sizes and bandwidth requirements.” Wow. Netflix must have a *really* big hard drive.
http://gigaom.com/2012/12/18/netflix-encoding/
@Bryan A
Yup, the whole ABR thing (Available Bit Rate) is cool beans. Every 2 seconds or so you can switch from any of the encodings to another, basically at an I-frame boundary (well, a closed GOP boundary but who’s counting). Based on the dynamic performance of your connection at the moment. You can also spin up the video quicker at the start by letting it go low-rez so you have less data to transfer for the initial display, then spin it up before you notice too much how bad it is. Cool stuff. Everybody has their own variant–Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.
Don’t feel too bad for Netflix though. A cable version of Game of Thrones using MPEG-2 might be 15-20Mbps for HD. So an hour might use like 7GB. A lot.
Netflix maxes out around 2-3Mbps for HD. The sum total of all those different versions might not exceed the cable companies version in total disk space, given that a lot of those versions are very small indeed. And hey, we have 4TB hard drives now. And there are rack mount systems at 3U that store like 24 drives vertically in an array, so like 100TB in about 5″ of vertical rack space. Repeated ad-nauseum of course in their data center…
Hey Dave – I am confused – does the 30 second skip forward trick still work with Roamio ?
thanks for all your info and reviews