TiVo Amazon Fire TV App Confirmed!

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Amidst the TiVo Bolt hits and misses, an Amazon Fire TV app has been confirmed. As first demonstrated in July of 2014, as an overseas MSO cloud offering and in relation to TiVo’s Haxe transition, Digital Trends suggests the app should be available to retail customers real soon.

TiVo would probably prefer you invest in one of its TiVo Mini boxes to share stored content with other televisions in the house, but with support for Apple Airplay and a new TiVo Android app available for Fire TV, you can use the streamers you might already have to access all of your recordings.

I’ll go ahead and assume that this will be a port of their existing Android app, which has long been available for Fire TV sideloading. As such, it’d require transcoding (and, obviously, suitable TiVo hardware) for more efficient transport in providing MPEG4 vs MPEG2. A loss in picture quality and audio fidelity would be expected, but is more than made up for in convenience. And I’m looking forward to my kitchen and deck television (one in the same) to bask in full FiOS TV glory in the near future. Slingbox latency, who?

13 thoughts on “TiVo Amazon Fire TV App Confirmed!”

  1. Will the app play live tv?

    As far as MPEG-2 conversion to MPEG-2, I would be surprised, but impressed.

    The new FireTV should be able to play MPEG-2 with the correct software decoding. Since TiVo has built in in MoCA,the bandwidth would not be a problem with MoCA adapter or Ethernet. AC router support should do pretty well with MPEG-2 streaming too.

  2. I am setting up a kitchen PC with this concept in mind to just use the Tivo web interface to watch TV, it might be better to just use an extra input on the monitor and use a firestick.

  3. The Fire TV app is also mentioned in Engadget’s review, incase anyone needs a second source.

    Right now, TiVo says it’s working on an app for the Amazon Fire TV. It’s not out yet, but when it launches you should be able to watch easily recordings from anywhere else in the home.

  5. Man and I just got around to sideloading the Tivo app to my Firestick yesterday. Would be nice to use the regular remote though. And I would bet that this will not support “out of home” streaming, so the sideloaded app may still be good for taking the firestick to the in-laws.

  6. Any chance this would be generic and run on the Asus/Google Nexus player?
    I have had mixed success with Fire TV stick WiFi performance and you can get the Nexus for ~50% of Fire TV (full version).

  8. I would have been excited about this a year ago, but now I own 8 Minis. I even have one on the patio and in the master bathroom.

  9. Would be nice if it supported out of home streaming. This way you can watch your TiVo recordings in hotels while traveling by just taking your fire stick with you.

  10. Dave-

    How well does the sideloaded app work on the Fire TV stick?

    From my experience, using the FTV Stick with S/D HD HomeRun, I would think it would have poor playback of MPEG2 and connectivity issues over WiFi.

    Now the FireTV with ehternet or MoCA might work pretty well– especially with the new FTV box.

    I spoke to a sales rep at TiVo today, and he said he read FTV will only support casting from what he read in an early version of the manual on the new Bolt. He said he hopes that is a mistake and it will support the full app, but that is what the manual said. Maybe you can get your hands on a manual for the Bolt?

  13. Fire TV app confirmed for next week! Recorded content streamed in and out of the home to begin with. No real “live” stuff, but if you initiate a recording it’s immediately available to stream in progress.

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