TiVo Archives - Page 13 of 149

TiVo Resurrects Lifetime Service Transfer Deal

TiVo’s got a great offer for those of you still rocking legacy DVRs with Lifetime service. Active* Series 2, Series 3, TiVo HD, and Premiere units can have their Lifetime service transferred to a new TiVo Bolt Vox under the equivalent All-In plan for just $99. As to the fine print, this promotion is only … Read more

TiVo Giveth… and Taketh Away

I’ve got some very good news for owners of legacy TiVo hardware… and a smattering of bad news.

While I had assumed the TiVo Premiere was end-of-life, over 250,000 of you still on the platform recently received the Roamio and Bolt’s highly desirable SkipMode – which enables somewhat automated commercial skipping of most prime time television recordings. Additionally, these 8-year old DVRs have been treated to the recently released Alexa integration for voice control. It’s quite refreshing to see TiVo invest their finite resources in backporting a subset of folks on this older hardware (and I’m guessing those of you on monthly or annual service plans are to be thanked).

On the flip side, the less than 1% of TiVo owners still using dial-up for guide data are about to be cut off due to exorbitant fees:

As foreshadowed by yours truly and then announced at CES, Alexa has finally come to TiVo retail boxes. Well, sort of. Over the weekend, a placeholder app appeared – announcing the imminent arrival of Amazon’s voice assistant. Although TiVo has introduced their own native voice remote, it requires an additional purchase, vs those who already own Alexa gear, and is limited to units running the less desirable TiVo Experience 4 (Hydra) on a subset of TiVo hardware. By comparison, Alexa will be made available to a broad swath of devices, dating all the way back to the Premiere and running either Hydra or the HDUI Encore interface.

The TiVo Alexa skill isn’t live yet, but we know it’ll utilize Amazon’s beefed up media api. And, based on some of the documented commands that’ll be available to us, the delay will have been well worth the wait:

Who’s Taking Over TiVo Retail Manufacturing & Sales?

As Rovi foreshadowed, prior to their 2016 TiVo acquisition, the merged company wants out of the retail hardware business. Not consumer services itself, but the manufacturing and distribution. As such, from Seeking Alpha’s transcript of the TiVo quarterly call yesterday: In addition, we have signed on a major device manufacturer as our direct-to-consumer box partner. … Read more

First TiVo Hydra Feature Update Rolling Out

The TiVo Hydra experience has seen a number of updates, since its October release, but they’ve primarily been focused on squashing (numerous) bugs. While that work continues, TiVo has begun rolling out their first “feature update” to existing Hydra owners — beginning two weeks ago with 5000 randomly selected boxes and now expanded to the … Read more

TiVo “GameSkip” Spotlights Super Bowl Commercials

While we often ignore or outright bypass commercial interruption, TiVo recognizes the Super Bowl is different and has flipped the script by inverting its ad-skipping technology: Everyone knows that this Sunday’s commercials are some of the best, highest quality commercials of the year. So, we’re going to tag the game backwards, with the commercials and the … Read more

The 4K TiVo Mini Vox Giveaway

TiVo VP Ted Malone kindly provided a TiVo Mini Vox ($180) for evaluation, which I’m now happy to pass along a member of the community.

As you likely know, the TiVo Mini line of small form factor set-tops extend your core TiVo DVR experience to additional rooms and televisions within the home. The newly released Mini Vox features a similar footprint as its predecessors and, beyond more agreeable styling, also brings superior processing power and 4K along for the ride to stream that ultra HD Netflix and Amazon. It’s snappy! The Mini Vox also sports TiVo’s new Hydra interface, for better or worse, which in turn enables TiVo’s highly capable native voice capabilities – triggered via the bundled voice remote.

The giveaway is a fairly simple and standard affair, although not entirely free… as the cost of entry is your social media soul. For reference, a YouTube subscription carries double the weight of a Twitter follow and 4x the value of a Facebook look-see. But, hey, feel free to stack the odds in your favor by taking all available actions. One winner will be selected at random next week and, should the response be favorable, I’ve got some other goodies (eero) waiting in the wings.

TiVo Announces Alexa, Google Assistant, IFTTT Capabilities

As TiVo puts the finishing touches on their CES experience, we can clearly see from the “booth” signage (above) that they’re expanding beyond newly introduced native voice control to embrace third parties. While TiVo “Vox” offers far deeper integration and control, including stacked commands, than Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant can provide, those offerings are always-listening (for better or worse) and already installed in many TiVo customer’s homes… and options are good. No word yet on availability, but I assume this will come to all Hydra-endowed retail units and whichever MSOs choose to integrate (who may be limited by regional availability).