In case you missed it, TiVo held an awkward Facebook sweepstakes to “win” the opportunity to pre-order a TiVo Stream. Today, the lucky 600 were notified with the email below:
Call (877) 289-8486 by September 4th (noon PST) to order your new TiVo Stream and receive it on September 5th. The TiVo Stream is just $129.99 with no additional service fee.
I’m satisfied with TiVo’s pricing. Sure, they could have gone lower on hardware, but TiVo’s always been something of a premium brand and service. Most importantly, they’re launching the Stream fee-free. And I’m down for one.
As a refresher, the TiVo Stream is a small network device that acts as an intermediary between a Premiere DVR and an iPhone or iPad — allowing you to stream live or DVRed content to iOS devices around the home. Also, as the virtual successor to TiVoToGo, the Stream can wirelessly offload unrestricted recordings to that iPad or iPhone to take on the road.
UPDATE: My TiVo Stream review is up.
I may be confused but how could you watch “Live TV” with up to 3 streams? Wouldn’t that not take 3 tuners from the Tivo? Maybe I am missing something.
I never watch any streaming video on my iPad so I am passing for now. If someone hacks it so we can use it with KMTTG so we can transfer already transcoded content, I would be in.
Slingbox solo is the same price and works everywhere, not just inside your house.
The transcoding is interesting, but I have time-warner cable so nothing is unrestricted.
Rodalpho, Yeah TWC is worst if you were planning on offloading content. But for around the home, I’d think this is a much cleaner, elegant solution than Sling.
Brennok, In terms of “hacking” I’m interested in seeing how we might be able to rig this up with a personal VPN to stream outside the home, a la Slingbox. Hmmm.
The slingbox dynamically adjusts bitrate based upon network conditions.
I have no doubt you could fool the tivo stream to work outside of your house with a VPN, but I question how well it would work, particularly on coffeehouse wifi or mobile data.
The main advantage of the tivo stream in your house is that it doesn’t take over the TV. So you can stream to your ipad in bed while the kids are downstairs watching skinemax. I guess I can see some value in that.
I’m hoping that maybe the fee-free thing is a good sign for the IP-STB as well. I’m not sure that I want to bother with the Stream as I really am concerned about transfers to my iPad and use KMTTG for this, The Stream may be quicker but there are very few instances where I’m not doing transfers/transcodes long in advance.
@DaveT
It is possible that it will stream the same live tv to 3 devices, or the up to 3 streams (assuming separate channels) would be its capability with one of the 4 tuner Premiere’s. Or, even better, maybe it can use tuners from any number of Premiere’s on your network (doubt that).
@Dave Zatz
The VPN method may not work if the IOS app will use UPNP. The Sonos app uses UPNP (UDP based) to find the devices on the network, that type of traffic can’t traverse differing subnets, thus the app doesn’t “see” the Sonos even if connected to the same network via VPN.
If Tivo really wants to limit access to the local LAN, I assume they would employ similar techniques.
One member of the forum has ordered – with tax and shipping it came out closer to $150:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=9254948#post9254948
Also, it looks like anyone can just call in and order without having received the email:
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=9255128#post9255128
Mostly I’m curious if the app will be AirPlay enabled. I have an AppleTV and Boxee Box and it would be awesome if I could Airplay live tv and recordings to them. Although the actual path the video takes would be a little ridiculous:
Tivo Premier –> Tivo Stream –> iPhone –> Apple TV
If it works, though.
@Sami My understanding (cough) is, just as the app currently lets you select a Tivo on your network to browse through, the 2.0 app with Stream support will do the same. You select the Tivo you want to stream/copy/watch live TV from, and go…
@Maddux Unless there’s a hack, I doubt it. The video is walled within the iOS app.
You should be able to use Airplay mirroring, unless they specifically disabled it (which is very possible).
Also if you’re jailbroken you can try AirVideoEnabler.
@Rodalpho
I forgot about Airplay mirroring. I so seldom use it. I haven’t used AirVideoEnabler, but if they block Airplay in the app, I might jailbreak (again) to use it.
Can we please find out about AirPlay support, if it does work I want to pre order this ASAP!
Jailbreaking won’t work, trust me. I haven’t used airplay or mirroring before but I am going to guess “no” until shown otherwise.
This would be a killer box if I could somehow schedule the recordings to automatically download onto my device in the middle of the night. Imagine picking up your device and Sportscenter or your favorite sitcom are already there. Something like a season pass manager for the device recordings…I would be sold if it had that functionality. Oh, and it needs to support Android too.
Got one, thanks Dave! You have to question the release timing given about 10 other devices will get released within 10 days.
When they release it for Android, I wonder if it will work with the Ouya?
@Chris, you are dead on with a much needed feature to automatically download episodes during a specified time. Assume they could build that into the mobile iOS or Android apps, and it would be enabled once it senses TivoStream. Just ordered my box….the whole Facebook sweepstakes to “pre-order” is joke…They could have at least given 5-10 away and just announced pre-ordering is available to all.
If they happen to sellout, it would make good press.
@Chris if someone could get it to work with KMTTG you could do this somewhat. You would just need to sync the device or drag and drop the videos in the morning.
I doubt you can schedule with it since I think the IOS devices timeout after so long. I know with Comixology it will stop downloading after so long if I don’t keep the app open, but maybe that is specific to their app. I am not that familiar with IOS to know for sure.
As I thought, we were all winners!
Dave said:
“Also, it looks like anyone can just call in and order without having received the email:”
@Nobody
I’m confused, why do you say jailbreaking wont work when you’ve never used airplay at all? Do you mean actually jailbreaking the phone won’t work? I’ve done it to iDevices many times, no problem.
This non-winner picked one up. Hoping for seamless experience with the app and consistent transferring. Never had much luck with kkmtg (mostly audio sync problems) which is a shame since my small cable company has not instituted any copy once controls even on premium channels. iTivo better but still too many hiccups and too slow. TiVo rep thanked me for being a customer for 12 years. Has it been that long!
Should be built into Premiere. Though it would be nice to have the value-add capability, I wouldn’t use it much to justify the extra device cost.
Can’t say I’m that interested. Nice TiVo has made it available, but most of my iDevice video watching is outside the home, and I can do that without having to hand hold a real time transfer on my iDevice using TTG right now without spending another dime. And I already have a Slingbox sitting on an old TiVo to watch live TV when I’m outside the house. So the benefit would be that I could retire that TiVo maybe and still watch live TV but then it wouldn’t work outside the house… Can’t see it.
@Mark Chavez TiVo already said they expect this to be built in the next model possibly in 2013.
https://zatznotfunny.com/2012-05/tivo-premiere-successor-foreshadowed-2013/
@Brennok – that is another reason why I don’t think I’ll order one. I already have a Premier Elite (and Tivo HD) but will probably wait off on getting any more Tivo Boxes until the “series 5” or “Premier+” comes out with this built-in.
As I mentioned KMTTG does the work that I need as I don’t need the quicker transcode so can wait. KMTTG even has the scheduling so that I could let it run overnight and just transfer to iOS in the morning (I forget, it may even be able to “automatically” transfer if iTunes is set up properly)
It’s too bad it won’t work outside the home but I do like the integration inside the home better than the Slingbox.
With the Slingbox, you send the command, it goes through the network, hits the IR blasters, tells your TiVo something, and then it restarts the stream. This is OK for when I’m out and about but a little annoying for timing when I’m in my own home.
With the TiVo Streamer my guess is that it’ll be a lot more fluid/natural.
I’ll be picking one up when I see them on sale either at TiVo’s site or on Amazon or something.