When we’d talked TiVo Mini at CES the company informed us that while retail launch may be a few months off, cable partner Suddenlink was in the process of rolling out the new TiVo extender. Now, just few weeks later, Suddenlink has refreshed their TiVo promotional pages to highlight the Mini as a core component of their “any-room” DVR. Of course, customers will also require the four tuner TiVo Premiere Elite/XL4/Q, as the hub for the Mini to receive both recorded content and hijack a tuner for live television. From the TiVo Mini Quick Guide embedded above:
Thank you for choosing the high-definition TiVo® Mini DVR companion from Suddenlink. With the TiVo Mini, you can watch live TV, search and browse for shows, watch shows saved on TiVoPremiere DVRs in your home network, enjoy Suddenlink Video onDemand, and more!
In terms of pricing, Suddenlink tells me that TiVo Mini rentals run $6 – $11/month, dependent on region… and perhaps package or bundle. As TiVo would be wise to avoid undercutting their MSO partners, I’d say this should give us an indication of where TiVo might price the retail variant of the “DVR companion.”
Unfortunately, according to this support note, dynamic tuner allocation hasn’t yet been enabled and each TiVo Mini permanently locks up one of the hub DVR’s four tuners, with a maximum of two client Minis virtually hanging off a single 4-tuner Premiere. In fact, we have it on good authority that at least one TiVo partner will not move forward with a TiVo Mini deployment until a more flexible configuration is provided. Related, much of the industry is moving to a 6-tuner configuration – as we’ve seen from Cox and Verizon FiOS. So perhaps that 6-tuner Pace DVR displayed in TiVo’s Cable Show booth will further provide a more robust whole-home solution in the near future.