After launching about a month ago to overwhelmingly positive reviews and to what we’re hearing are impressive sales, given limited (and bizarre) advertising to this point, TiVo Roamio out-of-home streaming is on track for an October launch — which is when TiVo intends to light up significant marketing, ideally timed for the critically important holiday shopping season, as we had assumed. Of course, TiVo will face some challenges given only 2 of the 3 Roamio DVRs actually “roam” (on their own) and Android support is now slated for early 2014.
As is to be expected from a significant new platform, there have been some technical glitches — the most notable being related to CableCARD tuning and network issues in relation to “green” routers. But TiVo has rapidly been squashing bugs: a Netflix crasher was resolved last week, Xfinity on Demand V301 communication issues were corrected last night, with better CableCARD and router support are expected in maybe two weeks.
For folks dissatisfied with stock DVR recording capacities (or looking to save a few bucks via an upgraded Plus versus MSRP Pro), it’s come to light that hard drives up to 3TB can simply be dropped into the set-top with Roamio handling all the drive prep for you. And for those that desire an absolutely massive 4TB internal drive, good for 630hrs of HD recording, Weaknees can help.
As to what’s next, the Opera app platform for TV is expect to hit early next year along with an updated TiVo SDK… and hopefully usher in a broader catalog of content partners. However, TiVo’s new HTML5 capabilities are already being leveraged via new Netflix and YouTube apps and two community software programs have been updated to beam webpages and H.264 video through Roamio. On the hardware front, companion TiVo Mini units are out of stock – but we’re not yet prepared to read much into that. More interesting is imagery depicting an updated TiVo Slide remote with QWERTY keyboard for the Roamio generation of DVRs.