While we’ve seen the TiVo experience running on Amazon Fire TV, there’s no telling when or if the company will ever make this feature available to retail customers. However, with Android streaming in the bag, Roamio Pro/Plus and TiVo Stream owners can take matters in their own hands by sideloading the TiVo APK onto Fire TV or Fire TV Stick… as recorded here.
Getting your TiVo-ed shows onto Fire TV does require a small amount of elbow grease. First off, you’ll need a method to navigate the touch-centric TiVo app interface on a television. Fire TV ($80) owners can get by just fine with a mouse. However, the portless Stick ($40) requires other means of control such as this wireless Android gaming controller or the Wukong app should you happen to have an Android smartphone or tablet available. Then, you’ll need to track down the TiVo Android app APK file. If it doesn’t end up hosted somewhere, the APK can be retrieved via something like Raccoon from a computer. Lastly, you’ll need to modify your Fire TV settings and sideload tha APK – which sounds much more difficult than it is.
This may not be the most efficient solution for full-time usage, but it’s much more cost-effective (and portable!) than a TiVo Mini with early in-home results looking good.
Awesome. Now to figure out if my v1 Kindle Fire can run the Wukong app so I can play with this on the FireStick.
Now, will this work if you’ve got a Premiere Elite & a TiVo Stream on the network?
Yes, it is stream based – so it will work.
Nice, now only if there was a method for the Roku’s
Will this work on a remote network?
I must say that, (even in a theoretical future with full-fledged clients with normally working remote), I really struggle to see the use-case-scenario for these end-points.
Now, obviously, this would be a boon to road-warriors. But once you get beyond them…
Why would anyone want to spend a rather large monthly amount on their cable bill, only to dramatically reduce the PQ of the programming they watch in the process through the transcoding process and bit-rate reduction? The fixed cost of a Mini pales in comparison to the accumulated cost of that monthly cable bill. It just baffles me.
I can think of only a few use-case-scenarios that make sense to me:
1) You’ve got a 24″ teevee somewhere, where the PQ doesn’t dramatically matter given the postage stamp size of the teevee.
2) You’ve got a teevee dedicated for your dog.
3) You’re legally blind.
Am I missing any beyond those three?
OK This worked! I sideloaded the TiVo apk onto the firestick. And I set up an unused apple bluetooth mouse using Settings.apk (google for it) instead of the Wukong app since that seemed way easier than loading an app on the Kindle Fire to watch TiVo. The streaming quality is not as good as on the TiVo mini. It may be due to some unorthodox networking I’ve got or it could be downsampling that’s going on. Either way — cool! Happy to help others if there are questions.
“The streaming quality is not as good as on the TiVo mini. It may be due to some unorthodox networking I’ve got…”
The drastic PQ degradation in the lean-back is inherent to the process, and cannot be eliminated by perfect networking.
The Mini plays back the original multicast recording.
This process transcodes the recording, (reducing PQ), and throttles the bit-rate to somewhere around one-third of the bit-rate of a normal multicast recording, (really reducing PQ), which is perfectly sensible for mobile devices, but will be incredibly painful in the lean-back. See my above comment.
Why can’t you use the official Amazon fire tv remote app for iPhone or android?
Because you can’t snap to the items in the UI via directional button or official app – you need something that is more mouse-like to handle the touch UI and Amazon kindly puts a big dot on the screen for free-form navigation with these other tools.
By the by, via Twitter, an interesting method to sideload Fire TV if you already possess an Android phone or tablet:
http://www.aftvnews.com/how-to-sideload-apps-onto-an-amazon-fire-tv-or-fire-tv-stick-using-an-android-phone-or-tablet/
FYI, also works side-loaded on the nexus player and on remote network.
Seems like a nice option for road warriors since you can also bring up a chrome browser on the nexus player to authenticate on hotel WiFi.
I’ve been informed the TiVo APK is currently hosted here if you need a copy for your Fire TV:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/ci2ri7dlbdcl68h/TiVo_2.0.1.apk
Got the TiVo app side loaded to the stick and was able to launch it, sign-in and select a TiVo. But after that no usable way to navigate…just have a windows of and iOS devices available.
But in a good note the stick is working from Mexico City except Amazon prime restrictions and Netflix defaults to Spanish or Portuguese with many not offering English.
Took it to another family members house across city and found you can’t play any previously downloaded games without wifi.
Still waiting for them to fix the problems with LG G3 and Android streaming which they don’t seem to want to fix. I hope your Kindle version fares better.