Categories: TiVo

What’s Next For TiVo (Mini)?

Apparantly TiVo Mini promotional pricing has been so successful that the company will be shifting the expiration date from January 6th, 2015 to May 4th, 2015. As a refresher, the TiVo Mini hardware launched at $100 and required either $6/month or $150 for Lifetime Service. Yet, with a new CMO on board tasked with revitalizing retail sales, one of his first maneuvers was more sensible pricing for the DVR extender — bundling hardware and service for a flat $150 (or less). Beyond that, a slightly refreshed TiVo Mini is on deck for a spring launch (with newly released FCC pics). And what I’d hoped might be an exciting Zigbee home automation module appears to be nothing more than RF remote control. It’s a nice-to-have, especially given wall or television-mounting, but not revolutionary nor quite as versitile as the wireless Mini I pine for. Perhaps TiVo will answer the call via other means at CES next month with the Amazon Fire TV support or Roku app that they’ve previously alluded to…

View Comments

  • "What is it exactly that’s preventing them from making a 802.11ac WiFi TiVo mini? Is WiFi too unreliable?"

    If you are smarter than the average bear, then you can create a robust WiFi infrastructure to adequately handle TiVo bandwidth. But most folks are not smarter than the average bear, so I do have a certain sympathy with TiVo's reluctance to include WiFi.

    OTOTH, the chipset is probably cheap enough to make including it non-problematic for a cost perspective. But on the other, other hand, they'd end up getting a huge amount of bad press and tech support demands from not-smarter-than-average-bear consumers...

  • My mini is connected to an AC bridge. It works a lot better than the poweline adapter that almost worked. It has been extremely reliable so far, but I do not use the mini much.

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Dave Zatz