TiVo’s out with price cuts across their line…
First, now is probably not the time to buy a Roamio OTA. With TiVo planning a “late July” announcement in regards to their recently acquired Aereo trademark, it’s best for cord cutters to hold off… unless another amazing deal comes along. I also wouldn’t recommend the base Roamio, as it lacks streaming and MoCA bridging — especially when those features, plus 2 additional tuners and 500GB more storage, can be had for just fifty bucks more — assuming you’re OK with cable-only and a warrantied refurb.
But possibly the most unusual aspect of this deal is sale pricing on Lifetime Service. Lifetime is rarely discounted, generally running $500 for new customers and $400 for existing TiVo households. Yet, this promo brings it down to a reasonable $350 price point.
So here are my recommendations and the breakdown, should you not qualify for 10 year customer loyalty pricing:
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"So here are my recommendations and the breakdown"
Given the price point of 3TB A/V hard drives, it pretty much makes sense to just go with the Pro, and avoid the work, no?
Yes, in this scenario, if your ultimate intent is 3TB of recording capacity - get the Pro. In my scenario, the Pro was $200 more and the recommended 3TB drive was $107. In that scenario it made sense to manually upgrade my drive to save a few bucks and also end up with an extra drive for something.
FWIW, while it all depends on the amount of the savings, which seem quite considerable in this particular case, I generally advise being wary of refurb TiVo's, based on my one personal anecdotal data point.
I bought my first TiVo as a refurb to save $50, and based on the loose fit of the power plug, it seemed highly likely to me at the time that the refurb had been to fix a defective power supply. And sure enough, once the warranty period passed, we started experiencing intermittent power supply failures that would result in spontaneous reboots. I was able to self-diagnose that it was the power supply due to the fact that the reboots would invariably occur when the TiVo needed a power bump, such as a recording beginning, or switching inputs to the TiVo.
The spontaneous reboots were just barely infrequent enough that we were able to live happily enough with them, rather than repairing or replacing the unit. But it left me vowing to never go down the refurb path with TiVo again. (Obviously, my one personal anecdotal data point does not actually equal "data", so YMMV. And, again, if the discount is big enough, that can certainly change the equation. But caveat emptor.)