As promised, some of the new elements found in the TiVo Bolt have begun trickling down to Roamio (and Premiere?) environments. TiVo Mini is up first with newly applied guide logos and “Quick Mode” to playback content at 1.3x speed.
While I’m happy to see older gear continuing to receive updates, neither of these features does much for me. Given the wide array of presentation, channel logos in the guide mostly clutter things up – it remains to be seen if I’ll more quickly identify what I’m looking for. Not that I use the guide very often… as a DVR owner… with highly competent search functionality (frequently accessed via TiVo’s smartphone app) . Even though I don’t have a use case, I do imagine my wife would enjoy the pitch-perfect Quick Mode to get through long award show presentations or episodes of Dancing with the Stars, assuming she remembers it exists and how to toggle it – it’s not exactly intuitive.
But, what would interest me, despite its limitations, is TiVo’s new SkipMode commercial avoidance feature. Also, the generally modernized interface would be a welcome addition. And at least one of these is bound to happen.
SkipMode is also already on the Mini if its connected to a Bolt.
Rewriting this comment. Clearly need more caffeine.
SkipMode wasn’t originally going to be ported to Roamio or Premiere environments. Hopefully that’s still being reconsidered.
I liken Tivo not giving all “software” updates to their “older” version (which was a full priced newer version just 2 months ago) as the equivalent of Apple saying IOS9 is only for the 6Plus and none of the software updates will work on the 6. I’m not a happy camper that my greater than $1000 investment in Tivo (Roamio Pro + mini – both with lifetime) isn’t receiving new features via software update. If I need 4k or any other hardware features, I’d upgrade. I need to live with Roamio for a few years to recoup my investment before thinking about upgrading. If Tivo is telling me “Your $1000 investment will become obsolete in only a year”, they’re going to lose yet another customer.
Tivo – support your customers. Roamio should get all sottware updates it’s capable of running. Older units, given their age can start to be phased out. Give your customers a reasonable expectation that their > $1000 investments will last more than 1-2 years.
I purchased two Bolts and put 4TB drives in each of them. Even though I really hate how the Bolts look, their functionality has really won me over. I will end up selling my launch lifetime Romaio Pro, with a 5TB drive, sometime later this year. I’ll use the Bolts instead along with my Minis. Then, if/when a six tuner Bolt comes out I will re-evaluate. After using the Bolts, and Minis connected to the Bolts, I don’t have much desire to use my Roamios any more.
As far as software updates go, I thought that was what the subscription fees were to help cover the costs of. Guide data does not cost enough to warrant the full amount of those fees. Features should be added in software when possible. SkipMode should be one of those.
I believe Tivo’s thinking is that “if we don’t give our existing customer base new features via software update, they’ll be forced to buy new hardware”. The reality for me, and likely most Roamio customers is that if Tivo refuses to support a product that was full priced / latest and greatest just three months ago, I’ll be damned if I’ll give them another $1000+ for a new device only to be told it won’t be supported in just a few short years.
They’ve been pretty good the last couple years ensuring Premiere and Roamio platforms are updated and current. It’s probably driven by their cable partners like RCN, but we retail customers have benefited. For example, the Premiere Haxe rewrite was a huge undertaking. So I’m feeling pretty hopeful. Surely these logos and quick skip suddenly showing up on my Mini are a good sign. Optimism, people!
I agree the logos clutter the guide interface. Not a fan
aaronwt I think i’m in your camp. I love the bolt’s speed. it just snaps. I put a 2TB in mine, but was thinking can we get along with another 4tb bolt and ditch the roamio
Now I’m wondering why Tivo wont let networked boxes share season passes.
Looking forward to the network logos in the program guide on my Roamio. The entire TiVo UI, while generally good, is a little too text-heavy. Using the logos will modernize it a bit and, IMO, make it a little more eye-pleasing. I’m disappointed that TiVo has stated they have no plans to bring SkipMode to Roamio since it’s not a hardware-dependent feature, although I’m hopeful they’ll do so next year. Not sure I see myself using QuickMode much.
Any word on other upgrades we Roamio users can look forward to, Dave? Heard any timeframe on when that HTML5 Hulu app is supposed to roll out? All I’ve read is “soon”.
No details on Hulu timing. I think it’s mostly in Hulu’s court… and TiVo probably isn’t their number one priority. Related, I feel like the WWE app has been delayed for probably technical reasons. Also haven’t heard anything lately on the Bolt OTA. Need to do some asking around.
I am happy tivo is adding the logos,I just think they should have added them to the left side of the channel number like directv does,Rather than the right side of the channel number,It just seems more natural that way ,at least to me. BUt i’ll get use to it Now if we can only get the logos, quick mode and skip mode, plus a 60 or 90 minute buffer added to my roamio pro i’ll be happy! That way i dont have to upgrade to a bolt until i get a 4k tv or more 4k content is added!
I’m loving the new channel logos. Look forward to seeing them also on the Roamio Pro. It adds a bit of color and graphics to the UI.
As for adding new features to the Roamio. Tivo has done a fairly good job of that over the last few years. If it gets the skip stuff from the Bolt great, if not, I really don’t care. It isn’t something I’m going to use that often anyways.
I care nothing about Quick Mode or SkipMode, but I’m looking forward to channel logos on the Roamio. Granted, my Roamios are only used with OTA, so there is going to be some major repetition, but it’ll still be great to have! :)
I had an issue with my new cable card (surprise) for the Bolt and had to get Tivo involved with Comcast. While the Tivo Rep and I were on hold with Comcast, I was told that Tivo wants to get the bugs out of the Skip mode before releasing the product to the Roamio owners. No word on Premiere. Now that info and a quarter doesn’t buy coffee anymore, but I was talking to a Tivo Tech Support person handling cable card communications with cable vendors. She knew her way around Comcast.
John
I like the idea of new features coming to the Mini. However, waking up to find viewing features on a Mini that *aren’t* available on the Roamio it’s connected to (such as Quick Mode) is odd.
Anyone who records sports will love QuickMode especially baseball fans who will save hundreds of viewing hours over a 162 game season. Having watched nfl/mlb/nhl/nba games in FF1 mode the lack of audio really took away from the game. :)
Channel logos bring TiVo one step closer to the easy to read color TV guides in most newspapers.
@celticpride If TiVo could make the buffer on the current viewing tuner larger I’d be happy though all tuners would be welcome.
@TimMeade. TiVo has mentioned they have work to do with networked boxes. Why can’t I I manage recordings & OnePasses on another networked box? All I can do is view shows but setting OnePasses/Recordings are a hidden accident. Which box did that SeasonPass end up on?
@Alan Gordon, I use my Roamio with OTA too. Hopefully TiVo adds the logos for popular diginets like Antenna TV, MeTV, WeatherNation, Cozi TV, Decades, etc. rather than just repeating the main network logo, e.g. CBS, on all of that affiliate’s subchannels. Can anyone who has the OTA channel logos in their guide comment?
Dave, regarding the Bolt OTA, TiVo’s head marketing honcho said we should expect to “hear something by end of year”. TiVo isn’t even selling the Roamio OTA any more. If they plan to have the Bolt OTA out in time for folks to order it from TiVo.com for Christmas gifts, you’d think it would be coming out before Thanksgiving at the very latest.
I don’t really find the quickmode “pitch perfect” while not the chipmunks it does have the accelerated audio sound. also watching something like baseball with it on, just makes the play on the field look like some sort of Benny Hill skit.. TRY IT!
For those who don’t care for the Logos in the Guide you can turn them off. To turn them off just press the “A” button for options and you can turn the Logos on or off. Good job TiVo for allowing that option!
Nice on both counts, thanks for the tip!
I found that QuickMode is decent for talk shows – watching Colbert or Daily Show, etc seems to be decent way to watch them a little faster — given the slow cadence of people in interview situations
I love Quick mode. I’ve been using it every day now on my Bolts and Minis. I use it for news, reality/talk shows, and sports. And then Skip mode is excellent too on the Bolts and Minis. I just wish skip mode was available on every show. Now I wait until a show has been completely recorded before I watch it. Because if Skip mode is available, then I want to use it.
More power to folks who love Quick Mode, but personally, I can’t imagine ever using it.
I’m not a sports fan in general, but I am an NBA junkie, and as far as I’m concerned, using it would absolutely ruin the experience. (I will sometimes go to 3x FF if the game is a blowout in the late 3rd / early 4th quarter to see if an improbable comeback starts to happen, but Quick Mode wouldn’t help me there.) I guess baseball might be a more plausible use-case-scenario, but back when I was younger and did watch some baseball, part of the appeal was the leisurely pacing. If you just want to know who wins and see highlights, well there are better ways to do so.
Fiction shows are obviously out in my book. Same with news and talk shows. I guess I can see the appeal for awards shows, but I generally don’t watch awards shows. (I love movies, but I hate the Oscars®.)
But, of course, YMMV, and more power to those who appreciate the feature. I will generously refrain from loudly telling folks, you’re watching teevee wrong!
(SkipMode is obviously more appealing, especially if TiVo does the normal ‘old TiVo we used to know and love’ thing and backports it to the S5/4. It’s obviously not a major technical / resource challenge for them to do so; just a lack of that old friendly TiVo behavior. I also wonder if anyone has documented which 20 channels they’re doing, as we don’t much / any broadcast shows, so it’d be the various basic cable channels I’m curious about. Oddly enough, one thing I wouldn’t want SkipMode for is the NBA, as the timeouts are consistently timed, and so I always know exactly how many 30 second skips are necessary to get me right back to game action, while SkipMode would actually slow me down by making me watch the tail and head of announcer blather rather than getting me directly back to game action.)
Here’s the list of the “top 20 most popular channels” that SkipMode supports, Chucky. And apparently the feature is never applied to sports or local news.
https://www.tivo.com/popup/skipmode-channels
It’s not a feature I’m just dying to have but I do watch several shows that would benefit from SkipMode. (One key press is much better than 7 skip forwards and 2 skip backs.) Hopefully we Roamio users get it in 2016.
Please delete at your convenience, dear moderator. Comment made only to force Tim’s comment I partially see via RSS show up.
Thank you very much, Tim. Multiple channels pertinent to our viewing patters.
“It’s not a feature I’m just dying to have but I do watch several shows that would benefit from SkipMode.”
It’d actually save me a few bucks. I buy 2 or 4 series per year a-la-carte from Amazon, both to eliminate manual comskip so I can better immerse myself, and to avoid the destruction of end-credit music with the distracting ‘on next week’s episode’. With SkipMode, I’d be willing to sacrifice full immersion on some of those shows to save the bucks.
“One key press is much better than 7 skip forwards and 2 skip backs.”
Yes indeedy. For those shows I don’t consider buying, it’d be quite welcome. And I think my SO, who often finds manual comskip too hassle-ish, would take great joy in the feature.
“And apparently the feature is never applied to sports or local news.”
That’s odd, no? I can hazard a few wild guesses at the rationale behind that, but still, odd.
“Hopefully we Roamio users get it in 2016.”
It’ll be an excellent test to see if TiVo has gone over to the dark side, or not. This ain’t like backporting Haxe to S4. This one is easy-peasy…
@Tim,
Earlier this year, I contacted TiVo about some incorrect logos, and they fixed multiple ones. I later contacted TiVo about several that didn’t get fixed at that time, and they fixed them. During this time, they added a MeTV logo to one of the channels. The problem is that instead of using an official MeTV logo, the Columbus, GA MeTV affiliate has a MeTV logo that says “MeTV Des Moines”. I contacted them back about it, and they told me a fix was coming. It’s been months…
A neighboring market’s FOX affiliate switched channels, and the FOX logo is still on a channel even though it’s a MeTV affiliate. It was reported the same time as the Des Moines issue, but nothing yet…
@ Alan, thanks for the info. I anticipate TiVo will make somewhat of a dog’s breakfast of network logos on the subchannels. (I’m still waiting on them to fix the actual program listings on some of them!)
@ Chucky, just curious: why do you buy shows from Amazon rather than Vudu? Both offer great 1080p24 PQ on TiVo but Vudu’s UI seems much better to me, mainly because the TiVo remote’s skip back button actually works as expected plus you can preview video scrubbing during FF and rewind — I hate that you can’t in the Amazon Video app.
One last tidbit: in reading USA Today’s review of the Bolt, I was excited to see this:
“Tivo says other apps will be joining the lineup, including HuluPlus and potentially HBO Now.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/11/04/review—tivo-bolt-stream-dvr-cord-shaver/75109560/
This is the first mention of HBO Now I’ve seen from TiVo! It’s not much but I’ll take any scrap of hope I can that we’ll see HBO and Showtime apps come to TiVo!
“Chucky, just curious: why do you buy shows from Amazon rather than Vudu? Both offer great 1080p24 PQ on TiVo but Vudu’s UI seems much better to me, mainly because the TiVo remote’s skip back button actually works as expected plus you can preview video scrubbing during FF and rewind — I hate that you can’t in the Amazon Video app.”
Yeah. The lack of scrubbing in the Amazon TiVo client is a drag. However, I’m committed to the Amazon platform for two reasons, both having to do with trust.
1) Customer service.
– I’ve been doing extensive Amazon e-commerce for close to two decades now, and over that long time frame, I’ve never had a single damn problem with any of that e-commerce that Amazon has failed to solve to my satisfaction with an absolute minimum of hassle.
To note two Amazon Video specific issues I’ve run into in the past year or so:
– I was watching an Amazon paid rental that had a ten second video glitch. It didn’t seem worth my while to complain about, but when I checked my email inbox the next day, Amazon had automatically flagged the issue and issued me a full refund without me having to complain.
– I was watching a ‘free’ Amazon Prime video that had about a 30 second glitch. I sent an email the next day just to alert them to the problem, genuinely not expecting anything in return, but promptly received a return email saying that Amazon was aware of the problem, and giving me a free month extension on my Prime subscription.
That’s the kind of friction-free customer service I’ve grown to expect from Amazon, both Video and otherwise, and which makes me implicitly trust them.
2) Future-proofing.
– I think Amazon is likely to be in the Video business longer-term than Vudu, and thus, am more inclined to make my purchases there.
– Although I’ve never bought any Amazon-branded hardware capable of doing video, and don’t anticipate doing so, I do like that they at least offer such hardware. To my mind, Amazon is the best of both worlds; they have a platform-agnostic service like Vudu, and they also have a hardware platform for their services like Cupertino.
So, I’m willing to put up with that single annoying failure of the TiVo Amazon client, for the simple reason of trust in Amazon. (And, of course, when I switch to my Roku, I can scrub away.)
bump for Tim…
I do have to agree with @Chucky about Amazon customer service. They are willing to stand behind their sales even if the vendor isn’t. When I had my nightmares with Seagate drives failing in my NAS, Amazon was going to honor the 2 year warranty that the drives were sold with even when Seagate claimed it was only a 1 year warranty. Amazon made a 3-way phone call with Seagate to see why they were not going to honor it.
@Chucky Actually Vudu has a streaming stick called the Vudu Spark. The Spark doesn’t support other services, so for most Vudu users a Roku (or maybe even a Chromecast) is a better option (for those that don’t have have a Smart TV, Blu-ray player, XBox, or Playstation that support it).
http://www.vudu.com/spark.html
http://www.walmart.com/ip/42394344
Also since Walmart owns Vudu, I would think that both video streaming services “have legs”.
We took a look at it…
https://zatznotfunny.com/2015-01/walmart-vudu-spark/
For a few bucks more, most folks would be better served by something else – like a Fire TV Stick. Given Walmart’s previous abandonment of digital media services, I’m with Chucky. Who knows how long they’ll keep this going. I suppose we have some insurance given their participation in UV, but who knows.
“Chucky, just curious: why do you buy shows from Amazon rather than Vudu? Both offer great 1080p24 PQ on TiVo but Vudu’s UI seems much better to me, mainly because the TiVo remote’s skip back button actually works as expected plus you can preview video scrubbing during FF and rewind — I hate that you can’t in the Amazon Video app.”
IIRC, one advantage TiVo promoted with the Bolt was something like a ‘modern Amazon client’. Dunno if that includes the UI improvements you and I would both like, or not. Hopefully aaronwt or some other sucker with a Bolt will chime in.
And if the Bolt does include those improvements, it’ll be interesting to see if they ever get backported to S5/4…
I’ve always had nothing but great customer service from Amazon too. Just last week, I was going to watch Back to the Future Part III on Prime Video. The entire trilogy had been reported all over the internet to be available exclusively on Prime Video for the entire month of Oct. I’d already revisited the first two films earlier in the month. For some reason, all three got yanked off Prime before the month was over, so when I tried to watch Part III on the 31st, it wasn’t there. A quick chat with Amazon customer service and they gave me a free 48-hr rental of the film. (Of course, that’s what they should have done — the rep had no idea why the films had been pulled early.) That said, I still prefer Vudu for video rentals, something I rarely do.
I don’t recall hearing that the Bolt boasts an updated Amazon Video app (apart from the coming ability to stream UHD videos). That would be nice. Would also love to hear from Bolt owners whether their Amazon Video app looks/behaves differently than the one on Roamio. And can anyone confirm whether the current app on Roamio is HTML5?
I find it funny that developers who provide their apps for free are better at updating their software for TiVo than are the major subscription providers whom we PAY to use their apps. Plex just came to TiVo this summer and already it’s been updated multiple times. This last update really boosted the UI navigation speed (which was my biggest knock against it). YouTube has been updated at least once since I got my Roamio this past spring. And I just noticed that Aol On updated their app here in the past week or so. Maybe Yahoo has been updated too (or perhaps the name just changed from Yahoo Screen to simply Yahoo)?