While the cord-cutter-centric TiVo Bolt Aereo Edition was scrapped, prior to release, TiVo’s re-evaluated market conditions and unveiled the Bolt OTA DVR. And it represents a pretty significant upgrade over its Roamio OTA predecessor, including native streaming to mobile apps and a bundled voice-control remote. Timing of the $250 device may appear challenging given Amazon’s Fire TV Recast announcement and marketing weight — the similarly specced 4-tuner, 1TB Recast runs $280, but free of fees. However, increased situational awareness, given Amazon’s marketing muscle, should benefit TiVo, Tablo, and HDHomeRun… with TiVo providing a somewhat more accessible approach, given traditional television output versus overcoming network tuner conceptual issues. Beyond core DVR capabilities, TiVo also bundles a number of native apps, like Netflix and YouTube. Plus, TiVo has sweetened the pot for potentially price sensitive cord cutters by reducing service fees to $6.99/mo or $70/yr, which seems entirely reasonable.
Having said that, some of those competitors stream to all sorts of inexpensive boxes… vs having to pick up a TiVo Mini for each television. Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. TiVo’s service provider IPTV endpoints are being reworked, expanded and, in talking to TiVo VP Ted Malone, they hope to release these Roku, Fire TV, and Apple TiVo “soft Mini” clients to retail TiVo owners in the first half of 2019. No fees.
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Some minor technical differences from the other Bolt-- primarily no CableCARD connector and no MoCA bridge. The MoCA thing sounds more like protect the customer from themselves rather than pinching pennies - splitting the cable with a cheapie product could result in diminished network performance... not that most would even know MoCA exists or what to do with it. TiVo doesn't support clear QAM here, which shouldn't come as a surprise - they never have.
If there was ever a time for TiVo to offer their own streaming TV package...now would be the time.
Think of it, cable networks beamed right into the guide along side your local OTA channels in this one box with a native DVR + the TiVo apps to watch and steam on other devices?
That would blow away all of the network attached solutions and cloud-based DVR offerings of the other competitors.
The direct HDMI connection to a TV is a real issue for those that FF and RW often. Commercial skip buttons negate the need for that, and the “what did they say” on the Siri capable Apple TV is the best “network stream” version of that that I’ve experienced.
I recently setup a Gen 2 Genie with a LG TV DirecTV client and it works better than I thought it woluld, alas you need MOCA or Ethernet for delay free content startup. My favorite of that app integration is the original DTV remote can control the app on the TV, so those used to that interface have no learning curve. This would be a cool capability of the TiVo app on new devices, alough extremely unlikely.