Shortly after releasing the bungled TiVo Stream 4K update, that inadvertently broke MPEG-2 decoding and locked up developer options behind a PIN, the company halted its software roll-out. They’ve regrouped and now, about six weeks later, are slow-rolling a new set of updates that incorporates all the prior fixes, restores that lost functionality, and provides some neat new tricks. And, for me, the most notable addition is the integration of Locast into the guide.
When TiVo first linked up with Locast last year, it didn’t make much sense given legacy DVR tuner hardware – you already get the locals, via cable or antenna, baked into the guide and available for recording… vs an inferior app serving up silo-ed content. Fast forward to the cord-cutter-centric TiVo Stream 4k that now places your locals smack dab in the middle of TiVo’s live guide, mingling amongst the likes of Pluto TV, it all makes much more sense. However, browsing the guide, as currently implemented, is a bit of a daunting mess. Fortunately, Redditor tivopm indicates a customizable, unified guide is on the roadmap:
At the moment we don’t have a way to filter the locast channels. We wanted to provide you this ASAP, but we do have filtering options planned in the future. […] We have a lot of filtering options planned.
I can confirm that TiVo Stream 4K firmware 4896 resolves issues with Channels and I’ve re-implemented hardware decoding for my preferred DVR. However, in taking a somewhat more cautious approach this time around, TiVo has only seeded 10% of deployed TiVo Stream 4k devices. Assuming all looks good, the roll-out would obviously expand and accelerate (and TiVo has hopefully beefed up internal regression testing going forward).