TiVo Courts ReplayTV Castaways

by

TiVo’s launched a landing page to court upcoming ReplayTV castaways. As of 7/31/11, the ReplayTV service will be discontinued. At best, owners will be left with a dumbed down digital VCR. Worst case? A brick.

TiVo’s pitch is similar to others we’ve seen recently… and not truly limited to ReplayTV customers. You can grab a Premiere for $0 down with service running $20/month (requiring a 2 year commitment) or pick one up bundled with Lifetime service for a flat $500. The Lifetime option is a better value for those who intend to keep the TiVo DVR for more than 2 years and/or ultimately intend to resell it. However, it remains to be seen if the presumably small number of remaining ReplayTV users are willing to shell out $500 to upgrade from a possibly expense-free SD experience (probably residing in a secondary room) to something a bit more modern.

16 thoughts on “TiVo Courts ReplayTV Castaways”

  1. Excellent point. Are there any inexpensive SD recording solutions out there these days for those people who don’t care about HD? ReplayTV was one of the last. I shed another tear for my dearly soon-to-be-departed service.

    Any idea what the ReplayTV community is doing to continue the guide service for those people who don’t want to shell out hundreds of dollars for a Tivo?

  3. If they haven’t upgraded to HD by now, I don’t see TiVo being the thing to push them over the edge especially when TiVo is still missing features Replay had.

  4. Well if they really just want to replace a SD Replay they could just buy a lifetimed Series 2 Tivo for under $150

  5. Brennok – Which features do you feel TiVo is missing that ReplayTV had? The only two I can think of are Send Show/Internet Sharing and the automatic commercial skip – but the last models of RTV dropped those.

    ReplayTV aside, $500 for a Premire with lifetime isn’t a bad deal.

  6. One word: DVArchive

    Although now a decade later, TiVo’s iPad app offers similar functionality for remote management. More importantly, the community is reverse engineering it to craft their own (non-iPad) apps. (I also quite disliked TiVo’s live guide. Unfortunately, my more recent Series 2 hardware was two Toshibas (with DVD drives) and they were the last to receive the grid guide option/update.)

  7. Wish they would make it just a LITTLE sweeter. I’d bite at say 400$ lifetime, no hardware fees.

  8. Megazone it has been a while but didn’t replay tv have streaming, pooled tuning, dvarchive as mentioned, didn’t they also have a guide that showed what was recording, and a couple other features that skip my mind now. I just know they pop up sometimes with people saying replay could do this why not TiVo.

  9. The networking was a super cool feature on the 5000 series. You could watch shows on any Replay in the house. If the Replay you were on couldn’t record a show, you could schedule it remotely in another room. Dave mentioned the DVarchive ability to offload recordings to a PC. All neat stuff you don’t see anymore.

  10. DVarchive was nice, I admit. But TiVo also has TTG for offloading shows to a PC – and it is an official feature, whereas DVarchive was a community hack that exploited RTV’s lack of security.

    There are a number of apps that provide features of DVarchive, and even things it didn’t – kmttg, pyTiVo/pyTiVoX, Streambaby, TiVo Remote, etc. There are also remote control apps for Android (TiVoRemote), iOS (i.TV, DVRremote), etc. TiVo’s web-based scheduling is better than RTVs as well. RTV had a long delay even for broadband connected units.

    RTV had room to room streaming, TiVo has MRV – and now streaming is coming in the Premiere (and here for some).

    TiVo’s had a grid guide for years now. It doesn’t show what is set to record, natch, but I never cared about that since I really don’t use the guide at all. And TiVo has the To Do List, which is better than what RTV had.

    ReplayTV didn’t quite have pooled tuning, but if there was a conflict it did offer you the option of scheduling the recording on another RTV in the home. Which is nice, but it wasn’t intelligent. If you scheduled recordings and then the schedule changed, creating a conflict, it didn’t push one to the other unit for you.

    So I’d forgotten about a few of the lesser features on RTV, but at this point TiVo has an equivalent of most of them – as well as a large number of features RTV never got. Like all of the OTT services, music playback, network photo viewing (not the stupid ‘partition part of the drive just for photos’ crap RTV did), etc.

    I’m sure switching to TiVo would be an adjustment for those with years of RTV experience, but a current TiVo is far more advanced than RTV was when development stopped.

  13. I really liked the ability to GET A recording from other users, I don’t know how they managed that with the studios (or maybe they didn’t) but I could just tag it on someone elses box and a few hours later it would be ON MY BOX. It was great tech.

  14. I started with a Replay (that fantastic Radio Shack deal), but found automatic commercial skip was inconsistent.

    30 second skip on the Tivo is enough for me.

    Moved to the Tivo for Amazon video (downloads onto a cheap lifetime Series 2 off ebay)

    Post-digital transition added a HD TV & a TivoHD @ $7/month.

    Earlier this year convinced Tivo to sell me lifetime for $199 on my $60 Premiere from woot.

    $499 ($399 MSD) is way too much for lifetime IMHO, even if the box is free.

    Replay had a better interface, but Tivo is a worthy successor.

  15. The Replay Community is very close to having a replacement guide service WITHOUT using WiRNS. This will not be free but it will supposedly be reasonable. The encription issues have been resolved and those not wishing to pay for the replacemetn guide service will be able to run an updated verison of WiRNS and full functionality with a $20 per year subscription to Schedules direct.

    You can keep up with the developments on the AVS ReplayTv forum or on the WiRNS forum on PlanetReplay.
    Long live our Replays!! :-)

Comments are closed.