TiVo

While I can’t vouch for the source, one TiVo Community forum member indicates he attended “dealer training” — where he came away with the final pieces of the TiVo Mini puzzle. And we’re purportedly looking at a March 6th retail launch, with hardware running $100.

As expected, assuming this pans out, the TiVo Mini will also set us back an additional$6/month or a flat $150 up front for “lifetime” service. The service fee remains somewhat befuddling, given such a large percent of the Mini is powered via a 4-tuner TiVo Premiere DVR, which comes with its own set of fees, and couple with the fee-free TiVo Stream that provides similar extender functionality to iPads. However, we suspect the idea of “subscribers” is a strategic move on the investor side of the house.

Beyond availability, Digital Dawn seems to reinforce our tuner allocation launch details… but also provides details on what comes next. Assuming TiVo can stick to the schedule, they’d release true dynamic tuner management in the second quarter this year, with each 4-tuner Premiere supposedly supporting up to 9 TiVo Minis and up to 4 simultaneous streams.

We’re pretty anxious to get our hands on one (or more) of these extenders and while $250 probably represents a hefty profit margin for TiVo, it doesn’t seem unreasonable – especially in conjunction with reports of significant app speed improvements due to a more modern Broadcom BCM7418 chip.

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TiVo Mini extenders have begun to arrive in Suddenlink customer homes. And, thanks to numerous contributions by TiVo Community forum member spotterman26, retail launch functionality has been clarified. While true dynamic tuner allocation remains out of reach, and pushed back on TiVo’s roadmap according to sources, the situation isn’t as dire as it appeared at first glance. Each 4 tuner TiVo DVR can host a max of two TiVo Mini clients, yet two Minis can hijack share a single tuner… if you don’t intend to use them simultaneously. As described by TiVo:

Do you want to allow devices on your home network to use a tuner on this TiVo Box to watch live TV? Only select 2 tuners if you expect 2 networked devices to watch live TV at the SAME TIME.

NOTE: Any tuner that is made available for watching live TV on other devices can NO LONGER BE USED TO RECORD SHOWS on this DVR. If you allow 1 tuner to be used, this DVR will only be able to record 3 shows at a time. If you allow 2 tuners to be used, this DVR will only be able to record 2 shows at a time.

Further, it appears the TiVo Mini may release a tuner it believes is unused after 90 minutes resulting in the “PRESS TiVo or Live TV” screensaver of sorts displayed below.

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TiVo subscribers looking to offload DVR recordings were caught by surprise when TiVo Desktop and other methods of transfer inexplicably failed. As it turns out, TiVo To Go has been crippled by an expired server-side cookie of some sort. Of course, you probably aren’t so concerned with the reason and are more interested in a resolution. While one TiVo support rep tried to pin this on a recent Microsoft update and suggested waiting 24-48 hours for a Redmond fix, we know better. And the simplest workaround is to merely set your computer clock to an earlier day, week, or even year. Assuming that approach doesn’t negatively impact other applications, like local email. Other options including constructing your own replacement cookie, should you be sufficiently geeky and motivated, or swapping out TiVo’s antiquated software for kmttg and updating the default curl download method to Java.

As to how this happened (and when it may be fixed), one can only guess. But we’ve seen it before from apps like Rhapsody and even prior versions of TiVo Desktop. And we suspect it’s related to contracting out a significant amount of what you might call non-core DVR functionality, as we see with the existing (and exceptional) TiVo iOS app developed by Duff Research. So while TiVo wisely contracts out the skills they need, without being burdened by long-term overhead, projects without champions have a way of failing via entropy. In this case, maybe it’s a simple oversight, maybe a preoccupation with a TiVo Desktop successor, or maybe the ship really is rudderless. Regardless, I imagine they’ll get it corrected in due course.

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