TiVo’s been talking up their DVR extender about a year, since it was first introduced last February as the IP-STB. And while we didn’t get the 2012 retail launch we were hoping for, TiVo tells me we’re on track for a spring launch. The Mini I groped at CES doesn’t look all that different from the product we perused last May at The Cable Show, but it presumably offers a much more polished experience streaming live television and recordings from a 4-tuner TiVo Premiere DVR. In fact, TiVo cable partner Suddenlink has already begun to deploy the Mini to customers.
I’m told the Mini contains 2GB of local storage dedicated to hosting the TiVo OS/experience and handling whatever caching may be necessary. Performance seemed pretty sprightly over their in-suite MoCA connection, but I’d expect at least a little lag when changing channels or queuing up content. Interestingly, I get the sense that the apps available to TiVo Premiere DVRs may not be fully duplicated onto the Mini. Assuming I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, I wonder if that’d be a contractual or technical issue. The remote mated with the Mini looked a whole lot like the discontinued TiVo Slide, but I’m not sure we can draw any conclusions from that and would expect a traditional peanut to ship.
