TiVo

TiVo Premiere, In Da House

The eagle has landed. And my TiVo Premiere review loaner, with new HD Flash UI (in places), is firing on at least one core. I haven’t had much time to play with it yet, but I did grab the opening animation (above) for your viewing pleasure, along with a few interesting screengrabs (below). Yes, like … Read more

Digging Deeper Within The New TiVo Premiere

While many have fixated on TiVo’s new sluggish, incomplete HD UI and possibly limited feature set, TiVo Community über contributor bkdtv (aka K. Fowler) has more quantitatively analyzed the TiVo Premiere’s beefy new hardware. In addition to running through the chips and specs, he’s also conducted a number of speed benchmarks under the “classic” UI. … Read more

The TiVo Premiere Review Roundup

tivo-hd-versus-tivo-premiere

The TiVo Premiere ($300) reviews have hit the web, ahead of the March 28th ship date. Unfortunately the coverage isn’t glowing, ranging in tone from decent to disappointment. In fact, some TiVo Community members are re-evaluating their pre-orders. Also unfortunately, I can’t say any of this comes as a surprise. As I wrote a few weeks ago, “The TiVo Premiere isn’t the home run I was hoping for. […] I expect to see a variety of improvements and additions over the next 12 months. Also, as a brand new platform, early adopters may find themselves in for a slightly bumpy ride.”

Current HD TiVo owners who want to see the platform evolve first-hand and who have tolerant spouses could get on-board with the Premiere now. Especially given some of the nice upgrade offers. Everyone else, upgrader or otherwise, should probably wait the 6-9 months it takes for the Premiere to get a few software updates under its belt.

As for me, I didn’t pre-order a Premiere and have no imminent purchase plans. Additionally, I’m still awaiting review hardware. Supposedly, TiVo had a limited supply of units to dole out and they appropriately prioritized the mainstream media and top tier blogs. However, I am left wondering if my lukewarm launch coverage made their decision that much easier.

Without further ado, here’s a sampling of TiVo Premiere reviews, featuring the last two sentences of each story:

Engadget
TiVo Premiere review

The problem is that moving at such a snail’s pace has allowed the cable companies to catch up and consumers to move on; if cheap / free cableco DVRs were TiVo’s greatest existential threat of the past decade, the combination of cheap / free / good cableco DVRs and the online-only content customer might be the fatal blow of this one. The Premiere is the DVR we wanted two years ago — TiVo’s challenge will be to make it the DVR we want two years from now.

Wall Street Journal
New TiVo Mixes TV and Internet, but Falls Short

All in all, TiVo Premiere looks incomplete. It seems more like a platform for a future set of offerings TiVo hopes one day to have, rather than a way to deliver new content right now.

Read more

Woot: TiVo Series 3 @ $175

With the introduction of the TiVo Premiere ($300), it’s no surprise that they’re blowing out excess inventory of prior models. And Woot’s got a decent deal today on the Series3: $169.99 + $5 shipping. It’s a refurbished unit, but the enclosure will still look better than your Premiere or TiVoHD… with that OLED front panel … Read more

BREAKING: DISH Held In Contempt (For Real)

I’ve been covering the TiVo/DISH/EchoStar patent infringement case for years. (With varying degree of interest.) And it looks like we’re that much closer to a conclusion given today’s ruling/affirmation by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit: Appellants (collectively, “EchoStar”) appeal from the district court’s decision finding them in contempt of the … Read more

The TiVo Premiere Paradox

TiVo Premiere, er, premiere week continues! And, last night, I was a guest on the EngadgetHD podcast dedicated to TiVo’s launch. Unfortunately, as with my write up, we had a difficult time focusing on what the Premiere offers… versus what it lacks. Of course, we’re not representative of the broader consumer market and have the … Read more

Three TiVo Premiere Mysteries

As no one beyond TiVo Inc, and their NDA-ed testers or partners, have spent more than a short while with the TiVo Premiere, there are quite a few outstanding questions of the CableCARD DVR. Is the hard drive still user expandable/replaceable? To what extent has the HME API been expanded to support the new Flash … Read more

The TiVo Premiere is here! (That’s it?)

TiVo-Premiere

After a few months of unintended leaks and 3 1/2 years since third generation hardware was introduced, the TiVo Series 4 Premiere has arrived. As with TiVo’s HD line, which is being cleared out, the Premiere will ship (next month) in two SKUs: A base model with 45 hours of HD storage (320GB) at $300. And a higher tier THX certified “XL” unit, containing a terabyte of storage (150 hrs of HD), for $500. Service fees are unchanged. As you’d expect, the Premiere sports significantly beefed up processing power and, also as expected, finally realizes TiVo’s new HD UI.

Additionally, the Premiere represents a savvy reboot of TiVo marketing. With, perhaps, a little help from their friends. Now that “DVR” functionality has essentially been commoditized, TiVo’s pitching the Premiere as a “cable box.”  That also provides video, web, and music content. Basically, “One Box” to rule them all.

So that’s what the TiVo Premiere is.

However, given TiVo’s inaugural role and leadership in space, not to mention the tens of millions spent annually on R&D, I have to say I’m somewhat underwhelmed. I get why they didn’t go the tru2way route, given the cable industry’s inability to roll out as planned and requirement to implement an inferior, secondary interface. But where’s the improved whole-home DVR experience (like Moxi), additional tuners, Blu-ray player, social media apps (like FiOS), DLNA, user personalization (like Sezmi), etc?

But, before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s dive into the Premiere specifics…

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