TiVo may come out with a multi-tuner box (4 tuners?) and smaller client boxes that you'd connect to other TVs in the house to stream onto.
Yeah, I'd read about the Tivo survey, but if they're just putting out feelers now, I wouldn't expect it to be available for 6-12 months, so if I switched providers now, I'd need to get an interim solution in place until then.
2) watching recorded content between devices works really well. It's actually pretty seamless, and feels like you're always watching the content from the place it was recorded.
What's the UI for this? Like, suppose I have a multi-room DVR in my living room and a regular DVR in the bedroom (so someone watching TV in the bedroom can pause live TV, record stuff, etc.) Do the recordings on both devices show up separately from each other, or are they all pooled together in the interface? I remember from my ReplayTV days having to remember which device had which timers, which was annoying.
The great thing about the home distribution method that Dish uses is that there's just one box recording everything with multiple tuners, so the other TVs are all browsing the same central show library instead of having to switch between them. My hunch is that going to Verizon would be a step backward in this regard.
Apparently they come in 160, 320, and 500GB sizes.
That's good to hear -- I'm sure they'd give me a 500GB as a prospective new customer. I'm less worried about capacity as I am with having to pay $20 for a multi-room DVR and $10 for a regular DVR to be able to pause live shows on two TVs. That significantly undercuts the cost savings of going to Verizon's "double play" package.
No, we don't get VOD on our Tivo.
Hm, I didn't think about VOD. I agree that free VOD offerings are often crap, but that's still something to consider -- the landscape of who has which free content at a particular time changes often, so I'd prefer to have as many choices as possible.
From what I've heard about multi-room distribution with Tivo, it's not the most elegant solution in the world. It's more like file sharing where you start a transfer of the show you want and start it once you've received enough data.
Wow, that's sad -- my old ReplayTVs did better than that. Hearing that makes me think I'd probably be best off getting the Verizon multi-room setup initially and possibly moving to Tivo if/when they get their act together on multi-room viewing that doesn't suck.
It sounds like our multi-room convenience takes a hit no matter which direction we go, leaving aside the murky details of the future Tivo thing. I guess I'll have to do the math on exactly how much we'll save to figure out if that's worth it or not. It may just be that our setup (two tuners distributed across 4 TVs) is particularly suited to the Dish way of doing things.
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