TiVo announces standalone HD TiVo

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TiVo announces standalone HD TiVo

More good TiVo news from CES: They announced a CableCARD standalone HD TiVo by beginning of next year. Hopefully that isn't too late.

by Matt Haughey January 6, 2005 in News

Comments

Finally!

Maybe this will get me to upgrade to HD now...

Posted by: Chris at Jan 6, 2005 1:36:48 PM

Great news, until it dawns on you that "next year" now means 2006. Nuts.

Posted by: TheMatt at Jan 6, 2005 2:15:27 PM

I think I hear a chorus of angels coming from my attic. And what's that shaft of light shining down on my entertainment center?

Posted by: sixtoe at Jan 6, 2005 6:35:14 PM

It's going to come out a year too late and it still won't have the latest/greatest. Single Tuner?! I highly doubt you'll be able to get 2 cablecards in it.

Posted by: john at Jan 6, 2005 6:48:56 PM

Cool! A "Broadcast Flag" TiVo. Just what I was looking for. I am sure it will be verrryyy popular.

Posted by: Michael Pate at Jan 6, 2005 8:55:56 PM

Broadcast flag or not: it will be very popular. So you cannot record PPV? Guess what, CableCard devices cannot watch PPV, at least until a bi-cirectional CableCard spec is ready. The only people who'll get a bug up their butt are video packrats. Most folks won't even notice. And it is dual tuner. I've seen the back, it has two cablecard slots.

Posted by: Ian at Jan 7, 2005 12:38:15 AM

CableCard devices can watch PPV. What they can't do is order them. To watch PPV on a CableCard device, you have to call your cable company and order the PPV event.

Posted by: Raj at Jan 7, 2005 6:20:10 AM

In a years time, I'd assume cable company offerings like the Motorola 6412 will be even better than they are right now. I'd personally have a hard time rationalizing shelling out a few hundred $, plus a subscription fee, for a Tivo.

Also, On Demand should be much more prevalent than now. I'm guessing that will be another limitation of the cable cards.

Posted by: Nick at Jan 7, 2005 10:53:25 AM

"Standalone" is pretty misleading -- it's not standing alone, it requires a CableCard.
Where is the real standalone -- like the regular TiVo -- that can use any video source? I want to be able to plug my tuner box for free, over the air digital television into my TiVo.

Posted by: Gene at Jan 7, 2005 11:29:37 AM

This CableCARD unit also has ATSC tuners. So it can record OTA ATSC natively. It is like the HD DirecTV unit which does DTV/ATSC, only this one does CableCARD/ATSC.

And the CableCARD 2.0 standard is supposed to support PPV, OnDemand, etc. Of course, cable companies have already started blocking recording of OnDemand on their own DVRs, and they're unlikely to allow TiVo, or any other 3rd party DVR, to record it.

Posted by: MegaZone at Jan 7, 2005 11:51:23 AM

So, does anyone know if TiVo is going to support CableCARD 1.x or 2.x?

From their 2006 timeline, it sounds like they're waiting for 2.x. But something else makes me think that's wishful thinking. Of course, I'd also be very happy with 1.x support if it had the ability to hold 2 CableCARDs.

Posted by: Cheddar at Jan 10, 2005 3:11:38 PM

Tivo will be a rotting corpse by the time this comes out. They should have prioritized this over the DirecTIVO HD box or done both at the same time. The HD Tivo was very late. By the time you could buy the HD Tivo you could also get Cablecards and cable HD DVRs. They blew whatever lead they could have had. Yes DirecTV customers have no other option but I doubt they've sold all that many of the HD units at $999. I bought one because I'm a football nut but $999 is a LOT of money for most people.

DirecTV is launching 4 more satellites and at CES demonstrated a whole-home 4-tuner system for which the slaves communicate with the server by coax, ethernet or powerlines. They showed it such that the server (you can have two servers per house) was HD and the slaves were SD but you can expect they'll have HD slaves once they solve the bandwidth as most home ethernet systems, and ethernet over coax, at 10/100 and serving a bunch of slaves with HD would probably require Gigabit ethernet or better compression. In addition their server or slaves can pull music or pictures off of any PC on the network and I think any PC can act as a television slave to the system as well - that would certainly be cool and SnapStream has been doing that for a while already with BeyondTV3. I just don't see how Tivo is going to survive that kind of onslaught. I am guessing the reason DirecTV is doing this on their own is that, in order to compete with cable, they're going to rent you the units at $7-$10 per month and they'll own and service them. That's what cable does. My local Time Warner rents me the Scientific Atlanta 8000HD dual-tuner high-def DVR boxes for $7 a month. At CES Scientific Atlanta also showed newer versions of these boxes that work over home networks and match the functionality of the DirecTV system. I just don't see how Tivo fits in here when they sell you a box for hundreds of dollars and then charge you $13 a month. The value proposition is just rediculous. Not only that but the Tivo boxes will have limited capabilities compared to the ones the cable companies provide directly to you. In addition Microsoft will have much to say about this. I'm sure long before Tivo brings out their Cablecard boxes Microsoft will support HD Cablecard tuners for Media Center and say what you want but Media Center is pretty darn slick and if you watched the CES Bill Gates Keynote you can see they're working their butt off to make it better and better. Tivo is just too much of a niche player to have a say. The companies who own the networks, plus Microsoft, will just marginalize them.

Posted by: UsesBoth at Jan 12, 2005 4:33:43 PM

I visited the TiVo "booth" (it was off the show floor) at CES in 2004 one year ago. At that time they assured me that "we'll have a non direcTV HDTiVo by early 2005. Now they say 2006. For a company in their competitive enviornment they need to move MUCH faster with product development. People have been hacking tivo (series 1) to do their own tivo-2-go for several years, and they just now are coming out with it? Maybe Strangeberry can save them.
http://www.strangeberry.com/

Posted by: spassmeister at Jan 14, 2005 10:48:26 AM

Tivo is lucky all the current HD DVRs from the cable companies are total crud. They really, really need to get this unit available as soon as they can. I'm not so sure 2006 will be soon enough, and i'd hate to see them go because there simply isn't an alternative worth using yet. Charter already supports CableCARDs for $1.50 a month per card .. What are they waiting for? The Moxi is just terrible, I want to record HD now, but not through a Moxi, or a Motorolla..

Posted by: Philip at Jan 20, 2005 6:48:04 AM

I don't know what your problem with the Moto 6412 is. Other than wishing it had a bigger hard drive, is seems like a pretty decent machine. Seemlessly integrated in the basic cable box. What's not to like?

Posted by: Bill at Jan 20, 2005 9:36:20 AM

I have to say that as a huge Tivo fan, I am just a bit disappointed in how long it is taking them to get HD tivo turned around. I live in Chicago and comcast just dropped one of thier HD boxes in my place, I wasn't looking for the DVR option (the motorola 6412), but since he ran out of the normal HD devices, he gave me the DVR with a wink and said they wouldn't charge me for the DVR. After playing with it, I must say that I am pretty shocked at how useful it is. Record and watch a different channel at the same time (or even record two channels at once), were it not for the small hard drive and the lousy interface for setting up recordings, this would be an excellent solution. I certainly hope Tivo can get their stuff together before comcast (or motorola) figure out what they are doing wrong.

Posted by: Jerry at Jan 25, 2005 9:22:14 AM

I'm a huge, huge fan of the Tivo interface and its functionality, but I'm a bigger fan of HD content. I dropped my Tivo service for the Motorola 6412 offered by Comcast. I dispise everything about the Moto unit and the horrible Microsoft Foundation Edition interface, but recording HD content and dual tuners means I'll put up with a lot of pain to use it rather than a SD Tivo Series2.

It's very sad that Tivo has put themselves in such a position. I really want them to succeed and I would instantly jump back if they can release a HD dual-cablecard unit and keep their rich interface and features intact. Sure it might cost more, but as they say, you get what you pay for. I'd pay more for the Tivo if they would just offer it.

P.S. If there's one feature every DVR should have, it's the FF jump-back that Tivo has. Anything faster than FF2 with the MS interface will put you WAY too far into the programming and usually spoil that part of the program if it returns to a suspensful moment. Did Tivo patent that feature or is the competition just ignorant?

Posted by: Dane at Jan 31, 2005 6:10:52 PM

I had a Tivo. I have the Motorola box now for HD. The Motorola box is TERRIBLE. I too, will go back to Tivo as soon as humanly possible, if they make it.

Sound familiar?:

-digital artifacts throughout HD programming
-can't do more than 2 things at once (very hard to watch a program while it is recording another because the box won't stop/FF/REW quick enough
-programs stop at 40 minutes, though it says it has recorded for an hour
-box freezes and requires unplugging

(it's the same reason I have a Mac, not a PC....I want my Tivo back)

Posted by: Leanna at Feb 15, 2005 7:49:15 PM

im really glad to hear it!!! finally dual tuner!!! ummm, one question. say if i dont have HD. can i still use it??

Posted by: AJ at Feb 8, 2006 5:13:39 PM

I'm a big fan of the Tivo and the easy of use interface. But like someone else commented, I'm a big fan of HD content also. So, I'm dropping my Tivo service and product for Cablevision PVR. The interface sucks, but I get two tuners, 100 hours of HD recording. Bottomline, I would have expected Tivo to be blazing the market with the cool new stuff, but the series2 if nearly three years old and nothing new on the horizon. I cannot hold my breath for Tivo so I'm moving on and a loss to a great product that only had to upgrade its product to be in the front the pack, not last in the the pack as they are now.

This is very sad for me to say good bye (for Now) to Tivo. I really wanted them to succeed and be the leader of the pack as they were when I first bought my first Tivo 5 years ago. I would go back if they do release a HD dual-cablecard unit and keep their rich interface and features intact. But at this point they (Tivo) are all talk and no delivery.

Charles

Posted by: Charles at Mar 27, 2006 11:52:58 AM

Received my first tivo last Christmas. In midst of hooking it up discovered it wouldn't record HD. We have HDTV. Took tivo back to the store. They told me tivo was saying hdtivo would be out in 1st qtr 06. Wha hoppen? Still waiting.

TIVO-less in Atlanta

Posted by: Dorse at May 14, 2006 2:29:20 PM

At the beginning of August 2007, I called Oceanic Cable Time Warner (located in Hawaii) to request cable cards that carried a High Definition package to go along with a HD-Tivo DVR that I wanted to purchase. The customer service representative stated that the cable cards would allow me to watch and record HD programs on the HD-Tivo. I made an agreement with the customer service representative and I ordered the cards. I then spent $300 for the HD-Tivo DVR and $300 for a Tivo Service subscription package and I made an appointment for an Oceanic cable technician to come out and install the cards.

After three weeks, the technician came out and tried to install the cards. Everything worked on the TV except the HD package. After two hours of making calls, the technician learned that over the last few weeks, Oceanic Cable (without telling their workers) decided to stop allowing the HD package available on the cable cards (It is available on their cable boxes). On the same day, I then made a call to the technician's supervisor who told me that there was nothing that he could do because it wasn't his decision. He said that he would try and work out an alternative solution, but there was no way that they were going to offer the cable cards with HD.

My complaint is this: I entered into an agreement with Oceanic Cable to purchase cable cards with an HD package, and I ended up spending a great deal of money and time towards a product they never intended to honor. I need to know whether the standard cable packages (specifically HD programming) that cable companies offer on their cable boxes MUST also be offered on their cable cards (with the exception of interactive programming).

Posted by: Jay at Aug 24, 2007 7:48:33 PM

TiVo announces standalone HD TiVo

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