# What would be the game changing feature



## Chris-AV-Dealer (Nov 19, 2014)

i think a game changing feature for the new bolt line would be a tile view. Have the ability to display four 1080p tuner feeds at the same time on the screen. If the unit supports a resolution of 4 times the resolution of 1080p, it should be able to handle four 1080p feeds. Obviously you would need a 4K tv to take advantage of this feature. It could be a selection you choose from the info screen where you see what channels all your tuners are set to. Then you could use the navigation controls to highlight which quadrant you want to here sound for.

What do you think community and TiVo?


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

4 channels on one screen simultaneously sounds like a gimmick to me. It's a feature that I (and a majority of people) would certainly never want to use. The only time such a feature might actually be useful is for people who want to watch multiple live sporting events simultaneously. The new SkipMode and QuickMode on the Bolt is far more important and useful to the vast majority of people.


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## HarperVision (May 14, 2007)

tarheelblue32 said:


> 4 channels on one screen simultaneously sounds like a gimmick to me. It's a feature that I (and a majority of people) would certainly never want to use. *The only time such a feature might actually be useful is for people who want to watch multiple live sporting events simultaneously. *The new SkipMode and QuickMode on the Bolt is far more important and useful to the vast majority of people.


Ding ding ding.....we _have_ a winner!


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## kisby (Mar 31, 2002)

One of the reasons I paid TWC $12.50 per month per DVR in my house was hardware failure fears. In the 90's I had a Tivo. One day, it failed and I was stuck with a bricked unit, but had paid for Tivo's fees. No one today wants a failed unit, having paid for a one year in advance or a lifetime fee. 

If it's true that Tivo makes no money off hardware, then offer this plan: If you buy lifetime, then we guarantee you a working unit. If your unit fails, we will replace it for free (up to 5-6 years, or whatever.) That would make me feel better about lifetime fee. If they are already doing this, then they need to advertise it better.

Also, I'd like to see a cloud storage option. If the unit fails, I lose everything. This defeats the purpose of a DVR. Starting over is painful. Also, let us store our home videos and pics on the cloud and show them via Tivo including app away from home

Even TWC's enhanced DVR is not as good as a Tivo when it comes to features. Make Tivo cool again. The Bolt is a good step in the right direction.

Also, a trade-up program would be nice. I hate it when I buy something, and a couple of months later, a new better unit comes out.


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## jrtroo (Feb 4, 2008)

Tivo will replace a lifetime box for a fee, it graduates with age, but is generally fair. Its in the T&Cs, but I would think putting what happens in a failure situation in marketing materials is a recipe for doubt.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

They offer a continual warranty now with monthly/yearly service. They will replace any broken TiVo on those plans for $50. Lifetime units do not get the same coverage but you can buy an extended warranty for $40 or you like jrtroo mentioned they do offer out of warranty replacement for a fee which increases with age.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

As for my answer to the original question....

I still think TiVo needs some sort of multiple user profile system for families. I also think it would be awesome if OnePasses would include recordings on other TiVos in your home as a pseudo way of treating multiple units as one.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

HarperVision said:


> Ding ding ding.....we _have_ a winner!


Only a minority of people watch sports at all, and only a minority of those people who actually do watch sports don't want to watch multiple games at one time.


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

kisby said:


> Also, I'd like to see a cloud storage option. If the unit fails, I lose everything. This defeats the purpose of a DVR. Starting over is painful. Also, let us store our home videos and pics on the cloud and show them via Tivo including app away from home


Backup is a good thing, with proper security anyway. But I still think the whole concept of a cloud DVR is insane, since bandwidth will never be infinite. I guess you could "own" a block of "cloud" storage, but why do you need it except to backup personal content that you created? Streaming any commercial content to that storage would be a complete waste of bandwidth, and later streaming it back for viewing would be essentially similar to conventional streaming. We already have streaming, and each user doesn't need a personal copy of a movie or TV show sitting on a server somewhere.


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## HarperVision (May 14, 2007)

tarheelblue32 said:


> Only a minority of people watch sports at all, and only a minority of those people who actually do watch sports don't want to watch multiple games at one time.


Which is why they're consistently in the top rated shows all the time, right? 

I agree, only a minority of those people *don't* want to watch multiple games! 

Can you say football? If no one watches this way, then why are there channels dedicated to doing just that on DirecTV?


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## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

The top rated shows aren't anywhere near a majority of viewers. It's still way below 51% of viewers. Which is what would be needed for a majority.


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## HarperVision (May 14, 2007)

aaronwt said:


> The top rated shows aren't anywhere near a majority of viewers. It's still way below 51% of viewers. Which is what would be needed for a majority.


In the TV world, it's still a strong marketable demographic. Ask the NFL.


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## kisby (Mar 31, 2002)

L David Matheny said:


> I still think the whole concept of a cloud DVR is insane,


You need to google the term "cloud DVR." If the concept is insane, then there is a lot of insanity out there. I don't want to see Tivo get left behind. I'm guessing they're already looking into this.


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## L David Matheny (Jan 29, 2011)

kisby said:


> If the concept is insane, then there is a lot of insanity out there.


There is indeed.


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## Chris-AV-Dealer (Nov 19, 2014)

I actually think offering cloud dvr service is a bad idea for one main reason, response time. When you're watching your dvr you want fast response time, skip quickly where you want to go, view what your fastforwarding. To do all these things in the cloud you will encounter buffering issues. This is why I don't see services like Playstation vue doing well unless they automatically remove commercials from programming, which wont happen. 

If you are concerned about backup, maybe tivo should enable a link to cloud services like dropbox and you can setup in your onepass setting if you want that recording backed up to dropbox.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Chris-AV-Dealer said:


> I actually think offering cloud dvr service is a bad idea for one main reason, response time. When you're watching your dvr you want fast response time, skip quickly where you want to go, view what your fastforwarding. To do all these things in the cloud you will encounter buffering issues. This is why I don't see services like Playstation vue doing well unless they automatically remove commercials from programming, which wont happen.


With the new automatic commercial skip feature you may not need fluid FF/RW any more.

Although I'm not sure I agree that fluid FF/RW is impossible over the internet. TiVo manages to do it with the Mini with minimal buffering and full bitrate MPEG-2 files. With a heavily compressed H.264 or H.265 file you could do the same thing with much less bandwidth. The trick to doing FF/RW with temporally compressed video is which frames you send through. For the 1x speed they need to send all the frames at 2-3x real time, so that requires the most bandwidth. But for the 2x mode they can eliminate B frames and for 3x they can only send I/IDR frames. So even at accelerated speeds they don't need significantly more bandwidth then normal playback. They could also store a lower resolution, lower bitrate, version of the video to use for FF/RW so that the bandwidth requirements are exactly the same as normal playback. My point is that just because existing services like Netflix and Amazon do a terrible job with their FF/RW features doesn't mean it can't be done better.

Personally I think TiVo should offer a cloud service. But I think it should be a complete service, akin to Playstation Vue or Sling TV. Where they package both the content and the cloud DVR into a single service. Perhaps they could even bundle the service with an OTA only local DVR, and integrate it seamlessly, so that they don't have to worry about local programming and they can just focus on the popular cable channels.


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## trip1eX (Apr 2, 2005)

The feature would be fun. And would be pretty easy to implement. But not sure many would use it in the long run.


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## BobCamp1 (May 15, 2002)

For me, support FIOS VOD and bring back the Season Pass. And drop the price of a Mini by $50.


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## tarheelblue32 (Jan 13, 2014)

BobCamp1 said:


> For me, support FIOS VOD and bring back the Season Pass. And drop the price of a Mini by $50.


Reducing prices isn't a feature.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

SP isn't coming back. Maybe they'll add some way for a 1P to have different settings for repeats and new, but based on Ira's response it doesn't sound like that is even being considered. It sounds like they've pretty much decided that you can get repeats via streaming so there is no reason to create a special case for recording them.


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## jonw747 (Aug 2, 2015)

Chris-AV-Dealer said:


> i think a game changing feature for the new bolt line would be a tile view. Have the ability to display four 1080p tuner feeds at the same time on the screen. If the unit supports a resolution of 4 times the resolution of 1080p, it should be able to handle four 1080p feeds. Obviously you would need a 4K tv to take advantage of this feature. It could be a selection you choose from the info screen where you see what channels all your tuners are set to. Then you could use the navigation controls to highlight which quadrant you want to here sound for.
> 
> What do you think community and TiVo?


Definitely not a game changer, but it should make the TiVo more attractive to Sports Bars and Fantasy Sports fans.


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## Sparky1234 (May 8, 2006)

1. DLNA Let me stream my video from my computer to TiVo! Not transfer but stream!
2. Swapable hard drives. Why is it so hard to upgrade or replace a defective hard drive. 1TB max HD size for Bolt, really!


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## zerdian1 (Apr 19, 2015)

Chris-AV-Dealer said:


> i think a game changing feature for the new bolt line would be a tile view. Have the ability to display four 1080p tuner feeds at the same time on the screen. If the unit supports a resolution of 4 times the resolution of 1080p, it should be able to handle four 1080p feeds. Obviously you would need a 4K tv to take advantage of this feature. It could be a selection you choose from the info screen where you see what channels all your tuners are set to. Then you could use the navigation controls to highlight which quadrant you want to here sound for.
> 
> What do you think community and TiVo?


NOT A GAME CHANGER FOR ME.

I had this 6 TILE feature on my Dish Hopper where it tiled 6 stations at once. The problem for me with that setup was that it was near impossible for me to select the channels even when there were no recordings on any of the tuners.

I could easily jump to any one of the 6 videos shown. but the channels were not channels I watched most of the time. Even when i set it up that the 6 tuners were on channels I wanted it would jump to a 6 channel tile that mostly did not include channels of interest to me.

During the Olympics they set it up so that the 6 channels were Olympics channels. I did like the feature during the Olympics. 
Most of the time I did not use the tile view feature.

I will probably buy a BOLT in exchange for my Roamio Basic on a $10 month by month service plan just to try out the new functions. I do not know if I can wait a year for a 6 to 8 turner 4TB Series 6 BOLT.


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## Sparky1234 (May 8, 2006)

Dan203 said:


> As for my answer to the original question....
> 
> I still think TiVo needs some sort of multiple user profile system for families. I also think it would be awesome if OnePasses would include recordings on other TiVos in your home as a pseudo way of treating multiple units as one.


I keep an iPad handy to program my 3 TiVos (Premieres) - it's faster than on the Tivo, can be done in the background while watching a program and you don't have to be in the same room. I agree that treating multiple TiVos in OnePass as one would be useful for multi-TiVo homes.


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## Dan203 (Apr 17, 2000)

Sparky1234 said:


> 1. DLNA Let me stream my video from my computer to TiVo! Not transfer but stream!
> 2. Swapable hard drives. Why is it so hard to upgrade or replace a defective hard drive. 1TB max HD size for Bolt, really!


1) They have Plex for streaming local content

2) You can swap the hard drive easily. Up to 3TB it's a simple drop in replacement. No special prep needed, just install the drive and the TiVo does the rest.


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