# Early holdouts -- What will it take for you to upgrade?



## abovethesink

For me, I need to see two things. Reviews from this forum that the Bolt is significantly faster and the ability to drop in a 3 TB HD as or almost as easily as on the Roamio. I cannot downsize my HD size and of course there needs to be a next gen performance leap. I have a four tuner Basic and a two tuner Premiere so I don't need a six tuner model (should definitely exist though). 4k is very important to me and not having to worry about what Netflix app I am using for what show is the main draw, but I cannot justify it without those two things. HBO Go would seal it as well, but I don't want to encourage them to go down that road when there is no reason the Roamio couldn't run it too.


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## tarheelblue32

They are going to have to offer a better price for lifetime service for me to be interested in the Bolt. $600 is just asking too much and I'm not interested in paying them $150/year. 

Taking away the $100 MSD on lifetime while at the same time raising the price $100 was a double blow. I could understand them maybe doing one or the other, but not both, plus you still have to pay for the 1 year of lifetime service for $150 included in the purchase price. So essentially you are paying $750 for what you were paying $400 for before. That's a 94% increase! Banana republics don't even have inflation that high.


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## usc-fan

It would take a major change in what tivo is doing. Seems every news that came out for older tivo owner is negative. its clear they are driving up prices to make up for losing the patent money in the coming year.

Lifetime prices went up, no MSD, and not adding software features to Roamio. I do not like this direction they are going. 

Really shows you the problem with the lifetime to begin with. they have to force people to upgrade. So it doesnt make sense to keep giving new features. Sucks for people that pay monthly.

Anyway this has left a bad taste in my mouth. Sad thing is they didnt need to gate software features since most people would only upgrade for 4k anyway. That would be the only reason for me to upgrade but with no MSD and only 4 tuner with 1TB this cannot be my main DVR.


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## aaronwt

Downscaling of streaming 4K content to 2K would probably come very close to getting me to pick one up. That and a reduction in the service price would get me to pull the trigger. Of course then I would need to dump the remote and put the Bolt somewhere I can't see it.


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## mattack

I haven't read all of the reviews yet, but from what I've seen in news articles and the amazon info so far..

* LOVE the commercial skip idea (if it works as well as it sounds)... (If DISH DVRs had the abilities that Tivo has of: to easily upgrade hard drives, let you own the hardware, and let you download shows off of the hard drive for even more storage, I would have VERY VERY VERY strongly considered going to DISH just for the autohop functionality)
* LOVE the fast-forward-with-audio, and I have been using a non-tivo recorder for > 10 years (and in recent years, VLC iPad app + Tivo downloads) to do the same thing.. But the Tivo fast-forward-with-audio is ONLY 30% faster apparently. I go WELL WELL WELL over 2x very often.. and even the Podcasts app lets me go 2x, and I listen to all audio and video podcasts that way. If this functionality were MUCH faster, even "just" 2x, it alone would make me _consider_ upgrading for it. If Tivo ever fixes the iOS app downloading problems, I would hope they add a faster-play option to that app.. (and way faster than the Bolt hardware can do)

(I admit, I think my non-tivo recorder does 1.5x, but that's part of the reason I now use VLC.. the other was that I was realtime dubbing, then watching on that recorder..)

BAD:
* Not 6 or more tuners
* Stupid non-rectangular shape (not stackable)
* Apparently way more expensive
* SMALL hard drive
* Using a LAPTOP hard drive ?!?!?!?!?!?!

Again, I may change some of these based on reading way more info, but these are my first impressions..

Except for the iOS app being completely busted (0x10005 and 0x10003 errors constantly, takes 10+ download attempts FOR ONE SHOW very often, if I can even successfully download at all), the "at the TV" experience of Tivo is unparalleled, and I keep meaning to correct a podcast story from last week about "dream DVR features", and Tivo has MANY of them already, and has for years.


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## Sixto

6 tuners is critical (for me). Mandatory.


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## dswallow

I see nothing I care about in the Bolt over the Roamio Pro that makes it a consideration at all, ever.

I have a Premiere in use that's still on a monthly plan. I really keep it around just for the HD OTA capabilities. I may consider the Bolt to replace that, just for the heck of it and to see what it can do as any new software rolls out to it.


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## Dan203

Sixto said:


> 6 tuners is critical (for me). Mandatory.


6 tuners and at least 3TB drive for me. My 3TB drive is consistently 80%+ full. I can't go smaller.


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## caughey

aaronwt said:


> Downscaling of streaming 4K content to 2K would probably come very close to getting me to pick one up.


What is the benefit of that?



Dan203 said:


> 6 tuners and at least 3TB drive for me. My 3TB drive is consistently 80%+ full. I can't go smaller.


When I went from the HD to Roamio, I thought 6 tuners was overkill. I could probably live with 4 tuners most of the time, but why would I want to downsize? I have 3TB in the Roamio and 2TB in the HD, no way could I put up with 500 or even 1000 GB again.

I'll wait for series 7.


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## cwerdna

Would want to see reviews after it's been in the hands of owners for at least a few weeks. I wish the lifetime price were a lot lower. Otherwise, on paper, this seems like a good upgrade from my TiVo HD.

I really like the ability to watch more quickly.


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## tomhorsley

Well, if my Roamio died, I'd think about the Bolt, but having only 4 tuners plus being the most hideously ugly case ever designed for anything in the universe would put me off. Maybe if I put it in a box so I couldn't see it when watching TV .

I just noticed, there are no component outputs either, which means you are at the mercy of HDCP encryption on HDMI, a feature that no one has ever competently implemented which constantly causes trouble.


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## jaj2276

I have a Premiere with 4 minis that I'm looking to possibly upgrade (the Premiere is 2.5 yrs old, monthly plan at $12.99/mo). I will wait to either buy a lifetime Roamio Plus (I want the 6 tuners) or a refurb'd Roamio Plus/Pro from Tivo (assuming they still sell lifetime with these units). I can't see me ever buying a Bolt unless they increase the # of tuners.

Seems so short-sighted for them to decrease the # of tuners.


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## Chris Gerhard

I am planning on buying a 4K Blu-ray player and don't think I will need 4K with TiVo so other than a very inexpensive TiVo Bolt with lifetime, nothing else would get me interested. I am OTA and streaming only, just purchased a TiVo Roamio and mini, and think I am set for the long haul unless OTA somehow can handle 4K in my lifetime.

The number of tuners means nothing to me, four is more than I could ever possibly need on an OTA DVR here in Little Rock.


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## aaronwt

aaronwt said:


> Downscaling of streaming 4K content to 2K would probably come very close to getting me to pick one up. .............





caughey said:


> What is the benefit of that?
> ....


The higher quality 4K streams, downscaled to 2K, would be much closer to BD quality than the 2K streams are.


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## reneg

Better lifetime pricing to start. 6 tuners is a must have for me now.


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## trip1eX

NOt upgrading. It's everything. Less tuners. High lifetime price. New features I can live without. I haven't heard that the Roamio or Mini UI has been further refined any. My Roamio Plus lifetime is only 15 months old and does the job.

OH and I can't imagine the pricepoint of a 6 tuner Bolt.


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## jonw747

If my TV ever dies I'll be in the market for a DVR that supports 4K or > recording - but I suppose that depends if my TV lasts long enough for that to become a reality.

At the right price, I'd buy a Bolt rather than a Mini to expand my system and add some redundancy, but even the best Summer deals on the Roamio didn't come close enough.


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## generaltso

I consider myself a TiVo evangelist. I tend to jump on any new TiVo hardware regardless of price. You would think that TiVo would consider me an ideal customer....willing to pay whatever it takes to run the latest and greatest hardware and software. But for the first time, they've given me a Sophie's choice. Regardless of how much I'm willing to pay, I would have to give up 2 tuners and a ton of storage space to "upgrade". I'm too reliant on both to give them up. I really want SkipMode mode, but why should I have to give up core features to get it? I hope a Bolt Pro will be seen in the near future, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that's the case.


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## fcfc2

Hi,
I guess I am not in the target population for the new Bolt. It has a few new "future" oriented features, 4K, MoCA 2.0, Wireless AC, and a much faster processor, which are pluses. However, the color and hump back design are negatives IMO. This hump back design by the way is supposed to help with heat dispersal from the new processor, but heat rises and the only venting is presumably on the bottom of the unit, how this is better than standard bottom and side venting is hard to figure. It also appears to be using laptop 2.5" drives, which are generally only available up to 2TB, even if the drive is easily upgradeable and this is yet to be determined. (Yes, I am aware of 3TB laptop drives but they are scarce and a bit pricey compared to standard 3.5" hd's) The new pricing model, seems to be trying to force the monthy/annual rental by removing any incentive to purchase the lifetime subscription. All my Tivo's are lifetime, so that alone is a gigantic negative. Also, unless there is a new Mini (Bolt V3) in the works that adds some of the "future" oriented features, and comes without the Bolt price restrictions, this seems like a substantial negative. The current 4 tuner limitation is not of interest to me either, and even if a 6 tuner version is coming down the line, unless there are substantial design changes, the price is liable to be prohibitive. Tivo does seem able to recognize marketing mistakes eventually, so it is possible they may make "adjustments" to their pricing structure but not in any time frame that is likely to attract me.


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## foghorn2

349.99 is the most Ill ever pay for "ALL IN".
As soon as I see that possibility, I'm ALL IN.


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## Aero 1

being OTA only and forgetting about the ridiculous new pricing, the bolt is not appealing for me.

ill wait till ATSC 3.0 is ratified, and 4k is normalized before i start buying all new stuff.


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## randian

Dan203 said:


> 6 tuners and at least 3TB drive for me. My 3TB drive is consistently 80%+ full. I can't go smaller.


Until TiVo implements a proper migration path, and there is no evidence yet that they have, why would you want a Bolt even if it had the drive space? You couldn't transfer any of your recordings and would have to manually reenter all of your no doubt numerous OnePasses and settings.


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## generaltso

randian said:


> Until TiVo implements a proper migration path, and there is no evidence yet that they have, why would you want a Bolt even if it had the drive space? You couldn't transfer any of your recordings and would have to manually reenter all of your no doubt numerous OnePasses and settings.


Why wouldn't you be able to transfer any of your recordings? And why would you have to reenter all of your OnePasses manually when you can copy them over through tivo.com or KMTTG?


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## slowbiscuit

usc-fan said:


> It would take a major change in what tivo is doing. Seems every news that came out for older tivo owner is negative. its clear they are driving up prices to make up for losing the patent money in the coming year.
> 
> Lifetime prices went up, no MSD, and not adding software features to Roamio. I do not like this direction they are going.
> 
> Really shows you the problem with the lifetime to begin with. they have to force people to upgrade. So it doesnt make sense to keep giving new features. Sucks for people that pay monthly.
> 
> Anyway this has left a bad taste in my mouth. Sad thing is they didnt need to gate software features since most people would only upgrade for 4k anyway. That would be the only reason for me to upgrade but with no MSD and only 4 tuner with 1TB this cannot be my main DVR.


Great summary of what I feel about this box. Intentionally limiting software features really pisses me off, they haven't done this before that I know of (i.e. before they could always use hardware as an excuse but that's obviously not true for this). And it's not like the Roamio is that old, service-wise.


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## brewman

No interest in the Bolt whatsoever. AFAIK it offers nothing new I want; offers less of what I do want than the Roamio, and I do not like the color or style.


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## b_scott

aaronwt said:


> The higher quality 4K streams, downscaled to 2K, would be much closer to BD quality than the 2K streams are.


Depends on the quality of the downscaling. My Kuro would probably downscale better than most software.


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## b_scott

foghorn2 said:


> 349.99 is the most Ill ever pay for "ALL IN".
> As soon as I see that possibility, I'm ALL IN.


really? Because I paid $399 Lifetime each for both my Premieres 5 years ago.


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## b_scott

generaltso said:


> Why wouldn't you be able to transfer any of your recordings? And why would you have to reenter all of your OnePasses manually when you can copy them over through tivo.com or KMTTG?


if you upgrade usually the old box would be removed from service at the same time as the other is adding service - and you can only transfer if both boxes have service.


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## trip1eX

generaltso said:


> I consider myself a TiVo evangelist. I tend to jump on any new TiVo hardware regardless of price. You would think that TiVo would consider me an ideal customer....willing to pay whatever it takes to run the latest and greatest hardware and software. But for the first time, they've given me a Sophie's choice. Regardless of how much I'm willing to pay, I would have to give up 2 tuners and a ton of storage space to "upgrade". I'm too reliant on both to give them up. I really want SkipMode mode, but why should I have to give up core features to get it? I hope a Bolt Pro will be seen in the near future, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that's the case.


2 Bolts! That's your answer.

IF that doesn't solve your problem then Tivo has another solution for you.

3 Bolts!

And if that doesn't work..., well you get the picture.


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## hefe

If I didn't have a Roamio, I might upgrade. But since I do, there's nothing of interest here.


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## randian

generaltso said:


> Why wouldn't you be able to transfer any of your recordings? And why would you have to reenter all of your OnePasses manually when you can copy them over through tivo.com or KMTTG?


Many cable systems set no-copy on everything. TiVo.com is notorious for screwing up when copying over season passes, mostly of the random reordering variety. Does it even work for Wishlists? There are many other settings besides OnePasses, and there is information like recording and deletion history which are not technically "settings" but which are still very important to keep. Which is all beside the point, because I damn well shouldn't have to resort to third-party software to do this. When I swap phones *everything* gets migrated over. Apple and Google have rabid fans that buy new phones every year, not just because they like the products but because they made it easy to switch over to a new phone.


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## generaltso

randian said:


> Many cable systems set no-copy on everything. TiVo.com is notorious for screwing up when copying over season passes, mostly of the random reordering variety. Does it even work for Wishlists? There are many other settings besides OnePasses, and there is information like recording and deletion history which are not technically "settings" but which are still very important to keep. Which is all beside the point, because I damn well shouldn't have to resort to third-party software to do this. When I swap phones *everything* gets migrated over. Apple and Google have rabid fans that buy new phones every year, not just because they like the products but because they made it easy to switch over to a new phone.


I don't disagree that TiVo should have a full migration tool to make it far easier to upgrade to a new box. But your general statement that you can't transfer recordings to a new box and would have to re-enter your OnePasses manually is false.


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## MikeAndrews

Why the hold out?

I own my TiVos to PLS. If they work, what motivation would i have to get another?

You know....Lincoln has a brand new 2016 MKX. I have reasons not to "upgrade" from my 2011.


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## GBK33

How can you not have 6 tuners? They have been pushing the use of the mini. With only 4 tuners and a couple of minis in use, you are cooked! That is a killer for me. The size is not adequate either. Needs a 3TB model. Really bums me out. 

NEEDS 6 TUNERS
NEEDS MORE STORAGE

They come out with a Bolt PRO with those items, then I'm in 100%


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## wizwor

I'm not really a TiVo customer. I just happen to own three TiVo Roamio/OTAs and a pair of Minis -- all with Lifetime. Total investment was $1150 for five rooms ($230/room for twelve tuners and 1.5t/225HD of disk). I'm very happy with the DVRs, but they do not live up to the hype. Very disappointed to see the Lifetime option disappear for the Roamios and outright SHOCKED at the new Lifetime prices.

The only way I would upgrade (or even replace) would be to get a good deal on a Lifetime bundle at some future time.


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## b_scott

wizwor said:


> I'm not really a TiVo customer. I just happen to own three TiVo Roamio/OTAs and a pair of Minis -- all with Lifetime. Total investment was $1150 for five rooms ($230/room for twelve tuners and 1.5t/225HD of disk). * I'm very happy with the DVRs, but they do not live up to the hype*. Very disappointed to see the Lifetime option disappear for the Roamios and outright SHOCKED at the new Lifetime prices.
> 
> The only way I would upgrade (or even replace) would be to get a good deal on a Lifetime bundle at some future time.


curious what hype they don't live up to?


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## wizwor

b_scott said:


> curious what hype they don't live up to?


I had a tough time figuring out One Pass. It's a little complicated to use, but the big part of the problem was errors in the program guide. In the end, TiVo support was able to replicate but not fix the problem because TiVo is not responsible for the guide. The two guide problems were...


Improperly Coded Programs
Discovery Errors

The very first program I tried to set up for One Pass was not actually on television. Some of the instances were an infomercial and the others were mistagged episodes of some other programs. During my channel scan, a number of channels were added that were more than a hundred miles away. When one of these channels was tuned, another channel played. When I set up a One Pass for Two and a Half Men, it was found on a phantom channel. The recordings were of PBS programs. I had to go through the channel list and remove foreign language and phantom channels. So, all of this is a lot less magic than i had expected.

Two things that just annoy me are...


Direct Access to Channels via the Remote
No Inactivity Timer on the Mini

When I press a channel on the remote, it does not go to the first available sub-channel. So, when I press 5, I get a message warning that the channel could not be tuned and I have to press channel up to get to 5.1. I have been told that this is because 5 all by itself is the analog channel. Analog channels were gone (except for low power exceptions) for five years before the Roamio/OTA was designed. All my other DVRs go to 5.1 when I enter 5 on the remote -- even the DTVPal (which was released when analog channels were still broadcasting). Of course, when you hit the back button, you get the dead space instead of the last tuned channel. Just a PITA.

The Mini should have an inactivity timer. Inactivity on an HDMI port causes most modern televisions to shut off. If I fall asleep watching television, the DVR times out and the television turns off. With the Mini, I awake to a screen saver. I know I could just set the timer on the television, but that would require me to deal with a second remote.

Generally, it takes a lot of steps to complete tasks with the TiVo and sometimes I have trouble finding options in the menu system. The fact that there was no detailed owner's manual in the box or easily located on tivo.com was frustrating for a nube.

Some say I need to adjust to the TiVo paradigm. That sounds like a fancy way to say TiVo operation is counter-intuitive.

So, counter-intuitive navigation, bizarre remote operation, inconsistent features, and program guide errors were unexpected in the 'premium' DVR.


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## wtherrell

Not enough tuners or storage. Plus a shape that is not only budtugly but won't stack into my Android rack. 

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk


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## cybergrimes

aaronwt said:


> The higher quality 4K streams, downscaled to 2K, would be much closer to BD quality than the 2K streams are.


Do the 4k capable apps even allow that? If you're running a 4k Bolt or say even an Amazon Fire to a 2k television set then the device is going to be outputting for the 2k device. Wouldn't Netflix know to only stream 2k content? What does it do now if you watch a regular 2k HD stream and you're plugged into a 720p television? It's only going to output at 720p, is that downscaled from the HD stream that Netflix is sending?

I don't recall anyone asking about downscaling to 720 devices when Netflix started offering 1080 content.


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## krkaufman

wizwor said:


> The fact that there was no detailed owner's manual in the box or easily located on tivo.com was frustrating for a nube.


I could use an up-to-date Roamio user guide to provide my niece's family, as well.


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## Dan203

cybergrimes said:


> Do the 4k capable apps even allow that?


I don't think so. I think they use the info from the HDMI connection to determine the max resolution and use that as the max they will allow to stream.


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## Bigg

Not that exciting. We'll see what the 6-tuner Bolt has feature wise. I really want 4k, but any new 4k TV has 4k Netflix and Amazon and a HEVC decoder built in, so that's a total non-feature for a TiVo.

At this point, I can't see why I'd want to upgrade even from my Premiere XL4. 6 tuners is the only thing I'd want, and Bolt doesn't have that yet. Commercial skip would be cool, but I'm a long-time TiVo user, so I'm really, really good at button mashing my way through them anyway.


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## Bigg

cybergrimes said:


> Do the 4k capable apps even allow that? If you're running a 4k Bolt or say even an Amazon Fire to a 2k television set then the device is going to be outputting for the 2k device. Wouldn't Netflix know to only stream 2k content? What does it do now if you watch a regular 2k HD stream and you're plugged into a 720p television? It's only going to output at 720p, is that downscaled from the HD stream that Netflix is sending?


TiVo doesn't support Amazon yet, but the Fire will stream a 1080p HEVC encoded stream to the new Fire, which should yield slightly better quality at a lower bitrate than H.264, but it's not actually taking a 4k stream and scaling it down, it's just a HEVC encode. If you have a 4k TV, then you actually get 4k.


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## wizwor

krkaufman said:


> I could use an up-to-date Roamio user guide to provide my niece's family, as well.


http://assets.tivo.com/assets/resources/HowTo/Roamio_VG_r3_Jan2015.pdf


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## krkaufman

wizwor said:


> http://assets.tivo.com/assets/resources/HowTo/Roamio_VG_r3_Jan2015.pdf


I was thinking that new features had been added since the last update to that manual.


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## series5orpremier

I can barely live with four tuners for cable only because I have an extra four tuners for broadcast OTA. Even then I have to reschedule a lot of cable recordings to other showings to avoid conflicts. A return of lifetime service at previous pricing is my first prerequisite. Easily self-upgraded internal storage is a second prerequisite. A six tuner model with OTA capability would be nice as well. They can even take out the BS 4K stuff because that makes no difference to me.

Wait a minute. That almost describes a Roamio, except for the OTA capability on a six tuner model, the faster processors and FF features.


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## aaronwt

cybergrimes said:


> Do the 4k capable apps even allow that? If you're running a 4k Bolt or say even an Amazon Fire to a 2k television set then the device is going to be outputting for the 2k device. Wouldn't Netflix know to only stream 2k content? What does it do now if you watch a regular 2k HD stream and you're plugged into a 720p television? It's only going to output at 720p, is that downscaled from the HD stream that Netflix is sending?
> 
> I don't recall anyone asking about downscaling to 720 devices when Netflix started offering 1080 content.


When netflix first starting offering 1080P, it was able to be downscaled to 720P.

As far as 4K, the new FireTV is the first truly mass market streamer that has the 4K streaming apps. And it comes out in a few days. So I don't know what they will do. I would love for it to be able to downscale the 4K content. But I'm really not expecting it. But you never know.


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## Sixto

generaltso said:


> I consider myself a TiVo evangelist. I tend to jump on any new TiVo hardware regardless of price. You would think that TiVo would consider me an ideal customer....willing to pay whatever it takes to run the latest and greatest hardware and software. But for the first time, they've given me a Sophie's choice. Regardless of how much I'm willing to pay, I would have to give up 2 tuners and a ton of storage space to "upgrade". I'm too reliant on both to give them up. I really want SkipMode mode, but why should I have to give up core features to get it? I hope a Bolt Pro will be seen in the near future, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that's the case.


My thoughts exactly.


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## LoveGardenia

I have became addicted to the six tuner capability. Why did they downsize that instead of upgrading? Those with 3 or more mini's will be disappointed. The hard drive should be bigger and I hate the curve design, there's no where to place the tuning adapter on top for those of us who are required to have one and have limited space for placement of both TA and Tivo Bolt. I was hoping to see two inputs for Cable and Antenna instead of a choice between the two. IF there is a Tivo Bolt Plus/Pro in the near future, I hope there's a better box design and the two inputs. Just my 2 cents. This new box is not for me.


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## krkaufman

LoveGardenia said:


> I have became addicted to the six tuner capability. Why did they downsize that instead of upgrading?


Aarrrrgh.... They didn't downsize. The Pro w/ 6 tuners is still available; the current BOLT is an upgrade replacement for the 4-tuner CableCARD/OTA base Roamio. TiVo is yet to release any upgrades for the OTA, Pro or Mini hardware.

For 6-tuner Plus/Pro owners, there simply hasn't been an upgrade. The Pro is still considered the current "high end" product.


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## mattack

tomhorsley said:


> plus being the most hideously ugly case ever designed for anything in the universe


Wow, I was going to disagree, and it took a few minutes to find images of the vague memory.. but I guess this *is* worse than the Boxee Box!


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## aaronwt

mattack said:


> Wow, I was going to disagree, and it took a few minutes to find images of the vague memory.. but I guess this *is* worse than the Boxee Box!


Both are ugly. My three Boxee Boxes are still hidden away, out of sight. Although I rarely use them any more. If I do pick up a Bolt, it will also need to be hidden away. No way would I want a Bolt out in the open like my Roamios or Premiere are. The Bolt would look so out of place with dozens of components that are black.


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## krkaufman

aaronwt said:


> Both are ugly. My three Boxee Boxes are still hidden away, out of sight. Although I rarely use them any more. If I do pick up a Bolt, it will also need to be hidden away. No way would I want a Bolt out in the open like my Roamios or Premiere are. The Bolt would look so out of place with dozens of components that are black.


Well, yeah, 'cause all of the vomit on it, amiright?


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## aaronwt

krkaufman said:


> Well, yeah, 'cause all of the vomit on it, amiright?


:up:


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## moyekj

krkaufman said:


> For 6-tuner Plus/Pro owners, there simply hasn't been an upgrade. The Pro is still considered the current "high end" product.


 Which means it should get SkipMode feature then.


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## atmuscarella

moyekj said:


> Which means it should get SkipMode feature then.


I think all of us think it (and all the Roamios) "should" get SkipMode, but so far TiVo disagrees. Hopefully they will change their minds.


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## innocentfreak

I don't have plans for 4k anytime soon since I am happy with my Plasma TV. 

I would definitely want 6 tuners and 3TB preferably more recording space. 

I think if a Bolt Pro was launched and it supported MRS to and from a PC I would make the jump especially if the content was integrated into OnePass.


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## DevdogAZ

krkaufman said:


> Aarrrrgh.... They didn't downsize. The Pro w/ 6 tuners is still available; the current BOLT is an upgrade replacement for the 4-tuner CableCARD/OTA base Roamio. TiVo is yet to release any upgrades for the OTA, Pro or Mini hardware.
> 
> For 6-tuner Plus/Pro owners, there simply hasn't been an upgrade. The Pro is still considered the current "high end" product.


Technically, you are correct. But if that's really what TiVo intended, this is a very odd marketing move. I don't think I've ever seen a company release a new product with lots of hype and fanfare, only to have the fancy new product be a replacement for a base model but not for the customers of their higher-end models.

It's almost like they're unsure of whether this product will actually be any good. So they're intentionally not making a version that would appeal to their best customers. They'll let the less -significant customers act as beta testers for this new product and then release a Pro version when all the kinks are ironed out.


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## anthonymoody

TBH I don't think I'd get one even with 6 tuners and 3TB at this point. My Roamio Plus, upgraded to 3TB, has lifetime service. Two years in, it still works just fine. The new features are meh IMO, and I don't yet have a 4K TV (and if I did I'd use the in-built apps...)

I have a feeling I won't be doing much upgrading until 4K is normalized.


----------



## atmuscarella

DevdogAZ said:


> Technically, you are correct. But if that's really what TiVo intended, this is a very odd marketing move. I don't think I've ever seen a company release a new product with lots of hype and fanfare, only to have the fancy new product be a replacement for a base model but not for the customers of their higher-end models.
> 
> It's almost like they're unsure of whether this product will actually be any good. So they're intentionally not making a version that would appeal to their best customers. They'll let the less -significant customers act as beta testers for this new product and then release a Pro version when all the kinks are ironed out.


Look at the Bolt in the context of attracting "new" customers. Entry level makes senses, 4K & new feature hype makes sense, $300 price with 1yr. service makes sense. I am sure TiVo wouldn't mind all of us buying one too but are we really the target market? And without cable companies wanting a 6 tuner 4K version does it really makes sense for TiVo to make one now? and if TiVo did, does it really make sense for people with Roamio +/Pros to upgrade already?

In reality the Bolt at $300 with 1 year service is cheaper that the Roamio with monthly or annual service was at release and the Bolt is a significant upgrade over the base Roamio. Also there is an OTA only version coming for us OTA only people. It will be interesting to see what they do with that units pricing.


----------



## DevdogAZ

atmuscarella said:


> Look at the Bolt in the context of attracting "new" customers. Entry level makes senses, 4K & new feature hype makes sense, $300 price with 1yr. service makes sense. I am sure TiVo wouldn't mind all of us buying one too but are we really the target market? And without cable companies wanting a 6 tuner 4K version does it really makes sense for TiVo to make one now? and if TiVo did, does it really make sense for people with Roamio +/Pros to upgrade already?
> 
> In reality the Bolt at $300 with 1 year service is cheaper that the Roamio with monthly or annual service was at release and the Bolt is a significant upgrade over the base Roamio. Also there is an OTA only version coming for us OTA only people. It will be interesting to see what they do with that units pricing.


I'm sure all of your points are valid in terms of attracting new customers who want an entry-level solution. I just think it's an odd marketing decision to offer a fancy new product to entry-level customers and then tell customers wanting something higher end that they have to buy a product from the previous generation.

It's not like it would have been a technical problem for them to offer a 6-tuner, 3 TB model. And they could set the price based on the increased cost of the components, so it's not a money issue. So I guess the big question is: Why is TiVo sticking with the Roamio for higher-end solutions when they could very easily just add the option for more tuners and storage to the Bolt and then they could market it to all customers rather than just entry-level customers.


----------



## b_scott

do a lot of people have 4K tvs? Seems like TV's are becoming disposable. Gone are the high end TVs like my Pioneer Kuro. Now everything is an inch thin and disposable.


----------



## DevdogAZ

b_scott said:


> do a lot of people have 4K tvs? Seems like TV's are becoming disposable. Gone are the high end TVs like my Pioneer Kuro. Now everything is an inch thin and disposable.


I think the 4K features are just future proofing. People won't want to spend $300+ on a "one box to rule them all" if it's not going to work with that new TV they hope to buy next year. Other streaming boxes can get away with not offering 4K right now because they're very cheap and don't require monthly fees. But with TiVo, the cost of the box plus the cost of service over the next several years, means they have to offer the most up-to-date features.

Which makes it that much more baffling why they are not be offering a 6-tuner, 3 TB version.


----------



## krkaufman

DevdogAZ said:


> Technically, you are correct. But if that's really what TiVo intended, this is a very odd marketing move. I don't think I've ever seen a company release a new product with lots of hype and fanfare, only to have the fancy new product be a replacement for a base model but not for the customers of their higher-end models.


I think they targeted the base model because its missing features proved troublesome to the overall whole home solution -- primarily absence of MoCA and built-in Stream. I agree that releasing just one model from what many expect to be an overhaul of the whole line seems odd, but it's a good move if it can give customers a better experience than they were getting from the more stripped-down base Roamio.


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## b_scott

DevdogAZ said:


> I think the 4K features are just future proofing. People won't want to spend $300+ on a "one box to rule them all" if it's not going to work with that new TV they hope to buy next year. Other streaming boxes can get away with not offering 4K right now because they're very cheap and don't require monthly fees. But with TiVo, the cost of the box plus the cost of service over the next several years, means they have to offer the most up-to-date features.
> 
> Which makes it that much more baffling why they are not be offering a 6-tuner, 3 TB version.


yeah sorry I was only talking about TVs. Just curious. It's been 7 years since I bought mine.


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## dswallow

I think the 4K component of the Bolt gives TiVo pretty equal footing in the 4K OTT box wars to come, considering everybody basically announced/introduced 4K devices at about the same time. And if the design language is sufficiently common across them then hopefully that'll give some hope we'll see wider integration of OTT video services into TiVo units as well.

So I think that's why we're seeing the Bolt; any higher-end version will come later; getting this device out, especially as a "new customer" device was very important in that scheme.

I do not think TiVo is forgetting the higher end customers or the long-term ones. But this product just isn't for them (us) except in limited circumstances. Obviously they're also choosing to reorganize the subscription aspects, too, and more than the Bolt that's upsetting people here. But I also don't think we really know where that's headed either. I think the initial focus was the new customer, getting the first year service built into the unit cost, simplifying choices up front for new buyers so they aren't all confused till they understand how it works and are hopefully more hooked on it, and then having some breathing room to sort out more of the follow-on details.

And finally, I think that we're basically seeing where most households will be single-point-of-income households, with one device that feeds multiple Mini or similar devices such that TiVo needs to be careful to ensure that revenue stream remains. Before they could probably count on multiple device households bringing up the average household income stream, but as a single device becomes far more sharable, that's something they have to consider.

Now it would be good for them to release a plastic shell you can put the Bolt into so you can have a stackable piece of equipment.


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## krkaufman

DevdogAZ said:


> *It's not like it would have been a technical problem for them to offer a 6-tuner, 3 TB model.* And they could set the price based on the increased cost of the components, so it's not a money issue. So I guess the big question is: Why is TiVo sticking with the Roamio for higher-end solutions when they could very easily just add the option for more tuners and storage to the Bolt and then they could market it to all customers rather than just entry-level customers.


Heh, I think the difficulty they're having getting all the new stuff working with just the one model demonstrates the technical difficulty TiVo would have faced trying to push out another 1-3 model upgrades (Pro, OTA, Mini).

If anything, I would have expected them to put emphasis on getting a 4K-capable Mini out next, so new buyers wouldn't feel short-changed by having to pair non-4K Minis w/ their shiny new 4K secondary TVs. Or maybe that's what they're intending with the FireTV app... let their apps become the client front-end and discontinue the Mini hardware.


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## DevdogAZ

dswallow said:


> So I think that's why we're seeing the Bolt; any higher-end version will come later; getting this device out, especially as a "new customer" device was very important in that scheme.
> 
> I do not think TiVo is forgetting the higher end customers or the long-term ones. But this product just isn't for them (us) except in limited circumstances. Obviously they're also choosing to reorganize the subscription aspects, too, and more than the Bolt that's upsetting people here. But I also don't think we really know where that's headed either. I think the initial focus was the new customer, getting the first year service built into the unit cost, simplifying choices up front for new buyers so they aren't all confused till they understand how it works and are hopefully more hooked on it, and then having some breathing room to sort out more of the follow-on details.


But marketing a new product like Bolt brings new potential customers to TiVo looking to see what the options are. Why make those new potential customers choose between Product A, with the latest and greatest features but limited capacity, or Product B, with greater capacity but none of the new features? As someone said earlier in this thread, that's a Sophie's Choice for potential customers, and may cause people to choose neither. Why not simply offer a version of Product A with the upgraded capacity?


----------



## mem_tiger

For me if they offered a sling app on this box I'd jump on it right away. I'm OTA and don't really like switching inputs to my Roku. I really just hope that the sling app is on the roadmap somewhere.


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## slice1900

aaronwt said:


> The higher quality 4K streams, downscaled to 2K, would be much closer to BD quality than the 2K streams are.


That's not really true. Blu Ray's quality is because of its bit rate, not because it is 1080p. Taking a low bit rate 4K stream (and Netflix's 4K stream is a much lower bit rate than Blu Ray) and viewing it in HD doesn't make it Blu Ray quality. Not even close.

I'm not sure but I'm starting to believe there are licensing restrictions with 4K content (at least studio stuff) that will prevent them ever being downscaled to HD by any device. They require HDCP 2.2, which is not built into any HDTVs, only 4K TVs. I have not seen any device with 4K output that will downscale to HD. If I'm wrong, please point me to such a device.


----------



## atmuscarella

DevdogAZ said:


> Why is TiVo sticking with the Roamio for higher-end solutions when they could very easily just add the option for more tuners and storage to the Bolt and then they could market it to all customers rather than just entry-level customers.


Think cable companies. The Roamio +/pro is the cable T6. It is unlikely that cable companies want or will pay more for a "Bolt +/pro" so TiVo has to keep making (and fully supporting) the Roamio +/pro for them. Add in that most people who wanted a higher end product bought a Roamio +/pro over the last 2 years and you are down to a pretty small market for the "Bolt +/pro" (at least right now).

The minute cable wants a 4K version we will have one and at some point TiVo may believe enough people will upgrade to justify another high end model, just not now. TiVo has allot more data than we do, so I am guessing they understand the market potential for another high end product pretty well. Time will tell.


----------



## atmuscarella

slice1900 said:


> That's not really true. Blu Ray's quality is because of its bit rate, not because it is 1080p. Taking a low bit rate 4K stream (and Netflix's 4K stream is a much lower bit rate than Blu Ray) and viewing it in HD doesn't make it Blu Ray quality. Not even close.
> 
> I'm not sure but I'm starting to believe there are licensing restrictions with 4K content (at least studio stuff) that will prevent them ever being downscaled to HD by any device. They require HDCP 2.2, which is not built into any HDTVs, only 4K TVs. I have not seen any device with 4K output that will downscale to HD. If I'm wrong, please point me to such a device.


We are pretty early on with 4K/UHD pretty hard to point you at any devices. Until we see how UHD Blu-ray players work we won't know for sure. But I would be surprised if they don't auto down scale to 1080p on sets without HDCP 2.2.


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## DevdogAZ

atmuscarella said:


> Think cable companies. The Roamio +/pro is the cable T6. It is unlikely that cable companies want or will pay more for a "Bolt +/pro" so TiVo has to keep making (and fully supporting) the Roamio +/pro for them. Add in that most people who wanted a higher end product bought a Roamio +/pro over the last 2 years and you are down to a pretty small market for the "Bolt +/pro" (at least right now).
> 
> The minute cable wants a 4K version we will have one and at some point TiVo may believe enough people will upgrade to justify another high end model, just not now. TiVo has allot more data than we do, so I am guessing they understand the market potential for another high end product pretty well. Time will tell.


What they offer/support for their cable customers doesn't have to be the same as what they offer to their standalone customers.

And it's very silly for you to assume that anyone who wants a high-end DVR already bought a Roamio. If TiVo acted on those assumptions, then there would be no reason to introduce the Bolt, because everyone who wants a DVR already has one. There are always new consumers entering the market. There are always products breaking. There are always people upgrading their set ups or adding additional TVs. Thus, TiVo should always have a high-end flagship product to offer to their customers. Offering a flagship low-end product or an outdated high-end product is just bass-ackward from a marketing standpoint.


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## aaronwt

slice1900 said:


> That's not really true. Blu Ray's quality is because of its bit rate, not because it is 1080p. Taking a low bit rate 4K stream (and Netflix's 4K stream is a much lower bit rate than Blu Ray) and viewing it in HD doesn't make it Blu Ray quality. Not even close.
> 
> I'm not sure but I'm starting to believe there are licensing restrictions with 4K content (at least studio stuff) that will prevent them ever being downscaled to HD by any device. They require HDCP 2.2, which is not built into any HDTVs, only 4K TVs. I have not seen any device with 4K output that will downscale to HD. If I'm wrong, please point me to such a device.


I never said it would be BD quality. Just much closer to BD quality than the 2k streams. I've seen some of the 4K streams from Netflix. They look much better than the 1080P streams. So downscaled 4K streams would look better than the current 1080P streams. Of course it still wouldn't be BD quality. But it would be closer to it than you get with current 2K streams. Which is the entire reason I would love to have the capabilty to downscale the 4K content from the streaming apps. I don't expect it but it would be a great option.


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## atmuscarella

DevdogAZ said:


> What they offer/support for their cable customers doesn't have to be the same as what they offer to their standalone customers.


If TiVo had enough volume that would be true. But so far they are a fringe product, less than a million total active units in the field (and I believe that includes minis). With small numbers you have to limit the number of models.



DevdogAZ said:


> And it's very silly for you to assume that anyone who wants a high-end DVR already bought a Roamio. If TiVo acted on those assumptions, then there would be no reason to introduce the Bolt, because everyone who wants a DVR already has one. There are always new consumers entering the market. There are always products breaking. There are always people upgrading their set ups or adding additional TVs. Thus, TiVo should always have a high-end flagship product to offer to their customers.


I don't actually disagree with much of what you wrote, but it is a numbers game, and TiVo has the data. Entry level is where you get new customers, high end is for power users. I am sure there are and will continue to be people who want and will pay for a high end 6+ tuner DVR, it just comes down to how many at any point in the refresh cycles.



DevdogAZ said:


> Offering a flagship low-end product or an outdated high-end product is just bass-ackward from a marketing standpoint.


I wouldn't call the Bolt flagship. It is clearly an entry level product. Also calling the Roamio Pro outdated is like calling a BMW several years into it's refresh cycle outdated. That said the way TiVo will deal with the Roamio +/Pro being 2 years into it's refresh cycle is by lowering the price, like they are doing now with 5/10 year loyalty promo, which appears to be $450 for the + & 600 for the Pro both with lifetime. Not sure people would be interest in paying 2X that just to get 4K streaming and a slight increase in speed.


----------



## WebFusion

It still puzzles me how far behind Tivo lags in terms of streaming features.

No HBO Now? No Hulu on launch? No sling TV?

Couple that with their choice to go "form over function" with the ridiculous "arched eyebrow" design that won't fit in with anything else, and I'll be passing on this one and keeping my roamio.

Maybe they'll come out with a "Bolt Pro" in a year or so that is actually competitive, but there's really nothing to see here but a couple of software tweaks and a faster processor (of, and the ability to display 4K content years before that will even be practical or necessary).

Swing and a miss.

Honestly, with their patent money probably running out in the next few years, I don't see how they'll even stay in business without being acquired by one of the major media companies.


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## DevdogAZ

WebFusion said:


> It still puzzles me how far behind Tivo lags in terms of streaming features.
> 
> No HBO Now? No Hulu on launch? No sling TV?


Is that even within TiVo's control? I've always assumed that streaming apps are written by the provider, and what platforms they'll write them for depend largely on the user base of that platform. So if there are 10 million Rokus, then Netflix will put a much higher priority on making a Netflix app for Roku than they will for TiVo, with only a million subscribers (and most using the box exclusively for TV recording).

I'm sure TiVo would be ecstatic to offer a Hulu Pluss app or an HBO Now app at launch. But those content providers probably haven't placed much priority on writing an app for the TiVo platform, due to TiVo's relatively low subscriber base.

What I wonder is what programming language/platform is used for Roku apps and whether all apps on a Roku could be relatively easily ported to TiVo. If so, that would open up a world of possibilities for Bolt.


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## atmuscarella

DevdogAZ said:


> What they offer/support for their cable customers doesn't have to be the same as what they offer to their standalone customers.
> 
> And it's very silly for you to assume that anyone who wants a high-end DVR already bought a Roamio. If TiVo acted on those assumptions, then there would be no reason to introduce the Bolt, because everyone who wants a DVR already has one. There are always new consumers entering the market. There are always products breaking. There are always people upgrading their set ups or adding additional TVs. Thus, TiVo should always have a high-end flagship product to offer to their customers. Offering a flagship low-end product or an outdated high-end product is just bass-ackward from a marketing standpoint.


The intro from Ira Bahr explains allot: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=10651152#post10651152 and Iran Bahr response to Dan covers a little more: http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=10651164#post10651164


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## MikeAndrews

b_scott said:


> do a lot of people have 4K tvs? Seems like TV's are becoming disposable. Gone are the high end TVs like my Pioneer Kuro. Now everything is an inch thin and disposable.


They will. They'll have 4K TVs and continue to watch SD content on it.


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## b_scott

anthonymoody said:


> TBH I don't think I'd get one even with 6 tuners and 3TB at this point. My Roamio Plus, upgraded to 3TB, has lifetime service. Two years in, it still works just fine. The new features are meh IMO, and I don't yet have a 4K TV (and if I did I'd use the in-built apps...)
> 
> I have a feeling I won't be doing much upgrading until 4K is normalized.


I think this is their fear. People buying lifetime and sitting on boxes for 7-10 years. They are still obligated to provide data to them so they can be used, but they get no income from them.


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## krkaufman

b_scott said:


> I think this is their fear. People buying lifetime and sitting on boxes for 7-10 years. They are still obligated to provide data to them so they can be used, but they get no income from them.


Good info from Ira Bahr Q&A, here.


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## Dan203

slice1900 said:


> That's not really true. Blu Ray's quality is because of its bit rate, not because it is 1080p. Taking a low bit rate 4K stream (and Netflix's 4K stream is a much lower bit rate than Blu Ray) and viewing it in HD doesn't make it Blu Ray quality. Not even close.


4K content has lower bitrates because they use HEVC encoding. If BluRays used HEVC they could lower the bitrate by nearly 1/2 and retain the exact same quality. So the fact that Netflix 4K has lower bitrates then current BDs means absolutely nothing in this context.


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## tomhorsley

DevdogAZ said:


> I'm sure TiVo would be ecstatic to offer a Hulu Pluss app or an HBO Now app at launch. But those content providers probably haven't placed much priority on writing an app for the TiVo platform, due to TiVo's relatively low subscriber base.


Which is why TiVo should be running android .


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## Dan203

tomhorsley said:


> Which is why TiVo should be running android .


They're pretty invested in their special version of Linux. I'm betting a transition to Android would be a pretty major overhaul to the whole system. Plus most Android apps aren't remote friendly anyway. Just try side loading them on a Fire TV some time. Most of them don't work at all or only have partial support for remote control navigation.


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## Bierboy

aaronwt said:


> ...I would need to dump the remote and put the Bolt somewhere I can't see it.


Ugh...that is ABSOLUTELY correct. It is downright UGLY.


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## trip1eX

The answer to upgrading for Plus/PRO owners was provided today by Tivo's CMO. Wait for next year when Tivo's solution for enthusiast users comes to market.


----------



## HarperVision

MikeAndrews said:


> They will. They'll have 4K TVs and continue to watch SD content on it.


Yep, they'll buy that shiny new 4K TV at Walmart, Costco or BB and bring it home and plug it in while it's still in the store "torch mode" and "cool" color balance setting and then proceed to be too cheap to pay their cable company for its HD service or worse yet, even standard digital and then hook their cable coax directly to the TV or use an SD cable box via RF coax or composite video and proceed to stretch the crap outta the 4:3 picture all the while complaining to their neighbor Bubba that 4K is no better than HD which wasn't better than SD with their old tube TVs and its all just a marketing gimmick to sell more TVs and outdate their perfectly good Hisense or Orion "flat panel"! 



Dan203 said:


> 4K content has lower bitrates because they use HEVC encoding. If BluRays used HEVC they could lower the bitrate by nearly 1/2 *and retain the exact same quality.* So the fact that Netflix 4K has lower bitrates then current BDs means absolutely nothing in this context.


This is where I disagree. ANY compression will affect the overall quality and never be as good as the original. It has been proven time and time again with the audio model.

I'm not saying there's not a place for it and it's not an awesome thing and the difference is negligible. But blow that compressed image up using a projector or worse yet a 4K one, which is where we are going, and those "little" things not seen on a smaller flat panel become more obvious.

No matter how you slice it, a "sampling" of something will never be the same as "all" of that something.


----------



## tomhorsley

Dan203 said:


> Plus most Android apps aren't remote friendly anyway.


There's an opportunity for real innovation then. A remote with a laser pointer and a a 3 axis accelerometer sensor for position detection, and you've now got a finger long enough to reach the screen from across the room and you've turned your TV into a touchscreen .

Or (probably more sensible, but less innovative), a touch screen remote where you can do your dragging and clicking with a smaller image of the TV screen.


----------



## Bigg

krkaufman said:


> If anything, I would have expected them to put emphasis on getting a 4K-capable Mini out next, so new buyers wouldn't feel short-changed by having to pair non-4K Minis w/ their shiny new 4K secondary TVs.


Who really has more than one 4k TV? And if they do, the built-in apps are just fine anyway with the current Mini.



HarperVision said:


> This is where I disagree. ANY compression will affect the overall quality and never be as good as the original. It has been proven time and time again with the audio model.


Well nothing is uncompressed, so the statement that with HEVC you can reduce bitrates by half relative to H.264 and get the same quality is correct. Just like AAC has the same quality as Mp3 at a higher bitrate.


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## tarheelblue32

tomhorsley said:


> Or (probably more sensible, but less innovative), a touch screen remote where you can do your dragging and clicking with a smaller image of the TV screen.


I think that's called a smartphone.


----------



## HarperVision

Bigg said:


> .......Well nothing is uncompressed, so the statement that with HEVC you can reduce bitrates by half relative to H.264 and get the same quality is correct. Just like AAC has the same quality as Mp3 at a higher bitrate.


I'm not a video engineer that creates these files, but is this not true?:

If you took the original 4K video master and ran it through H.264 compression (meaning: throwing away original picture info), the resulting output quality would be better than H.265/HEVC because it has less compression(meaning: less of the _original_ picture info being discarded compared to H.265/HEVC), although it will be larger than the H.265/HEVC.

If you took the same 4K original and ran it through H.265/HEVC compression, sure it would be a smaller file, but with that added compression(meaning: throwing away even more of the _original_ picture info) there would be more quality loss due to said added compression (meaning: more of the _original_ picture info being discarded!) compared to H.264.


----------



## dswallow

HarperVision said:


> I'm not a video engineer that creates these files, but is this not true?:
> 
> If you took the original 4K video master and ran it through H.264 compression (meaning: throwing away original picture info), the resulting output quality would be better than H.265/HEVC because it has less compression(meaning: less of the _original_ picture info being discarded compared to H.265/HEVC), although it will be larger than the H.265/HEVC.
> 
> If you took the same 4K original and ran it through H.265/HEVC compression, sure it would be a smaller file, but with that added compression(meaning: throwing away even more of the _original_ picture info) there would be more quality loss due to said added compression (meaning: more of the _original_ picture info being discarded!) compared to H.264.


Nope. That's incorrect.

The newer encoding technologies do a better job -- in that the way they encode and compress video, compresses better and retains a visual quality that is better than the older technologies.

Each technology can choose to use a higher compression rate, which provides a correspondingly poorer video quality, in order to create smaller video files/streams.

I'm sure somewhere there's a good side-by-side comparison written with non-techies in mind, probably even with cool graphics. But the simple Wikipedia article does discuss the differences with H.264 and H.265: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding


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## Bigg

HarperVision said:


> I'm not a video engineer that creates these files, but is this not true?:
> 
> If you took the original 4K video master and ran it through H.264 compression (meaning: throwing away original picture info), the resulting output quality would be better than H.265/HEVC because it has less compression(meaning: less of the _original_ picture info being discarded compared to H.265/HEVC), although it will be larger than the H.265/HEVC.
> 
> If you took the same 4K original and ran it through H.265/HEVC compression, sure it would be a smaller file, but with that added compression(meaning: throwing away even more of the _original_ picture info) there would be more quality loss due to said added compression (meaning: more of the _original_ picture info being discarded!) compared to H.264.


No. You have no clue what you're talking about. You're completely ignoring the fundamental concept of compression and different codecs. You throw away more of the picture if you're lowering the bitrate using a given compression scheme. HEVC is approximately twice as efficient as H.264, which is approximately twice as efficient as MPEG-2.

The discussion above was H.264 at one bitrate, let's call it 10mbps, and HEVC at half that, let's call it 5mbps. The quality should be the same, since HEVC is twice as efficient as H.264. Conversely, you could get the same quality with MPEG-2 at 20mbps. Or, at the same bitrate, HEVC should look WAY better than H.264, because it's more efficient.

It's more nuanced than that since each degrades differently and has different types of artifacts that show up, and they may not be exactly 50% more efficient, but that's the jist of it.


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## Bierboy

innocentfreak said:


> I don't have plans for 4k anytime soon since I am happy with my Plasma TV...


Call me an old fart (please), but I see no need for 4K either. My Panny plasma is just fine, thank you very much...


----------



## mulscully

Me personally, Fundamentally what killed the Bolt for me right now was 4 tuners. Smaller HD can be easily fixed with an HD upgrade, but I can't upgrade the tuners.. Might get one in the future if there is a 6 tuner version but just pulled the trigger on a Roamio Plus w/lifetime for $450 so no Bolt for me anytime soon....


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## tomhorsley

tarheelblue32 said:


> I think that's called a smartphone.


Yea, but you'd need something like reverse miracast to get the TV screen onto the phone .


----------



## foghorn2

Bierboy said:


> Call me an old fart (please), but I see no need for 4K either. My Panny plasma is just fine, thank you very much...


Exactly, I have a panny and sammy, wouldn't touch a 4k with any sized pole.
4K, 3D- all a bunch of nonsense.


----------



## lessd

foghorn2 said:


> Exactly, I have a panny and sammy, wouldn't touch a 4k with any sized pole.
> 4K, 3D- all a bunch of nonsense.


In a few years you will not be able to get less than a 4K HDTV (except ones under 20")


----------



## innocentfreak

lessd said:


> In a few years you will not be able to get less than a 4K HDTV (except ones under 20")


Doesn't mean he will have to buy a new set though unless something happens to his. There are people still with Kuro TVs. I just bought my Samsung Plasma this past year so it should definitely last me until something can rival Plasma. I only upgraded my set since Panasonic was out of the game and Samsung was leaving also.


----------



## atmuscarella

lessd said:


> In a few years you will not be able to get less than a 4K HDTV (except ones under 20")


Agree and if you want a top of the line TV now it will be 4K.  I have a plasma I am happy with but if it crapped out tomorrow it would be replaced with a 4K TV - hopefully that doesn't happen for a few years


----------



## HarperVision

dswallow said:


> Nope. That's incorrect. The newer encoding technologies do a better job -- in that the way they encode and compress video, compresses better and retains a visual quality that is better than the older technologies. Each technology can choose to use a higher compression rate, which provides a correspondingly poorer video quality, in order to create smaller video files/streams. I'm sure somewhere there's a good side-by-side comparison written with non-techies in mind, probably even with cool graphics. But the simple Wikipedia article does discuss the differences with H.264 and H.265: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding





Bigg said:


> No. You have no clue what you're talking about. You're completely ignoring the fundamental concept of compression and different codecs. You throw away more of the picture if you're lowering the bitrate using a given compression scheme. HEVC is approximately twice as efficient as H.264, which is approximately twice as efficient as MPEG-2. The discussion above was H.264 at one bitrate, let's call it 10mbps, and HEVC at half that, let's call it 5mbps. The quality should be the same, since HEVC is twice as efficient as H.264. Conversely, you could get the same quality with MPEG-2 at 20mbps. Or, at the same bitrate, HEVC should look WAY better than H.264, because it's more efficient. It's more nuanced than that since each degrades differently and has different types of artifacts that show up, and they may not be exactly 50% more efficient, but that's the jist of it.


Yeah that makes sense now at you guys explain the process more. It's been awhile since I messed with these things and there's so many new codecs and processes since I did. Plus my old Lyme infested brain doesn't process this stuff the same way anymore.


----------



## aaronwt

lessd said:


> In a few years you will not be able to get less than a 4K HDTV (except ones under 20")


I don't see why. You can still by 720P TVs. I don't think 1080P TVs will disappear that quickly.

I just wish the larger UHD TVs would quickly come down in price. I can't go to a smaller size in my main setup so the absolute smallest UHD TV I would get would be 84". And right now those sizes are still very high in cost. Ideally I would like a 90" set. If I could go to projection I would. But no projector out there is quiet enough to be mounted above my head, without me going crazy from the noise.


----------



## 6tunersorbust

1. Bigger default hard drive. 500GB today is ridiculous, and only having a 1GB option (and having it cost $100 for that extra 500GB) is even more so. It should start at least at 1TB (and really 2TB) and have a 3TB option.

2. Stop trying to hide the service cost in the price. I don't want to pay for a year, I want lifetime from the beginning. This was the boneheadiest of the boneheaded decisions made on this product. Oh, and bring MSD back.

3. Six tuners. There's no reason to penalize antenna-only people.

I'm still on an old Series 3, because every time Tivo has come out with a new model, the important things have been WORSE, not better. Weaker tuners, more expensive, no real progress in hard drives in seven years. (The base offering is just twice what it was seven years ago. Twice? It should be ten times.)


----------



## 6tunersorbust

1. Bigger default hard drive. 500GB today is ridiculous, and only having a 1GB option (and having it cost $100 for that extra 500GB) is even more so. It should start at least at 1TB (and really 2TB) and have a 3TB option.

2. Stop trying to hide the service cost in the price. I don't want to pay for a year, I want lifetime from the beginning. This was the boneheadiest of the boneheaded decisions made on this product. Oh, and bring MSD back.

3. Six tuners. There's no reason to penalize antenna-only people.

I'm still on an old Series 3, because every time Tivo has come out with a new model, the important things have been WORSE, not better. Weaker tuners, more expensive, no real progress in hard drives in seven years. (The base offering is just twice what it was seven years ago. Twice? It should be ten times.)


----------



## Bigg

6tunersorbust said:


> 3. Six tuners. There's no reason to penalize antenna-only people.


Antenna-only people don't watch a lot of TV in the first place, and only have basically 5 channels to record from, so there is no reason for them to have 6 tuners. Cable and FIOS customers with 100+ HD channels have a good reason to have that many.


----------



## aaronwt

6tunersorbust said:


> 1. Bigger default hard drive. 500GB today is ridiculous, and only having a 1GB option (and having it cost $100 for that extra 500GB) is even more so. It should start at least at 1TB (and really 2TB) and have a 3TB option.
> 
> 2. Stop trying to hide the service cost in the price. I don't want to pay for a year, I want lifetime from the beginning. This was the boneheadiest of the boneheaded decisions made on this product. Oh, and bring MSD back.
> 
> 3. Six tuners. There's no reason to penalize antenna-only people.
> 
> I'm still on an old Series 3, because every time Tivo has come out with a new model, the important things have been WORSE, not better. Weaker tuners, more expensive, no real progress in hard drives in seven years. (The base offering is just twice what it was seven years ago. Twice? It should be ten times.)


Weaker tuners. My 2006 S3 boxes picked up the same channels as my 2004 DirecTV HD TiVos. Which picked up the same channels as my 2001 ATSC HiPix cards. And then my Premiere also picks up the same channels and my Roamio Basic picks up the same channels.


----------



## aaronwt

Bigg said:


> Antenna-only people don't watch a lot of TV in the first place, and only have basically 5 channels to record from, so there is no reason for them to have 6 tuners. Cable and FIOS customers with 100+ HD channels have a good reason to have that many.


I have dozens of channels/sub-channels to choose from around here. Personally if I only recorded from OTA, I would have conflicts on a daily basis with only four tuners. With no cable I would be recording much, much more from the local stations than I do now.


----------



## b_scott

krkaufman said:


> Good info from Ira Bahr Q&A, here.


hey look I was right.


----------



## krkaufman

aaronwt said:


> I have dozens of channels/sub-channels to choose from around here. Personally if I only recorded from OTA, I would have conflicts on a daily basis with only four tuners. With no cable I would be recording much, much more from the local stations than I do now.


36 OTA sub-channels of interest in suburban Chicago; just 9 downstate.

So even the OTA-capable models would benefit from the ability to add a couple additional OTA tuners (via USB or networked), should the built-in 4 tuners not be sufficient for the locale.


----------



## Bigg

aaronwt said:


> I have dozens of channels/sub-channels to choose from around here. Personally if I only recorded from OTA, I would have conflicts on a daily basis with only four tuners. With no cable I would be recording much, much more from the local stations than I do now.


The subchannels are mostly just junk. You are a very extreme user. For all practical purposes, there is no reason to have an OTA TiVo with more than 4 tuners.


----------



## b_scott

Bigg said:


> The subchannels are mostly just junk. You are a very extreme user. For all practical purposes, there is no reason to have an OTA TiVo with more than 4 tuners.


^this. aaron is never indicative of an average user. 

I have two 2-tuner premieres and a medium-high cable package and I almost never have a thing I can't record.


----------



## gespears

First, where is all this "Hype" I've been reading about. I may be sheltered, but I didn't see ANY hype. It looks to me like they had a deadline to get out a new product and dumped this thing out primarily to use it as a test bed for the real new products that are coming out in a year or so. And given TiVo's record of letting things go before they are really tested well, this may be a good idea.


Secondly, regarding my feelings on the Bolt: "Move along folks, there is nothing to see here."


----------



## foghorn2

I hope they don't make a brown version of the Bolt. I measured that tilt/angle and its exactly the same angle things have in a toilet bowl when longer things don't fit quite right in em. 

I also recommend getting one of these to make it look normal:


----------



## slice1900

Dan203 said:


> 4K content has lower bitrates because they use HEVC encoding. If BluRays used HEVC they could lower the bitrate by nearly 1/2 and retain the exact same quality. So the fact that Netflix 4K has lower bitrates then current BDs means absolutely nothing in this context.


Yes true, but the difference goes way beyond that (and while HEVC's _goal_ is to be able to lower the bitrate by half at the same quality, it isn't there yet...that will take a few years yet)

Blu Ray can have MPEG4 bit rates of 40 Mbps or higher. Netflix's 4K is about 15 Mbps, which with current quality of HEVC encoders is not much more than half that of Blu Ray.


----------



## aaronwt

b_scott said:


> ^this. aaron is never indicative of an average user.
> 
> I have two 2-tuner premieres and a medium-high cable package and I almost never have a thing I can't record.


My GF is OTA only and uses two, S3(OLED) TiVos. She is using several tuners concurrently to record on a regular basis.

And then I end up recording a bunch of stuff for her off cable. I just handed her five discs today, with ten Lifetime movies on them that had recorded over the past week.


----------



## tomhorsley

foghorn2 said:


> I hope they don't make a brown version of the Bolt.


I was trying to imagine how they could make the case for the "pro" version look even worse when it comes out, and my thought was they could take a casting of a big old elephant dung and use that as a shape for the case, painting it brown.

Other than that, I haven't come up with any better ideas for making a worse looking case .


----------



## JWhites

What would it take for me to upgrade? It being given to me free.


----------



## jonw747

Bigg said:


> The subchannels are mostly just junk. You are a very extreme user. For all practical purposes, there is no reason to have an OTA TiVo with more than 4 tuners.


As long as there are more than 4 OTA channels, there's is most definitely a purpose to having more than 4 tuners. Maybe not you, maybe not me, but somebody must be watching those channels, don't you think?


----------



## Bigg

b_scott said:


> ^this. aaron is never indicative of an average user.
> 
> I have two 2-tuner premieres and a medium-high cable package and I almost never have a thing I can't record.


Yup! His network is really freaking impressive too. He's got like 50+ devices on it. I only got to 20 or 30 with 3 roommates and all of their crap!



aaronwt said:


> My GF is OTA only and uses two, S3(OLED) TiVos. She is using several tuners concurrently to record on a regular basis.
> 
> And then I end up recording a bunch of stuff for her off cable. I just handed her five discs today, with ten Lifetime movies on them that had recorded over the past week.


You two are made for each other. Both TV addicts I see. 



jonw747 said:


> As long as there are more than 4 OTA channels, there's is most definitely a purpose to having more than 4 tuners. Maybe not you, maybe not me, but somebody must be watching those channels, don't you think?


Probably not all at once! Heck, most people don't need more than 4 tuners with 100+ HD channels in their cable package. That's actually an interesting point though. It's amazing that someone watches those garbage channels. I wish the networks would all switch back to a single 19mbps channel, as HD would actually look like HD again. The subchannels would, in most cases, be no loss. There is a halfway decent PBS subchannel that my TiVo picks up occasionally, other than that, all of them here are garbage.


----------



## SC0TLANDF0REVER

wizwor said:


> ...Very disappointed to see the Lifetime option disappear for the Roamios and outright SHOCKED at the new Lifetime prices.
> 
> The only way I would upgrade (or even replace) would be to get a good deal on a Lifetime bundle at some future time.


You almost gave me a heart attack thinking they took this away. They re-named it, it's now called the 'All-In Plan upgrade rate (which currently is $599.99, plus any applicable taxes).'


----------



## krkaufman

jonw747 said:


> As long as there are more than 4 OTA channels, there's is most definitely a purpose to having more than 4 tuners.


And if one feels the need to pre- or post-pad recordings, you're suddenly looking at, effectively, a 2-tuner TiVo.

Further, there *is* less to record off OTA TV; however, networks tend to broadcast their best shows to compete for the best timeslots, leaving your TiVo jumping from bored one night to overtaxed the next.


----------



## jonw747

Bigg said:


> Probably not all at once! Heck, most people don't need more than 4 tuners with 100+ HD channels in their cable package. That's actually an interesting point though. It's amazing that someone watches those garbage channels. I wish the networks would all switch back to a single 19mbps channel, as HD would actually look like HD again. The subchannels would, in most cases, be no loss. There is a halfway decent PBS subchannel that my TiVo picks up occasionally, other than that, all of them here are garbage.


We can't control scheduling, though, and the networks far too often pit their best shows against each other to try to win the time slot. Given a family may be sharing the TiVo, it's simply not inconceivable that between the 4 major networks, PBS, CW, and some of the other smaller networks that may be of interest for re-running old shows, or for local/international coverage that all tuners could be put to use.

Plus if someone's only source of television was OTA, they may very well want to make the most of it.

In my area, it's possible to receive both Washington and Baltimore OTA stations. At 8PM tonight, here's some of the shows that are available (at least the ones I actually recognize):

Dancing with the Stars
Spin City
Bernie Mac
The Voice
Hart to Hard
Gotham
Let's Make a Deal
Andy Griffith
Big Bang Theory
Alaska State Troopers
Entertainment Tonight
M*A*S*H
Family Feud
Masterpiece Classic
Masterpeice Mystery
Law & Order: SVU
Walker, Texas Ranger
Antiques Roadshow
Newsline
Penn & Teller: Fool us
The Jeffersons
Criminal Minds
Raising Hope
World News

That's 21 different programs that could interest multiple members of a family depending on taste. Plus thanks to minis, some may decide to watch some of those live.

More tuners is definitely a good thing. The question is ... at what cost.


----------



## jonw747

krkaufman said:


> And if one feels the need to pre- or post-pad recordings, you're suddenly looking at, effectively, a 2-tuner TiVo.
> 
> Further, there *is* less to record off OTA TV; however, networks tend to broadcast their best shows to compete for the best timeslots, leaving your TiVo jumping from bored one night to overtaxed the next.


Yes, I was surprised to hear that TiVo doesn't handle padding better. I think it was my DirectTv HR20 that would handle padded shows with a single tuner if they were back to back on the same station. It would also auto-pad all shows by like 5 minutes if it didn't create a conflict.


----------



## NashGuy

Dan203 said:


> They're pretty invested in their special version of Linux. I'm betting a transition to Android would be a pretty major overhaul to the whole system. Plus most Android apps aren't remote friendly anyway. Just try side loading them on a Fire TV some time. Most of them don't work at all or only have partial support for remote control navigation.


You may be right that it would be a major overhaul, although I wonder if TiVo couldn't run a forked version of Android as a virtualized OS on top of what they already have, or some other solution that would add Android compatibility as middleware without messing with the existing underlying codebase they already have for core DVR functionality and HTML5 app compatibility?

I think the advantage of doing that wouldn't be so that users could somehow side load Android mobile apps onto their TiVo but so that developers could very easily port their existing Fire TV and Android TV apps (which are developed for lean-back TV use with remote control navigation) over to TiVo with very little tweaking. Pretty much all the major streaming video apps missing from TiVo (HBO Go/Now, Showtime/Showtime Anytime, Sling TV, WatchESPN, Crackle, Epix, etc.) are available on one or both of those platforms. I'm growing less optimistic that we'll ever see those services develop HTML5 apps for TiVo. To my knowledge, none of them have ever ported their apps to any HTML5 platform so far.

As Ira Bahr pointed out in the recent Q&A, the main reason TiVo lags so far behind in apps is because developers have to spend extra time developing for TiVo and, given its relatively small install base, it comes far down the pecking order in terms of priority (after Apple, Roku, Amazon Fire, Android, Chromecast, Xbox, Playstation, Samsung Smart TV, etc.).


----------



## jonw747

NashGuy said:


> You may be right that it would be a major overhaul, although I wonder if TiVo couldn't run a forked version of Android as a virtualized OS on top of what they already have, or some other solution that would add Android compatibility as middleware without messing with the existing underlying codebase they already have for core DVR functionality and HTML5 app compatibility?


I still think they should offer an option of a licensed and integrated Roku streaming solution. It would surely be far less complex than supporting Android, and it would be more agnostic towards the providers.

I haven't used my Roku in years (prefer Fire TV), but a company like TiVo shouldn't get caught in the content struggle between Amazon, Google, and Apple (unless they get bought up by one of them).


----------



## trip1eX

jonw747 said:


> We can't control scheduling, though, and the networks far too often pit their best shows against each other to try to win the time slot. Given a family may be sharing the TiVo, it's simply not inconceivable that between the 4 major networks, PBS, CW, and some of the other smaller networks that may be of interest for re-running old shows, or for local/international coverage that all tuners could be put to use.
> 
> Plus if someone's only source of television was OTA, they may very well want to make the most of it.
> 
> In my area, it's possible to receive both Washington and Baltimore OTA stations. At 8PM tonight, here's some of the shows that are available (at least the ones I actually recognize):
> 
> Dancing with the Stars
> Spin City
> Bernie Mac
> The Voice
> Hart to Hard
> Gotham
> Let's Make a Deal
> Andy Griffith
> Big Bang Theory
> Alaska State Troopers
> Entertainment Tonight
> M*A*S*H
> Family Feud
> Masterpiece Classic
> Masterpeice Mystery
> Law & Order: SVU
> Walker, Texas Ranger
> Antiques Roadshow
> Newsline
> Penn & Teller: Fool us
> The Jeffersons
> Criminal Minds
> Raising Hope
> World News
> 
> That's 21 different programs that could interest multiple members of a family depending on taste. Plus thanks to minis, some may decide to watch some of those live.
> 
> More tuners is definitely a good thing. The question is ... at what cost.


Exctly. Tivo needs to have a 150+ tuner dvr for those with cabletv.


----------



## dswallow

trip1eX said:


> Exctly. Tivo needs to have a 150+ tuner dvr for those with cabletv.


Cable Networks do something the traditional broadcast networks rarely do: repeat new episodes of series often, sometimes even across multiple channels, in the weeks immediately following the first air date. This dramatically reduces the conflicts that can't be resolved by fewer tuners. To some extent you could say those relying solely on traditional broadcast networks generally need more tuners to be able to capture the recordings they may desire.


----------



## wco81

I just re-upped with Comcast for 2 years instead of switching to DirecTV, partly because of my Roamio.

Bolt streams 4K from Netflix but obviously doesn't record 4K since there are no 4K channels being broadcast yet.

If 4K channels become a thing, that's when I would want a DVR upgrade capable of recording 4K channels.

Otherwise, I presume you can get all the 4K content that this Bolt offers elsewhere, that is there will be boxes with Netflix and Amazon apps. which can stream 4K.

And these boxes will be cheaper and/or offer other fuctionality like playing UHD Blu Rays.


----------



## aaronwt

wco81 said:


> I just re-upped with Comcast for 2 years instead of switching to DirecTV, partly because of my Roamio.
> 
> Bolt streams 4K from Netflix but obviously doesn't record 4K since there are no 4K channels being broadcast yet.
> 
> If 4K channels become a thing, that's when I would want a DVR upgrade capable of recording 4K channels.
> 
> Otherwise, I presume you can get all the 4K content that this Bolt offers elsewhere, that is there will be boxes with Netflix and Amazon apps. which can stream 4K.
> 
> And these boxes will be cheaper and/or offer other fuctionality like playing UHD Blu Rays.


Other devices will need to decode HEVC and VP9. The Bolt has this capabilty but the new FireTV doesn't. It looks like it just decodes HEVC. Youtube currently uses VP9 and more providers might follow. Because of the 0.5% royalties the HEVC group wants from the streaming providers.(which supposedly would translate to over 100 million from providers like Netflix, Facebook etc.


----------



## trip1eX

dswallow said:


> Cable Networks do something the traditional broadcast networks rarely do: repeat new episodes of series often, sometimes even across multiple channels, in the weeks immediately following the first air date. This dramatically reduces the conflicts that can't be resolved by fewer tuners. To some extent you could say those relying solely on traditional broadcast networks generally need more tuners to be able to capture the recordings they may desire.


But what if there is content on all the cable channels at the same time that someone in some household could possibly want to watch?

well someone somewhere needs at least 1 tuner for every channel then. Thus the 150+ tuner Tivo.

And btw, cable includes the networks. It also includes plenty of programming like sports that isn't repeated. And many people want to time shift tv, not wait for it to be repeated days later.

Also given the sheer number of cable channels compared to just 4 networks means that, even if content is repeated, you're still looking at a spectacularly high number of tuners needed for a cable dvr.

Plus what if half of the Duggar family are watching live tv and all of their 1327 OnePasses have padding to ensure nothing is missed? 150 tuners is a minimum I say!!!!! Otherwise it is just bad business to leave someone out in the cold.

I'm looking forward to seeing the 150+ tuner UltraMega Tivo Bolt next to the 25 tuner Tivo Aero Bolt on the shoe-level shelf at Best Buy by summer 2016.


----------



## wco81

Presumably there will be a lot of devices which play back 4K streams, including 4K TVs which will have apps to access those streams.

If the broadcast networks air 4K programming, cable channels will follow and there will need to be DVRs which can record that content.

It's good that TiVo is continuing to develop hardware. Right after the release of the Roamios, they let some engineers go. There's always a question of whether the aftermarket for DVRs is big enough to sustain continued development.

You figure with cable and satellite improving their DVRs and with cord cutting, Tivos niche is getting smaller and smaller.


----------



## krkaufman

dswallow said:


> Cable Networks do something the traditional broadcast networks rarely do: repeat new episodes of series often, sometimes even across multiple channels, in the weeks immediately following the first air date. This dramatically reduces the conflicts that can't be resolved by fewer tuners. To some extent you could say those relying solely on traditional broadcast networks generally need more tuners to be able to capture the recordings they may desire.


Exactly!! Which is why we (and many here) prioritize their network-based programs at the top of the OnePass Manager, since they only air ONCE, while putting most cable-based shows lower in the OnePass Manager, since they often have repeat airings either later that night, overnight or the next evening.

Without the re-airings, I'm not sure how many tuners we'd need -- I just know it'd be a whole lot more than 6. (And I'd have to kiss padding goodbye.)


----------



## NashGuy

wco81 said:


> If the broadcast networks air 4K programming, cable channels will follow and there will need to be DVRs which can record that content.


UHD (4K) is part of the new ATSC 3.0 over-the-air (OTA) broadcast standard currently in development. There were trial broadcasts of UHD in Cleveland (I think) earlier this year, not for the public, solely for engineers working on ATSC 3.0. From what I've read, we shouldn't expect there to be UHD OTA broadcasts and consumer-available ATSC 3.0 tuners capable of receiving them until 2018 at the soonest. Maybe more like 2020.

It's hard to imagine ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox producing UHD broadcasts and delivering them directly to cable and satellite subscribers (essentially acting as pay networks) but NOT to their local OTA affiliates across the country; it would be a total disruption of the way broadcast TV works in the US. Therefore, I don't see the four most popular networks in the US offering UHD versions until sometime in the 2018-2020 time frame.

At the same time, it's hard to imagine most cable channels, which have much lower overall viewership than the big 4 broadcast nets, going UHD first. It would be a strange situation if we could watch season 8 of Rizzoli & Isles on "TNT 4K" but couldn't watch the Super Bowl in UHD on ABC. But who knows, maybe we see a few of the most popular pay channels (I'd say HBO, Showtime and ESPN being most likely) go UHD in the next few years before the big 4 broadcast nets do, followed then by less popular cable channels (Discovery, FX, USA, Fox News, AMC, etc.) in UHD. And then there's still the bigger question of whether cable systems stick with QAM transmission for UHD channels when they begin offering them or if they offer them via some kind of IPTV system. Perhaps there will be a long transition period where cable set-top boxes have QAM tuners for legacy HD and SD channels and the ability to access IP "channels" for UHD and on-demand. Who knows, all speculation. Anyhow,* if it happens to work out in the future that you can use your Bolt to record UHD cable channels, great, but don't buy one expecting that it will work out that way. For the foreseeable future, expect all UHD/4K you view on your Bolt to come through streaming apps.*


----------



## DevdogAZ

I won't be at all surprised if the ATSC 3.0 standard requires upgraded HDMI and HDCP standards as well, meaning that today's 4K TVs as well as the Bolt wouldn't be able to access those signals anyway.


----------



## jonw747

trip1eX said:


> well someone somewhere needs at least 1 tuner for every channel then. Thus the 150+ tuner Tivo.


Well, when 150+ tuner cable card cost only $5/mon to rent and hard drives which can handle recording and storing 150 simultaneous streams cost $220, I'll be sure to ask for it.

Or we could achieve the same thing if there was a true on-demand content provider that let us watch what we want to watch when we want to watch it without commercials.

The whole idea of recording programs is really anachronistic.


----------



## jonw747

DevdogAZ said:


> I won't be at all surprised if the ATSC 3.0 standard requires upgraded HDMI and HDCP standards as well, meaning that today's 4K TVs as well as the Bolt wouldn't be able to access those signals anyway.


Think so? The FCC has traditionally taken a stand against protected content on the "public" airwaves, but this is something I haven't followed.


----------



## ADG

Not a holdout, just no reason to get a Bolt at this time. I have 2 Roamios (one is a +), an Elite + and 2 S3's. Simply don't need another Tivo and certainly not one with fewer tuners than my current primary box. There are no features that it offers that are of interest to me other than the commercial skip, and I'm not buying a new unit just for that


----------



## DevdogAZ

jonw747 said:


> Think so? The FCC has traditionally taken a stand against protected content on the "public" airwaves, but this is something I haven't followed.


There was already a long delay in finalizing the standards for HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2 that are required for streaming 4K content between devices. I can't imagine that 3 to 5 years from now, when 4K broadcasts are about to begin, the content owners will be content with a standard that is then 3-5 years old and has probably been cracked.


----------



## krkaufman

jonw747 said:


> The whole idea of recording programs is really anachronistic.


It's definitely getting there. XOD4TiVo sure would be a lot more useful if there weren't a single-session limitation, and if it were more reliable -- and Comcast didn't own NBC, so CBS would be more amenable to their content being made available via Xfinity VOD, etc.


----------



## Bigg

jonw747 said:


> That's 21 different programs that could interest multiple members of a family depending on taste. Plus thanks to minis, some may decide to watch some of those live.


A) You've got bigger problems if you're watching THAT much TV, and B) Alaska State Troopers is a cable show, not OTA.



jonw747 said:


> I still think they should offer an option of a licensed and integrated Roku streaming solution.


That would be awesome, but a bit awkward for both companies. And how would it integrate into the TiVo software?



aaronwt said:


> Other devices will need to decode HEVC and VP9. The Bolt has this capabilty but the new FireTV doesn't. It looks like it just decodes HEVC. Youtube currently uses VP9 and more providers might follow. Because of the 0.5% royalties the HEVC group wants from the streaming providers.(which supposedly would translate to over 100 million from providers like Netflix, Facebook etc.


The question is, how much better is HEVC? Even a small improvement over VP9, and it pays for itself many times over. Also, large consumers of anything never pay full price for it, except for commodities, which HEVC is definitely not, so you can be guaranteed that Amazon and Netflix aren't paying that full 0.5% royalty, or they have bookkeeping methods to minimize that cost.



NashGuy said:


> It's hard to imagine ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox producing UHD broadcasts and delivering them directly to cable and satellite subscribers (essentially acting as pay networks) but NOT to their local OTA affiliates across the country; it would be a total disruption of the way broadcast TV works in the US. Therefore, I don't see the four most popular networks in the US offering UHD versions until sometime in the 2018-2020 time frame.


No. That wouldn't be a major disruption of anything. DirecTV already gets a better feed than OTA does in most markets. Increasing the resolution doesn't fundamentally change the programming, and they know that the vast majority of high-value customers have DirecTV or cable anyway. The bigger issue is the broad variety of content that they play, most of which won't be available in 4k for a long time to come. ESPN and movie channels are the first adopters of 4k, ESPN because they have a ton of money and produce a lot of their own content, and movie channels because there are a ton of movies already out there scanned at 4k or higher. DirecTV is ready for 4k, they are already pushing 4k STBs out.



> At the same time, it's hard to imagine most cable channels, which have much lower overall viewership than the big 4 broadcast nets, going UHD first.


ESPN, and a movie channel. And then it will grow from there. Most existing cable channels won't go 4k in the foreseeable future. But a few will, or we could end up with another channel like HDNet, where it's not available in HD or SD, only 4k, probably a mostly movie channel with existing 4k movies.



> And then there's still the bigger question of whether cable systems stick with QAM transmission for UHD channels when they begin offering them or if they offer them via some kind of IPTV system. Perhaps there will be a long transition period where cable set-top boxes have QAM tuners for legacy HD and SD channels and the ability to access IP "channels" for UHD and on-demand. Who knows, all speculation. Anyhow,* if it happens to work out in the future that you can use your Bolt to record UHD cable channels, great, but don't buy one expecting that it will work out that way. For the foreseeable future, expect all UHD/4K you view on your Bolt to come through streaming apps.*


That is the bigger question, and I'd agree with that assessment of the Bolt. We just don't know how cable will handle it, and it's at least a year off anyway, as DirecTV will most likely be first to market by at least 6 months of linear 4k content.


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## slice1900

NashGuy said:


> From what I've read, we shouldn't expect there to be UHD OTA broadcasts and consumer-available ATSC 3.0 tuners capable of receiving them until 2018 at the soonest. Maybe more like 2020.


It'll be way longer than that. ATSC 3.0 is not even finalized yet, that is at least a year away. Then you have to have make chips able to receive it, so that a future Bolt OTA will actually be useful for receiving 4K programming (the one you can buy today cannot receive ATSC 3.0 and that isn't something it can get via a software upgrade)

There's no way stations will just switch over to broadcasting ATSC 3.0 and orphan the hundreds of millions of TVs, Tivo and other devices that have a ATSC 1.0 tuner, and there's no bandwidth for them to be able to broadcast both ATSC 1.0 and 3.0 channels even if that were free (and it isn't, it would cost millions)

A few markets may see a few stations go ATSC 3.0 and broadcasting 4K by 2020, but the majority of the country won't have it even by 2025. Maybe cable customers will get 4K locals, if the FCC allows them to provide 4K feeds to them even when they are only broadcasting HD.


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## NashGuy

Bigg said:


> No. That wouldn't be a major disruption of anything. DirecTV already gets a better feed than OTA does in most markets.


Um, please explain. In my market, I can GUARANTEE you that the DirecTV HD feeds of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS, etc. are not better than the OTA feeds. I left DirecTV earlier this year and was switching back and forth between it and the OTA channels using my TV's tuner. In every case, the OTA feed was better or equal to the DirecTV feed. In no case was the OTA feed lower in HD PQ.

And how could the DirecTV feed be better? They were obviously carrying the signal from my local stations (complete with local news, local station bugs on primetime networking programming, local commercials). It never appeared to me that DirecTV was carrying some generic national feed of the broadcast networks rather than my local stations. So are you saying that local stations from all of the country are uplinking a satellite feed of their programming to DirecTV that is superior to the feed which they have encoded for transmitting from their own broadcast towers to local OTA viewers? That may very well be happening but I've never heard of such. It seems to me that's the only possible way that PQ could be superior on satellite than via OTA.

And even if that is happening, I can't possibly imagine local affiliates passing along a UHD feed to satellite/cable systems when they aren't even broadcasting such from their towers. They absolutely weren't doing that during the SD-to-HD transition some years back. If your local ABC affiliate wasn't broadcasting in HD yet, you didn't get to see ABC programming in HD, regardless of whether you watched that affiliate OTA, on cable, or on satellite.


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## trip1eX

jonw747 said:


> .
> 
> The whole idea of recording programs is really anachronistic.


Well I'm with you there. We definitely are heading towards on demand. Seems like just a matter of when not if.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## razor237

Does the commercial skip feature work on content i stream from my Roamio dvr? i could have 10 tuners and call it a day lol. Kinda messed up they didnt add those features to the roamio but guess no one would buy the Bolt still sucks


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## zerdian1

hefe said:


> If I didn't have a Roamio, I might upgrade. But since I do, there's nothing of interest here.


I have 5 Roams 2 PROs, 1 Basic, and 2 Minis.
The 2 PROs are on Lifetime.
I was going to replace the basic with a BOLT but it had to be greater than 6 tuners and 3TV and get a lifetime on the last DVR I plan to have for about 5 years.. 
The lifetime is almost double what I wanted to spend.I will wait.
I have bought 5 Roamios in last 12 months.


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## Jonathan_S

NashGuy said:


> Um, please explain. In my market, I can GUARANTEE you that the DirecTV HD feeds of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS, etc. are not better than the OTA feeds. I left DirecTV earlier this year and was switching back and forth between it and the OTA channels using my TV's tuner. In every case, the OTA feed was better or equal to the DirecTV feed. In no case was the OTA feed lower in HD PQ.
> 
> And how could the DirecTV feed be better? They were obviously carrying the signal from my local stations (complete with local news, local station bugs on primetime networking programming, local commercials). It never appeared to me that DirecTV was carrying some generic national feed of the broadcast networks rather than my local stations. So are you saying that local stations from all of the country are uplinking a satellite feed of their programming to DirecTV that is superior to the feed which they have encoded for transmitting from their own broadcast towers to local OTA viewers? That may very well be happening but I've never heard of such. It seems to me that's the only possible way that PQ could be superior on satellite than via OTA.


In many, but not all, markets DirecTV receives a direct line (or direct microwave) feed from the local station's broadcast studio to DirecTV's uplink facilities.

Especially in the old analog days this could allow DirecTV's version of local stations to usually look better than the version you could pull in from an antenna as the signal traveled a shorter and better shielded distance as analog before being converted to digital.

In the HD era I don't know whether DirecTV receives the final compressed mpeg2 from the local station, or an uncompressed (or less compressed) feed. Obviously if they're receiving the final mpeg2, then further compressing it to mpeg4, it can't look better than what the station broadcasts itself. (And ATSC reception is all or nothing, so you're not getting a snowy picture).

OTOH if they're receiving an uncompressed/less compressed feed then it's a question of encoding gear quality and bitrates; meaning is could vary station to station and market to market which feed looked better - OTAs or DirecTVs.


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## NashGuy

Jonathan_S said:


> In the HD era I don't know whether DirecTV receives the final compressed mpeg2 from the local station, or an uncompressed (or less compressed) feed. Obviously if they're receiving the final mpeg2, then further compressing it to mpeg4, it can't look better than what the station broadcasts itself. (And ATSC reception is all or nothing, so you're not getting a snowy picture).
> 
> OTOH if they're receiving an uncompressed/less compressed feed then it's a question of encoding gear quality and bitrates; meaning is could vary station to station and market to market which feed looked better - OTAs or DirecTVs.


Thanks for the explanation. I agree with your logic. I'd be very surprised if Sinclair, Media General, or any other major broadcast group (much less small independent broadcasters) would go to the trouble/expense of creating dual encodes of their live HD feed, one in MPEG2 for OTA and another superior version in native MPEG4 for DirecTV. (As you stated, simply re-encoding the MPEG2 OTA stream in MPEG4, whether that's being done by the station or, more likely, by DirecTV, cannot possibly improve upon the MPEG2 version from which its derived. For the MPEG4 version to be better, it would have to be derived from some superior "master" version of the material that would also precede the MPEG2 OTA stream.)

I've seen lots of comments on these kinds of forums over the years about HD picture quality from various sources. I've repeatedly seen posters say their local OTA looks better than other sources, including satellite and cable. I don't think I've ever seen someone saying HD looks worse on OTA than another source.


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## atmuscarella

NashGuy said:


> ... I don't think I've ever seen someone saying HD looks worse on OTA than another source.


I wonder what happens when local stations compress the national feed excessively before they broadcast. In Rochester NY ABC & CW are broadcasted (both in 720p) on the same frequency, which cause both to be compressed more than if they were broadcast on separate frequencies. If cable/sat got the less compressed national feed from the local broadcaster before they did their compression cable/sat could have a better picture.


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## jmpage2

Cost of the Bolt is crazy for a 4 tuner box with a smallish hard drive. My Roamio with a 2TB hard drive is doing everything I need it to do, which includes feeding content to 4 Minis.

I've been thinking for awhile now that the Roamio is probably the last CATV compatible box I will own... if Apple gets their act together I could very much see my TiVo setup being replaced with the new ATV if there was enough content for it.

I do have an extended warranty on my Roamio so if it died while still covered I would contemplate swapping it with a Bolt... assuming a six tuner box is available at the time.


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## Bigg

NashGuy said:


> Um, please explain. In my market, I can GUARANTEE you that the DirecTV HD feeds of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS, etc. are not better than the OTA feeds. I left DirecTV earlier this year and was switching back and forth between it and the OTA channels using my TV's tuner. In every case, the OTA feed was better or equal to the DirecTV feed. In no case was the OTA feed lower in HD PQ.


It can, and does, vary by market. However, the OTA channels have gotten heavily compressed because of all the junk subchannels. Cable usually carries the OTA channels bit for bit, as they just dump two channels with subchannels into a single QAM, although they could compress them on their own if they wanted to. DirecTV, OTOH, uses MPEG-4 and doesn't have 6mhz QAMs, so they take a high-bandwidth fiber feed directly from the affiliate, and compress it to MPEG-4 using their own equipment, which often gives you a much better picture than what you can get anywhere else.



> And how could the DirecTV feed be better? They were obviously carrying the signal from my local stations (complete with local news, local station bugs on primetime networking programming, local commercials).


DirecTV encodes and uplinks them in each market. They get the signal before it's compressed in MPEG-2 for a 19mhz ATSC-8VSB channel. Yes, it is compressed, but it's probably at triple or more the bitrate that any end customer sees. Then they encode it using their own MPEG-4 encoders that give better picture quality than most other systems. They put a lot of $$$ into their encoding and uplinking systems. DirecTV arguably has the best PQ of any pay TV service in the country other than Google Fiber, and maybe FIOS, although they've started compressing a lot more too.



> And even if that is happening, I can't possibly imagine local affiliates passing along a UHD feed to satellite/cable systems when they aren't even broadcasting such from their towers. They absolutely weren't doing that during the SD-to-HD transition some years back. If your local ABC affiliate wasn't broadcasting in HD yet, you didn't get to see ABC programming in HD, regardless of whether you watched that affiliate OTA, on cable, or on satellite.


They would have to have the ability to pass UHD through, so yes, it would be on a station by station basis, and local programming is not going to go UHD for a long, long time. And satellite doesn't have the ability to handle a lot of markets with UHD LiLs, that's a metric crapton of bandwidth. But cable, and a few major markets with satellite might see UHD locals with UHD network programming. Maybe.

There is no reason that they have to broadcast the same resolution from their towers. The people who are using OTA isn't the target market for 4k anyway. But my guess is that cable is UHD for quite a while before we see UHD networks.



Jonathan_S said:


> OTOH if they're receiving an uncompressed/less compressed feed then it's a question of encoding gear quality and bitrates; meaning is could vary station to station and market to market which feed looked better - OTAs or DirecTVs.


They're not getting it uncompressed, but it's a master quality compressed feed, probably something like a 20+mbps MPEG-4 or 40+mbps MPEG-2 feed that looks completely flawless, so they can apply their own magic sauce MPEG-4 encoding to it.



NashGuy said:


> I'd be very surprised if Sinclair, Media General, or any other major broadcast group (much less small independent broadcasters) would go to the trouble/expense of creating dual encodes of their live HD feed, one in MPEG2 for OTA and another superior version in native MPEG4 for DirecTV. (As you stated, simply re-encoding the MPEG2 OTA stream in MPEG4, whether that's being done by the station or, more likely, by DirecTV, cannot possibly improve upon the MPEG2 version from which its derived. For the MPEG4 version to be better, it would have to be derived from some superior "master" version of the material that would also precede the MPEG2 OTA stream.)


No, you've got it backwards. They are handing off the feed before it gets "final" compressed for OTA to DirecTV, and DirecTV is the one doing the special compression for their own system.



> I've seen lots of comments on these kinds of forums over the years about HD picture quality from various sources. I've repeatedly seen posters say their local OTA looks better than other sources, including satellite and cable. I don't think I've ever seen someone saying HD looks worse on OTA than another source.


OTA used to be the gold standard, but it's gone way downhill over the past few years because of subchannels. Since most cable systems just dump the OTA feed on bit for bit, it looks equally as bad. DirecTV is likely the only place it could look better, although it's entirely possible that some cable companies do their own encodes too, although they could be better or worse than OTA depending on what sort of bandwidth they allot.


----------



## Bigg

atmuscarella said:


> I wonder what happens when local stations compress the national feed excessively before they broadcast. In Rochester NY ABC & CW are broadcasted (both in 720p) on the same frequency, which cause both to be compressed more than if they were broadcast on separate frequencies. If cable/sat got the less compressed national feed from the local broadcaster before they did their compression cable/sat could have a better picture.


It's not the national broadcast. It's the station's broadcast. DirecTV gets it BEFORE it gets compressed for OTA. The station takes the national feed, mixed it into their programming stream, they spit it out at a high bitrate (or uncompressed in their studio), THEN it gets compressed for OTA. Before that last compression, DirecTV gets a feed. They may even have compressors in the rack at the station, I'm not sure exactly how that works. That would even give them a fully uncompressed feed, although the national programming, and most everything else would have been compressed at some point in it's transmission to the station, but at a much higher bitrate than what end users get of the final feed.


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## HarperVision

Jonathan_S said:


> In many, but not all, markets DirecTV receives a direct line (or direct microwave) feed from the local station's broadcast studio to DirecTV's uplink facilities.
> 
> Especially in the old analog days this could allow DirecTV's version of local stations to usually look better than the version you could pull in from an antenna as the signal traveled a shorter and better shielded distance as analog before being converted to digital.
> 
> In the HD era I don't know whether DirecTV receives the final compressed mpeg2 from the local station, or an uncompressed (or less compressed) feed. Obviously if they're receiving the final mpeg2, then further compressing it to mpeg4, it can't look better than what the station broadcasts itself. (And ATSC reception is all or nothing, so you're not getting a snowy picture).
> 
> OTOH if they're receiving an uncompressed/less compressed feed then it's a question of encoding gear quality and bitrates; meaning is could vary station to station and market to market which feed looked better - OTAs or DirecTVs.


I can't speak for every other local broadcaster or what's happening now, but when I was the Transmitter Engineer at the local NBC affiliate in PA we got the studio master signals at the transmitter site on top of the mountain via a microwave shot from the studio downtown. This signal was split for many different things like comms, control signals, status/test signals, a local radio broadcast signal (WROZ, "The Rose"), the Studio TV signal (HD main and SD subchannel), all at about 75Mbps total BW. These signals were split at a demodulator and sent to a couple different pieces of equipment:

1. ATSC modulator to prep signals to go to our Harris ATSC IOT Transmitter.
2. D->A Converter to create an analog NTSC baseband signal to feed our old Analog Transmitter and our backup RCA/Thomson NTSC tranmitter (before full digital transition)
3. TV feed sent to Comcast local headened (can't remember if fiber, microwave, or just using OTA antenna)

DirecTV (at the time) just got our feed from another local affiliate's location in Harrisburg (WHP) using a rooftop Yagi antenna, so it was just an MPEG2 ATSC 1080i signal. I don't know what equipment was used there locally to convert and send it off to DirecTV, or what the resultant picture quality was. This wasn't an ideal location for reception, but I guess it was just convenient if they already had the DirecTV interface equipment there. We offered them a fiber feed, the same way we gave them SD, but they didn't use it.

DISH used the same approach, but their signal receive location was somewhere in York within about 10 miles from the broadcast antenna tower.


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## HarperVision

atmuscarella said:


> I wonder what happens when local stations compress the national feed excessively before they broadcast. In Rochester NY ABC & CW are broadcasted (both in 720p) on the same frequency, which cause both to be compressed more than if they were broadcast on separate frequencies. If cable/sat got the less compressed national feed from the local broadcaster before they did their compression cable/sat could have a better picture.


I have the same issue here, but even worse. I pickup repeaters/translators from Maui that are supposed to be reflections of the main transmissions from Oahu. They totally butcher the signals though, jamming 2 network channels into one ATSC channel like you, but what makes it worse is that the networks are natively 1080i, but they convert them each to two 720p signals and low bitrates and the signal breaks up into mpeg squares/artifacts with any motion whatsoever! :down:  

So for me at least, these OTA signals are even worse than Oceanic's crappy compressed QAM and especially DirecTV's luscious MPEG4!


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## NashGuy

atmuscarella said:


> I wonder what happens when local stations compress the national feed excessively before they broadcast. In Rochester NY ABC & CW are broadcasted (both in 720p) on the same frequency, which cause both to be compressed more than if they were broadcast on separate frequencies. If cable/sat got the less compressed national feed from the local broadcaster before they did their compression cable/sat could have a better picture.


Yeah. This is where things get a bit hard for me to say as I've never worked as a broadcast engineer at a local network affiliate! But what those guys are doing is a combination process: taking the national broadcast feed, say from ABC, and then splicing in local commercials and local programs (e.g. newscasts) plus sometimes overlaying local computer graphics on top of the feed (e.g. local station logo, local time/temp, news crawler with weather alert or local election results). What I don't know is if the final MPEG2-transport stream for broadcasting from the tower is what immediately comes out of that combination process (meaning that final encoding is done simultaneously as part of the combination) or if the combination process puts out some kind of less-compressed stream (possibly even a patchwork of different encodings/resolutions for different parts of the stream), which then in turn receives a final MPEG2-TS encoding for OTA broadcast. If the latter scenario is what happens, then yes, it's possible that the less-compressed stream could somehow be sent over to satellite/cable MSOs for them to encode, possibly with a superior final picture quality than the OTA broadcast depending on encoding schemes/bitrates, etc. I'd be surprised if the latter scenario is what actually happens but I admit that I honestly don't know. I just know that anywhere I've been able to observe local OTA HD signals, they looked better than they did through whatever pay source they were also available through in that home, whether DirecTV, DISH, Comcast cable, or (especially) AT&T U-verse.


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## HarperVision

Bigg said:


> It's not the national broadcast. It's the station's broadcast. DirecTV gets it BEFORE it gets compressed for OTA. The station takes the national feed, mixed it into their programming stream, they spit it out at a high bitrate (or uncompressed in their studio), THEN it gets compressed for OTA. Before that last compression, DirecTV gets a feed. They may even have compressors in the rack at the station, I'm not sure exactly how that works. That would even give them a fully uncompressed feed, although the national programming, and most everything else would have been compressed at some point in it's transmission to the station, but at a much higher bitrate than what end users get of the final feed.





NashGuy said:


> Yeah. This is where things get a bit hard for me to say as I've never worked as a broadcast engineer at a local network affiliate! But what those guys are doing is a combination process: taking the national broadcast feed, say from ABC, and then splicing in local commercials and local programs (e.g. newscasts) plus sometimes overlaying local computer graphics on top of the feed (e.g. local station logo, local time/temp, news crawler with weather alert or local election results). What I don't know is if the final MPEG2-transport stream for broadcasting from the tower is what immediately comes out of that combination process (meaning that final encoding is done simultaneously as part of the combination) or if the combination process puts out some kind of less-compressed stream (possibly even a patchwork of different encodings/resolutions for different parts of the stream), which then in turn receives a final MPEG2-TS encoding for OTA broadcast. If the latter scenario is what happens, then yes, it's possible that the less-compressed stream could somehow be sent over to satellite/cable MSOs for them to encode, possibly with a superior final picture quality than the OTA broadcast depending on encoding schemes/bitrates, etc. I'd be surprised if the latter scenario is what actually happens but I admit that I honestly don't know. I just know that anywhere I've been able to observe local OTA HD signals, they looked better than they did through whatever pay source they were also available through in that home, whether DirecTV, DISH, Comcast cable, or (especially) AT&T U-verse.


I'm sure, at least at the local station I mentioned a few posts up, that they have now gone to a full fiber feed from them to DTV. If this is the case now, then what Bigg said should be true with them getting the full studio Master Signal, the same as what our rack equipment got that was interfaced with the OTA transmitters. I think it was a 16QAM signal, but I can't remember the bitrate for just the TV part of the 75Mbps microwave signal being sent from the studio downtown.


----------



## NashGuy

HarperVision said:


> I have the same issue here, but even worse. I pickup repeaters/translators from Maui that are supposed to be reflections of the main transmissions from Oahu. They totally butcher the signals though, jamming 2 network channels into one ATSC channel like you, but what makes it worse is that the networks are natively 1080i, but they convert them each to two 720p signals and low bitrates and the signal breaks up into mpeg squares/artifacts with any motion whatsoever! :down:
> 
> So for me at least, these OTA signals are even worse than Oceanic's crappy compressed QAM and especially DirecTV's luscious MPEG4!


Oh, that stinks. When you talk about your local OTA channel, I assume you're referring to KOGG, which is a Wailuku, Maui-based repeater station that rebroadcasts Honolulu, Oahu-based KHNL (NBC) and KGMB (CBS) on 13-1 and 13-2. I'm sure that cable and satellite are actually getting the original 1080i feeds direct from KHNL and KGMB rather than uplinking KOGG's signal. But I guess those Honolulu airwaves don't make it over to Maui very well, so you have to rely on OTA reception from KOGG, which reencodes the original signals and even downgrades their resolution to 720p so that both HD broadcasts can fit in one channel.

http://rabbitears.info/market.php?request=station_search&callsign=34448

Yours is a very odd example and doesn't really speak to the general question of OTA versus cable/satellite. At any rate, I'd much rather be on Maui than Oahu any time, regardless of the local TV situation! Maui is wonderful.


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## HarperVision

NashGuy said:


> Oh, that stinks. When you talk about your local OTA channel, I assume you're referring to KOGG, which is a Wailuku, Maui-based repeater station that rebroadcasts Honolulu, Oahu-based KHNL (NBC) and KGMB (CBS) on 13-1 and 13-2. I'm sure that cable and satellite are actually getting the original 1080i feeds direct from KHNL and KGMB rather than uplinking KOGG's signal. But I guess those Honolulu airwaves don't make it over to Maui very well, so you have to rely on OTA reception from KOGG, which reencodes the original signals and even downgrades their resolution to 720p so that both HD broadcasts can fit in one channel.
> 
> http://rabbitears.info/market.php?request=station_search&callsign=34448
> 
> Yours is a very odd example and doesn't really speak to the general question of OTA versus cable/satellite. At any rate, I'd much rather be on Maui than Oahu any time, regardless of the local TV situation! Maui is wonderful.


Yes, that's exactly it! It is odd, but more common than you think in rural and mountainous America where repeater/translators are used.

BTW, I am on the Big Island, not Maui. But I can see the mountains of Maui from my lanai and can pickup 13.1 and 13.2 via a Clearstream4 antenna.


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## NashGuy

HarperVision said:


> I'm sure, at least at the local station I mentioned a few posts up, that they have now gone to a full fiber feed from them to DTV. If this is the case now, then what Bigg said should be true with them getting the full studio Master Signal, the same as what our rack equipment got that was interfaced with the OTA transmitters. I think it was a 16QAM signal, but I can't remember the bitrate for just the TV part of the 75Mbps microwave signal being sent from the studio downtown.


Thanks for the additional details. I like reading this kind of stuff (even if we've got into the technical weeds unrelated to the overall thread). I still stand by my original assertion that kicked off this whole rabbit trail, however, which is that we won't see UHD linear broadcasts from ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox on cable/satellite in a given market before we see it OTA in that market. Regardless of our discussion above about the minor encoding differences that may take place among the different sources for those channels, we never see a difference in actual RESOLUTION LEVEL (apart from artificial upscaling/downscaling, such as DirecTV is known to do with their "HD Lite" channels). I just can't imagine a local ABC affiliate, still broadcasting OTA in 720p, specially preparing a higher resolution separate feed of their live stream in 2160p UHD to hand over for an MSO to broadcast to their paying subs. (Would that even be legal under FCC broadcast licensing rules?) Likewise, I can't imagine ABC, at the national level, bypassing their affiliates and going straight to MSOs with a UHD national feed that contains no local affiliate content, advertising or branding. That would be in violation of their contracts with their affiliates (who would be up in arms) and, as I mentioned earlier, a total upheaval in the way that broadcast TV works in the US.


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## Bigg

HarperVision said:


> DirecTV (at the time) just got our feed from another local affiliate's location in Harrisburg (WHP) using a rooftop Yagi antenna, so it was just an MPEG2 ATSC 1080i signal. I don't know what equipment was used there locally to convert and send it off to DirecTV, or what the resultant picture quality was. This wasn't an ideal location for reception, but I guess it was just convenient if they already had the DirecTV interface equipment there. We offered them a fiber feed, the same way we gave them SD, but they didn't use it.


That's how they all started doing LiL. I believe that DirecTV using direct feeds of one type or another now wherever they can. There's probably some station somewhere that they are still using an antenna for, but it's not the norm anymore. I know even some small cable companies have converted to fiber feeds, one near me was advertising as such that they had fixed a couple of the channels with a fiber feed instead of an antenna.



HarperVision said:


> So for me at least, these OTA signals are even worse than Oceanic's crappy compressed QAM and especially DirecTV's luscious MPEG4!


DirecTV probably throws you guys a lot of bandwidth too, since there is nothing else they can do with spot frequencies that far out in the Pacific, and they wouldn't have any overlap with California, as they are too far away.



NashGuy said:


> What I don't know is if the final MPEG2-transport stream for broadcasting from the tower is what immediately comes out of that combination process (meaning that final encoding is done simultaneously as part of the combination) or if the combination process puts out some kind of less-compressed stream (possibly even a patchwork of different encodings/resolutions for different parts of the stream), which then in turn receives a final MPEG2-TS encoding for OTA broadcast.


The master feed comes out on HD-SDI most likely, totally uncompressed, and it has to be compressed before it can leave the studio. What I don't know is whether it's compressed into a high-bitrate "master" feed for that station, which is then compressed for OTA, or if the OTA compressor is feeding right off of the HD-SDI signal. In DirecTV's case, they are getting a parallel feed split off before the signal goes to to the OTA compressor, whether it's compressed at that point or not.



> I just know that anywhere I've been able to observe local OTA HD signals, they looked better than they did through whatever pay source they were also available through in that home, whether DirecTV, DISH, Comcast cable, or (especially) AT&T U-verse.


It varies by market. And cable/U-Verse/whatever may be re-compressing the OTA signals, they may be using them directly (U-Verse isn't, since they're MPEG-4), or they may have a high-bitrate feed and still be bungling them up worse than OTA just because they compress the living crap out of everything. But one way or the other, DirecTV is getting a much better quality feed, and compressing it on their own. They still use a lot of compression to cram everything onto the satellites, so it's not like it's some amazing high-bitrate feed, but they have the control over tweaking it to get the absolute best performance possible out of their bandwidth allotment.

This post is really interesting. I've heard other places about direct fiber feed, but this post described DirecTV taking a direct HD-SDI feed right in the studio.

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/25-hd...r-change-compression-codecs.html#post31817025



HarperVision said:


> I'm sure, at least at the local station I mentioned a few posts up, that they have now gone to a full fiber feed from them to DTV. If this is the case now, then what Bigg said should be true with them getting the full studio Master Signal, the same as what our rack equipment got that was interfaced with the OTA transmitters. I think it was a 16QAM signal, but I can't remember the bitrate for just the TV part of the 75Mbps microwave signal being sent from the studio downtown.


Yup. There are probably several different topologies in use in various markets, but I believe that the point stands in most markets that DirecTV is making sure that they get a feed higher up the chain than OTA/cable because they want to be able to have as much control over their compression as they can to deliver the best looking picture with the bandwidth they have available.



NashGuy said:


> I still stand by my original assertion that kicked off this whole rabbit trail, however, which is that we won't see UHD linear broadcasts from ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox on cable/satellite in a given market before we see it OTA in that market. Regardless of our discussion above about the minor encoding differences that may take place among the different sources for those channels, we never see a difference in actual RESOLUTION LEVEL (apart from artificial upscaling/downscaling, such as DirecTV is known to do with their "HD Lite" channels).


I still disagree. I think UHD networks will launch on cable/satellite. Also, DirecTV abandoned HD Lite a long time ago when they converted to MPEG-4, but I believe DISH still does it.



> (Would that even be legal under FCC broadcast licensing rules?)


Why wouldn't it be? They would still be providing the content for free over their airwaves. The laws never said they had to broadcast in HD, only in ATSC-8VSB digital. If they broadcast OTA in 480i and handed off a 1080i signal to Comcast and DirecTV, there's nothing legally wrong with that.



> Likewise, I can't imagine ABC, at the national level, bypassing their affiliates and going straight to MSOs with a UHD national feed that contains no local affiliate content, advertising or branding. That would be in violation of their contracts with their affiliates (who would be up in arms) and, as I mentioned earlier, a total upheaval in the way that broadcast TV works in the US.


Correct. Unfortunately, with the draconian way the contracts are structured, they cannot and will not do that. The only place it gets messy is significantly viewed locals. If, for example, WCBS in New York has a 2160p feed available, and Comcast drops that on the SV feeds in Hartford-New Haven, which is primarily the territory of the awful WFSB (SUCKS)-DT, then WFSB is going to be pretty pissed if they're not doing 2160p yet, even though we have both available today.


----------



## NashGuy

Bigg said:


> I still disagree. I think UHD networks will launch on cable/satellite.


Well, I sort of do too. As I originally said, I can see two or three linear cable channels offering a full-time UHD version in the next few years, such as HBO and Showtime. If they do, their OTT internet steaming services -- which now compete directly against Netflix and Amazon Prime, which already offer select UHD titles -- will simultaneously get the same UHD content. I can also imagine satellite and cable providers offering some sort of UHD sampler channel, sort of like the old HDNet or INHD channels. (I believe DirecTV likewise offered some sort of sampler 3D channel that no one ever watched.)

What Comcast is doing rather than a linear UHD sampler channel, though, is offering select UHD titles for on-demand internet streaming if you have the capable Comcast-issued set-top box, the Xi4, which should be rolling out pretty soon now. I imagine it will cost a little more to lease or possibly require an additional "UHD technology fee," although I don't think I've read anything about cost.

And I believe Comcast's approach really points the way forward for how UHD is going to roll out on cable for the foreseeable future. Increasingly, the whole rationale for linear channels is questionable. It's not how people consume media any more, particularly the type of viewer who would happen to own a UHD TV. And content providers would much rather provide you with on-demand streams they control rather than allow you to record their content. So rather than lots of individual channels offering up UHD versions of themselves, the way we saw the SD to HD transition happen, I think it's much more likely over the next few years that we see select popular channels offer a few of their signature shows in UHD. They'll let the MSOs place those shows on their on-demand platforms (with commercials you can't fast forward through if it's not a premium channel). If you subscribe to the linear HD channel and you have a UHD set-top box from the MSO, you can watch that channel's few UHD titles on demand. Perhaps we'll see the four major broadcast networks participate too with a handful of primetime shows. I would imagine their UHD on-demand shows would feature the local affiliate's bug while dynamic ad insertion would allow for some local ads to be included, so the affiliates make some money that way. Whether the cable companies allow TiVo to play is questionable; perhaps Comcast and Cox will include UHD content in their existing on-demand platforms for TiVo, perhaps not.

Satellite is at a disadvantage here because they don't have a broadband internet pipe running to your house the way cable does, although there's nothing to stop them from offering internet-based UHD on-demand, the way they currently provide HD on-demand. It just means the customer will have to provide their own broadband connection.


----------



## apw2607

aaronwt said:


> When netflix first starting offering 1080P, it was able to be downscaled to 720P.
> 
> As far as 4K, the new FireTV is the first truly mass market streamer that has the 4K streaming apps. And it comes out in a few days. So I don't know what they will do. I would love for it to be able to downscale the 4K content. But I'm really not expecting it. But you never know.


No, it never ever did that. On any netflix client. Thats the whole point of adaptive streaming.


----------



## wco81

Roku 4 is also supporting 4K for $129.


----------



## aaronwt

apw2607 said:


> No, it never ever did that. On any netflix client. Thats the whole point of adaptive streaming.


 I'm not sure off hand which devices it was on, but I definitely had more than one where it would stream a higher encode than what the output resolution was. I don't know if it was a glitch or what. But it was corrected at some point.


----------



## HarperVision

wco81 said:


> Roku 4 is also supporting 4K for $129.


And I can buy a Hyundai Accent when I need a full sized van. What's your point?


----------



## Bytez

They seem to want to put themselves out of business with their $150 yearly and $600 lifetime pricing. I expect them to cut the price drastically next year.


----------



## tarheelblue32

Bytez said:


> They seem to want to put themselves out of business with their $150 yearly and $600 lifetime pricing. I expect them to cut the price drastically next year.


The likely outcome of them cutting prices drastically would be to put themselves out of business even sooner.


----------



## Brolan

tarheelblue32 said:


> The likely outcome of them cutting prices drastically would be to put themselves out of business even sooner.


Nope, if they cut the price of lifetime they would get the money now, not later. Might not be best for the long term though.


----------



## Bigg

NashGuy said:


> Well, I sort of do too. As I originally said, I can see two or three linear cable channels offering a full-time UHD version in the next few years, such as HBO and Showtime.


Right. I think we all agree on this. Whether it's ESPN or a specific 4K channel or HBO, it will be something.



> Increasingly, the whole rationale for linear channels is questionable. It's not how people consume media any more, particularly the type of viewer who would happen to own a UHD TV. And content providers would much rather provide you with on-demand streams they control rather than allow you to record their content. So rather than lots of individual channels offering up UHD versions of themselves, the way we saw the SD to HD transition happen, I think it's much more likely over the next few years that we see select popular channels offer a few of their signature shows in UHD.


I don't think linear channels are going anywhere. The whole model is based on linear channels, and a LOT of people still watch them. What I wonder is how long we are going to be able to have several hundred TV channels that each have little new content on them, each with carriage costs and bandwidth requirements.

The reason we might very well see what you are suggesting is because of bandwidth. Cable systems are basically out of bandwidth in their current configurations. In theory, they should be able to have virtually unlimited bandwidth by using all-digital, SDV, and 860mhz+ plants combined, but getting there would take any of today's providers a significant amount of money to get the pieces of that puzzle in place that they don't already have.



> Satellite is at a disadvantage here because they don't have a broadband internet pipe running to your house the way cable does, although there's nothing to stop them from offering internet-based UHD on-demand, the way they currently provide HD on-demand. It just means the customer will have to provide their own broadband connection.


Either that or they could do something like DISH did, where you have some amount of space dedicated to VOD or PPV VOD, and they download over satellite and become available at some point for VOD. You're limited to a somewhat small library unless you add a much larger hard drive just for this type of thing though.


----------



## HarperVision

Bigg said:


> .....The reason we might very well see what you are suggesting is because of bandwidth. Cable systems are basically out of bandwidth in their current configurations. In theory, they should be able to have virtually unlimited bandwidth by using all-digital, SDV, and 860mhz+ plants combined, but getting there would take any of today's providers a significant amount of money to get the pieces of that puzzle in place that they don't already have.........


Going MPEG4/H.264 would help a lot too.


----------



## Dan203

Well I didn't actually buy one, but I did just receive a Bolt in the mail. (thanks TiVo!) I'll post my review once I get it up and running and have some recordings to play with.


----------



## HarperVision

Dan203 said:


> Well I didn't actually buy one, but I did just receive a Bolt in the mail. (thanks TiVo!) I'll post my review once I get it up and running and have some recordings to play with.


Whaaaaa????? Is it for being a "Super Moderator" here, which you certainly are!


----------



## Dan203

HarperVision said:


> Whaaaaa????? Is it for being a "Super Moderator" here, which you certainly are!


Yep. Apparently they like the cut of my jib.


----------



## HarperVision

Dan203 said:


> Yep. Apparently they like the cut of my jib.


They must think you actually have some marketing clout around here!


----------



## NashGuy

Bigg said:


> I don't think linear channels are going anywhere. The whole model is based on linear channels, and a LOT of people still watch them.


Well, I never said linear channels are going away either, at least not in the next several years. (But Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, may be right that linear TV will disappear by 2030, completely replaced by internet TV.) But due to bandwidth considerations, as you mentioned, as well as the necessity to switch out in-home set-top boxes (if they're going to transmit UHD in anything more efficient than h.264, such as HEVC), along with the fact that many average TV viewers don't see as big an improvement in UHD over HD as they saw in HD over SD (so therefore less popular demand for UHD channels), I don't think cable and satellite operators are going to be in any huge rush to launch UHD multicast in a big way, i.e. a whole package of UHD channels you can get. And if the infrastructure and demand aren't there, you have a chicken-and-egg problem with the cable TV channel owners (e.g. Viacom, Time Warner, etc.), who are probably more concerned with faltering profits these days than they are with making a big splash with UHD.

And those challenges come at time when, as I said before, we're grappling with the whole question of whether delivering TV in the form of linear multicast channels is the best way forward. I don't think it's controversial to say that linear TV feels like the past and on-demand internet-based TV feels like the future. I think that only adds to the business case for cable companies to distribute UHD as on-demand internet-based streams over the next several years. As another example besides Comcast, look at how Rogers Cable in Canada is rolling out live sports broadcasting in UHD. Yup, it's via streaming over their super-fast internet pipe.

No doubt cable, satellite and OTA linear multicast channels in HD and SD will continue on for many years, although fewer of them will survive as the economics of the TV industry change due to waning subscriptions -- goodbye channels like Destination America, Pivot and Investigation Discovery! If ATSC 3.0 ever gets off the ground and we do see OTA broadcasts of UHD linear channels (sometime between 2019 and 2025), that would prompt cable and satellite to at least carry those networks and we may well see at least a few more cable-only channels (e.g. AMC, FX, USA, etc.) launch linear UHD versions. But by then, viewers will be even more used to streaming shows (and UHD shows, specifically) on demand than they are now. So I don't know if I ever see us having big packages of 50, 75, or 100 UHD channels the way we do with HD channels now.


----------



## Bigg

HarperVision said:


> Going MPEG4/H.264 would help a lot too.


Good point. H.264 on an all-digital 860mhz plant with SDV would be the ideal situation. If your nodes are small enough, your channel capacity is completely unlimited, as you are basically sending individual channels to individual users. Of course a small subset of popular channels, all local channels, and all SD channels for the DTAs would have to stay linear.



NashGuy said:


> Well, I never said linear channels are going away either, at least not in the next several years. (But Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, may be right that linear TV will disappear by 2030, completely replaced by internet TV.) But due to bandwidth considerations, as you mentioned, as well as the necessity to switch out in-home set-top boxes (if they're going to transmit UHD in anything more efficient than h.264, such as HEVC), along with the fact that many average TV viewers don't see as big an improvement in UHD over HD as they saw in HD over SD (so therefore less popular demand for UHD channels), I don't think cable and satellite operators are going to be in any huge rush to launch UHD multicast in a big way, i.e. a whole package of UHD channels you can get. And if the infrastructure and demand aren't there, you have a chicken-and-egg problem with the cable TV channel owners (e.g. Viacom, Time Warner, etc.), who are probably more concerned with faltering profits these days than they are with making a big splash with UHD.


The equipment issue isn't really a problem, as one way or another, you're going to need new 4k-capable boxes. The big issue is bandwidth. The only way I could see some 4k channels available is if they do some rather creative bandwidth sharing between gigabit internet and 4k TV channels by using IP multicast for 4k alongside the existing QAM system for HD and SD, but even that would be a fairly limited selection of channels.

I think they absolutely will launch a few 4k channels, but it's going to be that- a few channels.



> And those challenges come at time when, as I said before, we're grappling with the whole question of whether delivering TV in the form of linear multicast channels is the best way forward. I don't think it's controversial to say that linear TV feels like the past and on-demand internet-based TV feels like the future.


I agree with you there, internet TV feels like the future, it's more engaging, it's available whenever you want. However, the market still says that there is a huge demand for linear programming. I agree that the first stuff to drop will be a lot of the cable channels that have lost their original purpose, or are niche marketed. The higher-rated cable channels, HBO, and the networks are here to stay for a very, very long time, however.


----------



## tarheelblue32

Bigg said:


> Good point. H.264 on an all-digital 860mhz plant with SDV would be the ideal situation. If your nodes are small enough, your channel capacity is completely unlimited, as you are basically sending individual channels to individual users. Of course a small subset of popular channels, all local channels, and all SD channels for the DTAs would have to stay linear.


Get rid of the SD channels too. This is 2015 for crying out loud, it's time to move on. I know the SD channels don't take up a tremendous amount of bandwidth, but every little bit counts. Anyone who still refuses to give up their old CRT set can get a cable box that can down-convert the HD channels to 480i.


----------



## randian

How is network TV the future. Bandwidth is still a limited commodity, and a linear channel's bandwidth is independent of the number of viewers, while IP stream bandwidth scales linearly with the number of viewers.


----------



## Dan203

randian said:


> How is network TV the future. Bandwidth is still a limited commodity, and a linear channel's bandwidth is independent of the number of viewers, while IP stream bandwidth scales linearly with the number of viewers.


You can do multicast IP.

IP bandwidth is only linear if everything is VOD, like Netflix. If you're using IP to stream a live channel then it's really no different then using QAM. In fact you can use a more efficient modulation scheme with less wasted bandwidth if you switch to pure IP. You can also get rid of kludge technologies like SDV.


----------



## aaronwt

Apparently it didn't take much for me to upgrade. I got my first Bolt from BestBuy the other day. And now I have a second one  on the way from an Ebay auction. So I guess I'm fully diving in with the Bolt and I'll be selling my Roamio Pro later this year. Assuming I don't have any issues. 

And did I mention I really love the Skip mode and Quick mode features!


----------



## HarperVision

aaronwt said:


> Apparently it didn't take much for me to upgrade. I got my first Bolt from BestBuy the other day. And now I have a second one  on the way from an Ebay auction. So I guess I'm fully diving in with the Bolt and I'll be selling my Roamio Pro later this year. Assuming I don't have any issues. And did I mention I really love the Skip mode and Quick mode features!


Does the one from eBay come with the puke already on it?


----------



## aaronwt

HarperVision said:


> Does the one from eBay come with the puke already on it?


 I was going to order the fake puke from Amazon and take a photo. But I got the Bolt on a SPur of the moment.

Release day, this past Sunday, brought back some good memories of the four tuner Premiere. When I showed up at BestBuy at 10AM on Sunday, (on the way to meet my GF to see a movie) to be the second one in the store and the second one to purchase the four tuner unit.

So this past Sunday, when I was going to meet my GF at the theater, I kept thinking about that. And then the next thing I know I'm ordering the Bolt and a 4TB drive for it. And apparently now a second Bolt.


----------



## HarperVision

I believe you haven't earned the right to be a Bolt owner, after the things you've said. Send them both to me RIGHT NOW young man!


----------



## Bigg

tarheelblue32 said:


> Get rid of the SD channels too. This is 2015 for crying out loud, it's time to move on. I know the SD channels don't take up a tremendous amount of bandwidth, but every little bit counts. Anyone who still refuses to give up their old CRT set can get a cable box that can down-convert the HD channels to 480i.


You don't have to kill all the SDs. Just get rid of the 200-300 channels that the DTAs don't need. That way, there would be very little equipment turnover and it would still save some bandwidth.


----------



## Jed1

tarheelblue32 said:


> Get rid of the SD channels too. This is 2015 for crying out loud, it's time to move on. I know the SD channels don't take up a tremendous amount of bandwidth, but every little bit counts. Anyone who still refuses to give up their old CRT set can get a cable box that can down-convert the HD channels to 480i.





Bigg said:


> You don't have to kill all the SDs. Just get rid of the 200-300 channels that the DTAs don't need. That way, there would be very little equipment turnover and it would still save some bandwidth.


Unfortunately SD is what the majority of what people will watch. Most customers will not pay extra for the HD channel package unless they get it for free.
Right now all the signals coming into my head end are HD for the channels that are available in that resolution. Those signals are then down converted to SD due to the large volume of customers who basically refuse to pay extra for HD. Most are trying to save money on their monthly bill.

For the customers who still have analog SD sets or do not want to pay the $5/month STB charge will get a HD DTA that will convert the digital SD signals to analog SD. Those that have a HD set and do not want to pay the monthly rental charge will get the HD DTA set up using HDMI which will letterbox the SD signals. If they complain about that then they get set up using RF output on the DTA and using the RF input set to channel 3 on the HDTV.
Those that have an analog set just get them set up using the RF output.
The HD DTA has no guide or access to VOD.

If customers want the guide and VOD then they have to pay the $5monthly fee and get a RNG 110. If the RNG 110 is hooked to an HDTV set then HDMI is used and set to 1080i so the SD channels are up converted to HD. 
If the box is hooked to a SD set then the RF output is used and the box is set to run in 480i.


----------



## Bigg

Jed1 said:


> Unfortunately SD is what the majority of what people will watch. Most customers will not pay extra for the HD channel package unless they get it for free.


Either they could build the cost of HD into the packages or equipment fees, or if they want to keep tiers, they could have the boxes for customers who don't pay for HD just output 480i from the HD channels. Not hard to do.


----------



## zerdian1

I still record and watch classic TV shows in SD.
Any shows in both, I record HD.
I guess it would be OK for future 4K UHD DVRs to drop SD.


----------



## rzak

Get HBO NOW and I will immediately buy a Bolt.


----------



## n8walker

Wow.

My first reaction to the Tivo Bolt, is that I can't stack my components with the curved design. My second reaction is that it doesn't come in black. So it doesn't match any of my other components.

I would only upgrade if future models had a more traditional box shape and was available in the color black. I spend many hours in front of my Tivo, and I just wouldn't be comfortable with it's new design shape or color.


----------



## wco81

BTW, anyone know which application processor this is using compared to whichever Broadcom part they used on the Roamio?


----------



## tomhorsley

n8walker said:


> My second reaction is that it doesn't come in black. So it doesn't match any of my other components.


An opportunity for a new weaKnees product: Squared off black boxes to hide your Bolt in .


----------



## Bigg

zerdian1 said:


> I guess it would be OK for future 4K UHD DVRs to drop SD.


HUH? No one ever asked for them to drop SD, and they can't anyway, as a lot of channels aren't available in HD.


----------



## larrs

I have almost pulled into my local Best Buy several times in the past week to buy the Bolt and then talked myself out of it. I love the idea of giving Tivo more of my money- since I have almost annually since 1999 and I have to say I am not opposed to the $150 annual fees, especially with a warranty included. Heck, I pay that much for Sirius/XM in my car and I am sure I use the Tivo a lot more. However, I just can't find a compelling reason to upgrade at this time. I am not giving up my 6 tuner Roamio with Lifetime and although I would love to replace my Elite 4 (also Lifetimed) with it, I am not sold on any 2.5" conventional drive standing up to constant recording. And, although I have one UHDTV, it has it's own 4K streaming built in for Netflix, Amazon and You Tube but one thing I can say for sure is that I cannot tell the difference between the TV's built in 4K streaming and the Roamio's 1080P streaming except for the video-based test footage. On film-based or regular programming in 4K like House of Cards, no one in my family can tell the difference from normal seating distances. Maybe when I upgrade my projector it will make more sense or maybe if cable sports went to 4K (ESPN4K?). So, I just can't compel myself right now.


I just can't make myself- yet.


----------



## Jed1

A winning lottery ticket right now would do the trick.


----------



## JoeKustra

Jed1 said:


> A winning lottery ticket right now would do the trick.


Me too. This probably the first time I haven't jumped on a new toy. You know I'm a sucker for new toys. But I'm going to pass on the Bolt, Amazon's Fire TV, Netgear's R8500 and the Roku 4. They just don't get me excited. Maybe they don't have the value increase?

BTW, I'm in FL watching analog Cox cable. I am missing the paving of rt 61. Not.


----------



## Jed1

JoeKustra said:


> Me too. This probably the first time I haven't jumped on a new toy. You know I'm a sucker for new toys. But I'm going to pass on the Bolt, Amazon's Fire TV, Netgear's R8500 and the Roku 4. They just don't get me excited. Maybe they don't have the value increase?
> 
> BTW, I'm in FL watching analog Cox cable. I am missing the paving of rt 61. Not.


Ahh!!! Nothing like old fashioned analog cable. The good ole days when things were more simple.

I just set up a 50 inch Vizio M series 4k TV for a friend and I have to admit the TV has a gorgeous picture. Nice black levels. His analog TV bit the dust and he ask me to pick him out a new TV and receiver that met his wife's approval. Took a little bit but I finally convinced her to go forward with it.
No cost of living for the seniors so it looks like I will have to dig even deeper in the pocket to fill the gap to support my elderly mother. I am fighting with the state again for my mom's $16/month of food stamps as they keep insisting I have two checking accounts. I wish I did as the make believe one has $5800 in it.
If I had that I could get a couple of Bolts with All In.

They did mill 61 in Frackville last week and there is a water shutoff sticking up about 4 inches by Boyers. There is a steady stream of cars with flat tires and busted rims because of it.
Temps are going to drop into the high twenties this weekend so I guess they will pave it when it is snowing out.


----------



## HarperVision

Jed1 said:


> ...... Temps are going to drop into the high twenties this weekend so I guess they will pave it when it is snowing out.


I certainly don't miss THAT from living in PA! 

Low of 77 this week here.....damn!


----------



## Jed1

HarperVision said:


> I certainly don't miss THAT from living in PA!
> 
> Low of 77 this week here.....damn!


Funny you mention Hawaii, when I had to turn the heat on last week to get the dampness out of the house my mom mentioned we should move to Hawaii. 
I will add this to the when I get the winning lottery ticket list.
A couple of All In Bolts
Move to Hawaii.


----------



## HarperVision

Jed1 said:


> Funny you mention Hawaii, when I had to turn the heat on last week to get the dampness out of the house my mom mentioned we should move to Hawaii.
> I will add this to the when I get the winning lottery ticket list.
> A couple of All In Bolts
> Move to Hawaii.


We have jobs like everyone else, and it's really not as expensive as you think here on the Big island, especially over the mountain (or should I say "volcano"!  ) on the Hilo side.


----------



## cwerdna

zerdian1 said:


> I still record and watch classic TV shows in SD.
> Any shows in both, I record HD.


On my TiVo HD (w/1 TB), the vast majority of recordings and SPs are in in SD (e.g. news, Nightly Business Report, stuff on Bloomberg and CNBC, etc.)

I only record a few things in HD due to the enormous space requirements vs. SD. Thus, most of the stuff I record in HD I try to watch and delete fairly quickly.

If I could go to maybe 5 or 6 TB, then I probably would record a LOT more in HD.


----------



## PeteB

I love the TIVO technology, I've been an owner for many years, but now I'm done upgrading. What would it take for me to upgrade?
1. The tech is fine, they need to completely overhaul their business practices. Start with firing the entre development team, and getting a competent one. They still have SD screens on the Roamio. A single developer should be able to code the entire interface in a week, add a few weeks for testing...it's been years.
2. Some type of written agreement not to remove functionality from users. It's unacceptable how key features like podcast downloads, and suggestion viewing have been removed.
3. A changelog on releases.
4. Customer service. I've seen people praise Margaret for coming on here and throwing a few crumbs. There should be a full time person dedicated to it.

TIVo: you want to get more customers? There's how to start.


----------



## zerdian1

larrs said:


> I have almost pulled into my local Best Buy several times in the past week to buy the Bolt and then talked myself out of it. I love the idea of giving Tivo more of my money- since I have almost annually since 1999 and I have to say I am not opposed to the $150 annual fees, especially with a warranty included. Heck, I pay that much for Sirius/XM in my car and I am sure I use the Tivo a lot more. However, I just can't find a compelling reason to upgrade at this time. I am not giving up my 6 tuner Roamio with Lifetime and although I would love to replace my Elite 4 (also Lifetimed) with it, I am not sold on any 2.5" conventional drive standing up to constant recording. And, although I have one UHDTV, it has it's own 4K streaming built in for Netflix, Amazon and You Tube but one thing I can say for sure is that I cannot tell the difference between the TV's built in 4K streaming and the Roamio's 1080P streaming except for the video-based test footage. On film-based or regular programming in 4K like House of Cards, no one in my family can tell the difference from normal seating distances. Maybe when I upgrade my projector it will make more sense or maybe if cable sports went to 4K (ESPN4K?). So, I just can't compel myself right now.
> 
> I just can't make myself- yet.


I believe rightly or wrongly that my 5 TiVo Series 5 Roamios will outlast the new TiVo Series 6 BOLT in both the fans and the drives. 
The Bolt laptop devices will just run hotter and have a shorter life span than the desktop devices in my Roamios.

Somewhere down the line I will get a Bolt when it has enough features over what I have now.

SkipMode Commercial Skip is a big plus 
and for that reason alone I would buy one but it must have 8 or so tuners and 8TB of memory. 
The little 2.5" drives are only good now to about 2TB currently, as WeaKnees is using Internally in his 4 tuner 8TB model with 6TB external 
as in my 12TB WeaKnees Roamio Pro.


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## zerdian1

cwerdna said:


> On my TiVo HD (w/1 TB), the vast majority of recordings and SPs are in in SD (e.g. news, Nightly Business Report, stuff on Bloomberg and CNBC, etc.)
> 
> I only record a few things in HD due to the enormous space requirements vs. SD. Thus, most of the stuff I record in HD I try to watch and delete fairly quickly.
> 
> If I could go to maybe 5 or 6 TB, then I probably would record a LOT more in HD.


I record about one third in HD and two thirds in SD.
I have 17.5TB of storage and with the new system setup we are only up to 20% currently.
Much of what I record in HD are the new TV shows and some of the News.
The News is set up to only keep one copy so if not watched it is replaced with the latest show.

For us the Daily NEWS TiVo consists of the BBC, the ABC, CBS and NBC morning, evening NEWS and late night talk shows, plus PBS NEWS shows.
And some daytime talk shows.

My wife records her Brazilian TeleNovella shows in SD (mostly because GLOBO has not gotten around to HD yet) but the shows are deleted usually within a few hours of recording. If we travel I have it set up to keep 25 copies of her shows.

When you all start recording UHD in 4K and 8K IN A FEW YEARS, you will gobble up space even more.
Each 1TB of storage will hold 1000 hrs of SD,
140 hours of HD
and about 10 hrs of UHD.

I till not be long before we are using PetaByte (PB) Media (Disks, Optical, Holographic. etc.) 
instead of TB Media we are using for HD 
or the GB Media we were suing for SD.

George


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## aaronwt

zerdian1 said:


> I believe rightly or wrongly that my 5 TiVo Series 5 Roamios will outlast the new TiVo Series 6 BOLT in both the fans and the drives.
> The Bolt laptop devices will just run hotter and have a shorter life span than the desktop devices in my Roamios.
> 
> Somewhere down the line I will get a Bolt when it has enough features over what I have now.
> 
> SkipMode Commercial Skip is a big plus
> and for that reason alone I would buy one but it must have 8 or so tuners and 8TB of memory.
> The little 2.5" drives are only good now to about 2TB currently, as WeaKnees is using Internally in his 4 tuner 8TB model with 6TB external
> as in my 12TB WeaKnees Roamio Pro.


I have a 4TB, 2.5 inch drive in my Bolt. 4TB is the largest 2.5" available. Not 2TB.


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## aaronwt

zerdian1 said:


> I record about one third in HD and two thirds in SD.
> I have 17.5TB of storage and with the new system setup we are only up to 20% currently.
> Much of what I record in HD are the new TV shows and some of the News.
> The News is set up to only keep one copy so if not watched it is replaced with the latest show.
> 
> For us the Daily NEWS TiVo consists of the BBC, the ABC, CBS and NBC morning, evening NEWS and late night talk shows, plus PBS NEWS shows.
> And some daytime talk shows.
> 
> My wife records her Brazilian TeleNovella shows in SD (mostly because GLOBO has not gotten around to HD yet) but the shows are deleted usually within a few hours of recording. If we travel I have it set up to keep 25 copies of her shows.
> 
> When you all start recording UHD in 4K and 8K IN A FEW YEARS, you will gobble up space even more.
> Each 1TB of storage will hold 1000 hrs of SD,
> 140 hours of HD
> and about 10 hrs of UHD.
> 
> I till not be long before we are using PetaByte (PB) Media (Disks, Optical, Holographic. etc.)
> instead of TB Media we are using for HD
> or the GB Media we were suing for SD.
> 
> George


it would be much more UHD than that. First the bitrate of UHD probably won't be more than double what HD is using now. Plus the HEVC codec used for UHD can give you the same quality with about 25% the bitrate of current broadcast with MPEG2. So worst case 140 hours of HD or 70 hours of UHD.. Not ten hours of UHD.


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## wco81

What about the 30% faster playback?

Any experiences with those?

That might be worth it for some recordings. Or I might find that I can watch all recordings with that mode.


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## aaronwt

wco81 said:


> What about the 30% faster playback?
> 
> Any experiences with those?
> 
> That might be worth it for some recordings. Or I might find that I can watch all recordings with that mode.


I've been using the quick mode with my news recordings and they have been great for that. Personally I wouldn't want to use it on my normal Tv programs.
I did use quick mode on Sunday while watching a part of a couple of football games. And it also worked well too. I'll pretty much limit my Quickmode use to News programs, Sports programs and Reality Programs.


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## markjrenna

I do the same. It's great for sports and talk shows!



aaronwt said:


> I've been using the quick mode with my news recordings and they have been great for that. Personally I wouldn't want to use it on my normal Tv programs.
> I did use quick mode on Sunday while watching a part of a couple of football games. And it also worked well too. I'll pretty much limit my Quickmode use to News programs, Sports programs and Reality Programs.


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## Alan Gordon

*What will it take for me to upgrade?*

I'll be upgrading next year probably. I made the mistake of not buying "lifetime" service earlier this year, so it'll essentially be $150 for the cheapest model (provided I can swap out drives later). Not too bad for a DVR capable of 4K, built-in streamer, and MOCA all things considered.

*I do have a few disappointments:*


Four tuners. As an OTA user, my Roamio only has four tuners, so it wouldn't be a downgrade for me personally, but I was really hoping the Bolt would have six tuners.
Hard drive changes. 500GB or 1TB is too small for me. It'd be great if the 3TB drive I purchased for the Roamio could be used with the Bolt, but alas, I cannot do that.

I'm not crazy about the color, but I don't mind the shape if it allows for better ventilation.

*A big issue for me personally is knowing that another model is coming in 2016. Will this model be OTA capable, or will it be like the Roamio Pro and be cable-only?*


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## mattack

Bigg said:


> The subchannels are mostly just junk. You are a very extreme user. For all practical purposes, there is no reason to have an OTA TiVo with more than 4 tuners.


That's ridiculous. I am recording more than 4 tuners at a time just from "broadcast" stations, every night. (Yes, I have cable too.) I record the late night talk shows, and need to add padding to at least the end of them, to not have the end clipped off. So that's way more than 4 recording at ~12:35AM.


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## wco81

Wouldn't it be worse for sports and better for TV shows?

Sports is going to have motion.


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## Alan Gordon

mattack said:


> That's ridiculous. I am recording more than 4 tuners at a time just from "broadcast" stations, every night. (Yes, I have cable too.) I record the late night talk shows, and need to add padding to at least the end of them, to not have the end clipped off. So that's way more than 4 recording at ~12:35AM.


:up:

Last night I had all four tuners recording NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX between the hours of 8:00 - 10:00, and if I could receive The CW in HD OTA, I would have needed five in between the hours of 9:00 - 10:00.


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## Bigg

mattack said:


> That's ridiculous. I am recording more than 4 tuners at a time just from "broadcast" stations, every night. (Yes, I have cable too.) I record the late night talk shows, and need to add padding to at least the end of them, to not have the end clipped off. So that's way more than 4 recording at ~12:35AM.


There are people who want to record 10 or 20 things off of cable too. That doesn't mean it's a normal use case, or something that makes any sense to pursue from TiVo's perspective. 4 is more than enough for OTA. 6 is the CableCard limit, so that makes sense until the successor to CableCard is created.


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## wco81

Is that coming? Because it sure doesn't seem like the cable companies are particularly interested.

As for the number of tuners, we shouldn't have to pad recordings because the networks are inconsistent about when they start and end shows.


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## HarperVision

wco81 said:


> Is that coming? Because it sure doesn't seem like the cable companies are particularly interested............


Yes, it is.

http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=524569


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## bfollowell

Well, first of all, they'd have to come out with a device that I don't find so darned ugly. Oh, and I hate white. And did I mention that hate weird, strangely shaped devices that don't fit in well with other devices in my entertainment stack?

If they can fix all of those issues, as well as improve the Lifetime pricing, I'll consider Bolting.


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## PeteB

PeteB said:


> I love the TIVO technology, I've been an owner for many years, but now I'm done upgrading. What would it take for me to upgrade?
> 1. The tech is fine, they need to completely overhaul their business practices. Start with firing the entre development team, and getting a competent one. They still have SD screens on the Roamio. A single developer should be able to code the entire interface in a week, add a few weeks for testing...it's been years.
> 2. Some type of written agreement not to remove functionality from users. It's unacceptable how key features like podcast downloads, and suggestion viewing have been removed.
> 3. A changelog on releases.
> 4. Customer service. I've seen people praise Margaret for coming on here and throwing a few crumbs. There should be a full time person dedicated to it.
> 
> TIVo: you want to get more customers? There's how to start.


------------
I forgot to mention getting rid of those extremely annoying commercial banners evertime I hit pause. (yes, I know you can arrow down...EVERY single time you pause).


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## zerdian1

I think TiVo and Comcast have already worked out the successor to the CableCard, which started 16 months ago.
I am told by local Comcast Techs that their new replacement Xfinity X1 DVR is already without a CableCard. 
The one they were using was still 500GB and 4 tuners.

THE CABLECARDLESS X1+ HAS NO LIMITATION OF 6 TUNERS AS THE CABLECARD X1 HAD.



Bigg said:


> There are people who want to record 10 or 20 things off of cable too. That doesn't mean it's a normal use case, or something that makes any sense to pursue from TiVo's perspective. 4 is more than enough for OTA. 6 is the CableCard limit, so that makes sense until the successor to CableCard is created.


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## nowandthen

I really want to come back to Tivo, but 30 minute buffers doesn't cut it. I'm spoiled with DirecTVs 90 minute buffers. Is there some technical reason that Tivo is still only 30 minutes?

I don't like the shape or color of the Bolt, but I can place it out of sight.

What I'd like is one Bolt + 2 or 3 Tivo minis for HD distribution. I can't stomach the extra fees the satellite and cable companies charge for each additional box.

Please Tivo, longer buffers!


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## gigaguy

I totally agree, at least with Roamio's 6 tuners I can buffer 6 shows but only 30min each. The Sony DHG dvrs many of us had in 2005 offered 30-60-90min buffer options. Also the setable (and nameable) bookmarking, great to mark and name passages of a long program or even mark commercial breaks so you could skip them.


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## mattack

But were those really "DVRs", or more like "manual recorders"?

I still use my Toshiba XS32, but it's much much more like a "digital VCR" (yes, I know the C is for cassette), even though it too has a couple of features that newer things (including Tivo) didn't have/don't have -- play faster than real time (currently only the Bolt has this), and editing recordings, and dubbing to DVD -- which is very useful with edited recordings. Though nowadays of course I just transfer to computer. I still wish I could do basic edits on the Tivo before transferring to computer.


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## astrohip

nowandthen said:


> I really want to come back to Tivo, but 30 minute buffers doesn't cut it. I'm spoiled with DirecTVs 90 minute buffers. Is there some technical reason that Tivo is still only 30 minutes?


Oft requested feature. AFAIK, TiVo has never commented on their buffers, so we have no way of knowing.

I have both TiVo and Genie. I love the 90 minute buffer on my Genie, but love the six live tuners on my Roamio even more.

Now if they got together and had a baby...


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## HarperVision

mattack said:


> But were those really "DVRs", or more like "manual recorders"? I still use my Toshiba XS32, but it's much much more like a "digital VCR" (yes, I know the C is for cassette), even though it too has a couple of features that newer things (including Tivo) didn't have/don't have -- play faster than real time (currently only the Bolt has this), and editing recordings, and dubbing to DVD -- which is very useful with edited recordings. Though nowadays of course I just transfer to computer. I still wish I could do basic edits on the Tivo before transferring to computer.


Yes, they were very much "DVRs". They had guides, scheduled recordings, series/season passes, etc. No less a DVR than TiVo or any of the MSO offerings.



astrohip said:


> Oft requested feature. AFAIK, TiVo has never commented on their buffers, so we have no way of knowing. I have both TiVo and Genie. I love the 90 minute buffer on my Genie, but love the six live tuners on my Roamio even more. Now if they got together and had a baby...


Agreed. If directv offered a TiVo Roamio style DVR I would be in heaven and ditching TWC TV completely in a New York minute!!! I still can't believe the PQ difference since I got hooked up withy them again with their a genie lite and a thr22 DirecTiVo! It didn't used to be this bad. I was like a frog being slowly boiled with the TWC picture quality getting more and more compressed and crappy that I didn't really notice until recently, then tried DirecTV again and was like...


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## midnightmarauder

back in the day you could bash into the TiVo and change some coding in order to get more buffer time. I see things have changed.


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## lessd

midnightmarauder said:


> back in the day you could bash into the TiVo and change some coding in order to get more buffer time. I see things have changed.


Why is buffer time so important, as you can just record up to the 6 (4 for the Bolt) all the time. When I look at my tuner use I find many on the same ch, I can change that if I want but with the ability to record why does one care about buffer time, or how many of the total group of TiVo users cares not just counting this group on this Forum, I would think it would a very small %. I put in many TiVo to many families and never heard anybody complain or even talk about buffer time.


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## astrohip

lessd said:


> Why is buffer time so important


It's not important, it's handy. It's nice to have. It's useful.

This has been debated to death, and doesn't really need another 500 posts on the pros & cons. Don't tell me to "just record everything" or whatever mantra you think explains why you are right.

I have three working TiVos, and have had many more older ones (retired). I love TiVo, understand it well, and know how little use buffers should be.

Yet... I also have DirecTV. And I can only tell you that I find the 90 minute buffer very useful. And that's why one of the most frequent questions DirecTV users have, when they switch to TiVo, is about the buffers. It's just *very* handy.

Should you need it? No.
Do you need it? No.
But do you miss it? Yes.

So please don't tell me why YOU think I don't need it.


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## midnightmarauder

lessd said:


> Why is buffer time so important, as you can just record up to the 6 (4 for the Bolt) all the time. When I look at my tuner use I find many on the same ch, I can change that if I want but with the ability to record why does one care about buffer time, or how many of the total group of TiVo users cares not just counting this group on this Forum, I would think it would a very small %. I put in many TiVo to many families and never heard anybody complain or even talk about buffer time.


Main thing I like about an extended buffer time is coming home and finding I missed a newsbroadcast or something... I can rewind all the way back and not miss any of it. Or if I'm in the middle of a show live, and someone comes in I like to pause so we can chat and sometimes my buffer runs out so I then have to hit record or tell them to shut up.


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## krkaufman

nowandthen said:


> I really want to come back to Tivo, but 30 minute buffers doesn't cut it. I'm spoiled with DirecTVs 90 minute buffers. Is there some technical reason that Tivo is still only 30 minutes? ...
> 
> What I'd like is one Bolt + 2 or 3 Tivo minis for HD distribution. I can't stomach the extra fees the satellite and cable companies charge for each additional box.
> 
> Please Tivo, longer buffers!


Sounds like the question becomes... Are the longer 90-minute buffers worth up to $30 per month?


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## HarperVision

krkaufman said:


> Sounds like the question becomes... Are the longer 90-minute buffers worth up to $30 per month?


No, the question is still, why doesn't TiVo use longer buffers? You shouldn't have to resort to keeping or switching to DirecTV just to get a feature like this that should already be implemented in a so called "premium" DVR, the one that invented it all?


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## trip1eX

I rarely watch live tv so don't much care about buffer size. 

But not sure why this wouldn't take 2 seconds to implement. I doubt anyone would notice a few hours of missing storage space from a modern day Tivo.

But knowing Tivo, it is all based on some old coding from 15 years ago that is tied to other functionality in some archaic way that would break if the 30 minutes was changed.


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## krkaufman

HarperVision said:


> No, the question is still, why doesn't TiVo use longer buffers? You shouldn't have to resort to keeping or switching to DirecTV just to get a feature like this that should already be implemented in a so called "premium" DVR, the one that invented it all?


Well, that's YOUR question, but I wasn't replying to you or anyone else, aside from poster nowandthen, as clearly indicated by both the quoted text and content of my message (i.e. "up to $30 per month" as associated provider cost equivalent for "+ 2 or 3 Tivo minis").

And in the poster's case, they seem to only be hung-up on the buffer length in making a shift to TiVo, and their only expressed conditions are "buffer length" vs cost per additional screen. If they have some other questions in mind to evaluate their choice, they haven't expressed them.

Is there any chance that TiVo is really, finally going to implement this suggested buffer change in a timeframe that will be relevant to *the poster*? So the question for the poster remains... (see previous)


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## krkaufman

HarperVision said:


> No, the question is still, why doesn't TiVo use longer buffers? You shouldn't have to resort to keeping or switching to DirecTV just to get a feature like this that should already be implemented in a so called "premium" DVR, the one that invented it all?


As for the general principle, I'm in agreement and have posted similar opinions on the subject in recent months. (For which, of course, I was harangued by others telling me to just record whatever I want to watch, etc.)


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## lessd

krkaufman said:


> As for the general principle, I'm in agreement and have posted similar opinions on the subject in recent months. (For which, of course, I was harangued by others telling me to just record whatever I want to watch, etc.)


I just wonder what % of TiVo owners even know how long the buffer is, and what it is used for. I use full power saving mode so I have no buffer when I start to watch TV using that TiVo, but I understand why some people want a longer buffer, but of all TiVo users what % want that, and I not talking about people just on the TCF. To me a much more useful thing would to make the Mini time out 12 hours so it could be used in the bedroom for people that want the TV on all night.


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