TiVo. Its a brand name everyone knows. They practically invented the DVR. But after doing so they haven’t done much to innovate on their initial success, and that has the left the door wide open for cable companies to offer very similar equipment. Cable providers have been leasing boxes that offer many of the same features, but also many of the same limitations. The primary limitations being the number of shows that can be recorded simultaneously, and the storage size.
TiVo is now looking to address those two specific problems by introducing a new product: the TiVo Premier Elite. It doubles the amount of television tuners by making four of them available. It also offers a massive increase in storage capacity by bundling in a two terabyte hard drive. The gigantic hard drive should be big enough to store 300 hours of recorded HDTV!
All if this could come at a very high premium though. Estimates are that the Elite could retail for as much as $600 to $800, and that may not even include the monthly TiVo subscription fee. The sticker shock isn’t the only thing TiVo will have to work around. The Elite only has digital cable tuners on board. Because of this they have filled with the FCC to attempt to get a waiver to allow them to sell the device without an analog tuner built in.
Sources: Advanced Television, FCC
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This TiVo is aimed more at the custom integrators and not the regular market. It will only be carried in Magnolia Best Buys and other select online retailers. They also plan to show it off at CEDIA. I still know people like myself though who will more than likely be picking one up come release time. Then again we never consider the monthly fee and only look at them with lifetime.
I wouldn’t say it is a massive increase in size either. They have offered 2 tuner models with 1TB drives for several years starting with the TiVo HD XL. It is essentially two of these put together since it is also THX certified like the XL model.
Now the Q, which is the version of the Elite the Cable Companies like RCN and SuddenLink will be offering to their subscribers only comes with a 500GB drive so far. Of course since it won’t be available for retail, no waiver is needed for this version.
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