TiVo Mini review

[Poke]

Hmm did not know that Tivo had something like this.


http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/11/tivo-mini-review/

 

[mike123abc]

They had it available for cable systems that used TiVos as the cable company DVR for a while now. Nice to see they are releasing it to the general public now.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

This is a brand new product and it requires a Tivo Premiere to work.

 

[mike123abc]

http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/07/tivo-mini-available-suddenlink-price/

Suddenlink for example had it last month for their subs.

 

[Neutron]

Looks like the same set up as the C31 genie clients for Directv.

 

[jayn_j]

This is a brand new product and it requires a Tivo Premiere to work.

Worse than that. It requires the 4 tuner cable only TIVO. It is not compatible with my 2 tuner OTA TIVO, and that seems to be a marketing decision, and not a technical one.

Note that it also is not WiFi, and requires a hard ethernet connection.

 

[Foxbat]

Not to mention the monthly charge!

 

[mike123abc]

I helped my brother install his TiVo mini yesterday. It was pretty uneventful. We first put in a MOCA bridge since he did not have an ethernet drop. Then we installed the TiVo mini. The hardest part was getting the connections behind the TV that was wall mounted and we did not want to take it down. The mini booted up took about 15 minutes to set up. During the setup it asked if we wanted to use Ethernet or MOCA. We said MOCA, it went and found its address via DHCP, contacted the TiVo service and then downloaded the guide data.

It works really well. It is a touch slower on skip forward and back (we activated the instant 30 second skip). Aside from that it was hard to tell we were not at the TiVo.

It looks like it does everything in the box (guide, IPTV like Netflix, etc.). The only thing it seems to use the "master" TiVo for is a network disk.

We did dedicate a tuner to it.

All in all it was pretty fast and painless.

Since my brother was able to replace 2 HD DVR boxes with the TiVo XL4/TiVo mini he will save $33/month (17.50 per cable DVR vs the single $2 cable card for the TiVo). He will save the cost of the TiVo/Mini in under 3 years.

 

[Foxbat]

It looks like it does everything in the box (guide, IPTV like Netflix, etc.).

I heard from some Tech pundits that Netflix was one of the missing services from the TiVo mini. Your brother's mini had it?

 

[mike123abc]

I heard from some Tech pundits that Netflix was one of the missing services from the TiVo mini. Your brother's mini had it?

No, it did not have netflix on it, TiVo is promising it sometime in the future.