http://gizmodo.com/5484003/tivo-premiere...l+%28Gizmodo%29

I'm still using an upgraded Series2. Of course, I only have SDTV, and my cable box will take a serial input. What are you guys using?

I'm not likely to change TiVos until this one dies or my TV dies (and I get an HDTV...), but what about y'all?


EDIT: oh, look, links work with out [ url] [/url ] now. How weird.

As a Tivo fanatic who owns an S3 (lifetime) and an aging (but upgraded via HDD) S2DT, I say 'Meh.'

Their press teaser made it sound like a big deal.

These are Tivo HD and XL's with a new GUI, that we won't get on our S3's. We are 'supposed' to get Pandora and FrameChannel. I do like the new GUI, it'd be nice to have the video playing while you're going through menus. I still wonder if they upped the PowerPC CPU, but they didn't even mention it. That would've been a big deal.

I will be getting a new plasma soon and will need a new Tivo for it. I'll probably go with the Premiere and find some Weaknees tools to up the HDD myself to 2GB, which IIRC is what the HD XL can do.

The remote is cool but it's almost like they copied the Boxee one. I can do w/o the Bluetooth remote because I use DVRemote on my iPhone which provides the keyboard functionality for free.

I just picked up some Tivo HD's and are enjoying them very much....

sirquack are enjoying his Tivos.

So the new interface is done with Adobe Flash, huh? Are there any other consumer electronic products with Flash-built UIs?

It won't work with Satellite HD. Ergo, it's useless to me.

Actually, I'd like to return to Tivo. "Back in the day", with Cable + SD, our first DVR's were Tivos. They were great. Changed how we view TV forever. Tivo still has the best DVR experience on the market and I'm sure the S4 will continue that. Would be hard for me to give up my free triple-tuner HD DVR that Dish provides, as it's DVR functions are ok. And have to go back to our horrible local cable provider.

On a technical front, it looks great. But I think it's pretty lame that Tivo still charges $300-$500 for an HD DVR box that doesn't include built-in Wifi. That's so 2003. How much are WiFi chipsets these days, a few cents? Seems odd that a state-of-the-art brand new DVR with a focus on the online experience would lack such a basic thing. I guess it's a good business opportunity to gouge their customers out of another ninety bucks for a WiFi dongle. And people think Apple overcharges....

But really, I look forward to the day when we can get away from streaming programming and the need for DVR's all together. Just have everything be on-demand, ala AppleTV, Boxee, Hulu, etc.

I’ve been looking at Tivo or Moxi for some time now. I’m not sure which one would be better. AVS has some great info on both. Here is a comparison chart with links to discussions on each unit. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1204433

A buddy of mine keeps telling me I need to just dump cable and buy an Apple TV. He is an IT / PC geek though. What he considers simple, I consider a headache, so I’ve been resistant to his suggestions, but am wondering if he’s onto something. I’m tired of being forced to buy mega channel packages to see a couple of my favorite shows.

You might want to give Boxee a try. It's a 'little' geeky but it does give you an idea of what you can get from a media streamer like the AppleTV. Think Windows Media Center. Boxee works on Windows/Mac/Linux/AppleTV.

Tivo announced a return to DirecTV last year. But as is typical, they take forever to happen. Like, what happened to the Tivo interface on Comcast? It rolled out back east and then disappeared.

Indeed they did. And, just as you've said, I'm still waiting for it to happen...

I am optimistic that DirectTV & Tivo can make it happen. They did before, and the DirecTivo was a great DVR. They can do it again. Dish will lose and DirecTV will gain a customer the day they release a DirecTivo Dual-HD satellite tuner.

I don't intend to derail this topic, but if you can use iTunes, you can use an AppleTV. The ATV is very easy to use. We've discussed the ATV a few times around here. Do a search and you'll find some threads.

I just find it hard to believe that paying for TV shows via iTunes or other can be as economical as getting them all-ish over the cable/satellite pipe for a flat rate/month.
My other issue is that it's not possible to legitimately get auto racing without paying for cable or satellite. Yes, you can see the 3 races that get shown per year on broadcast, but that ain't enough to really understand what's going on with a championship.

I pay roughly 88.00 months for everything including HD channels, minus the movie channels, the ones that run only old movies, Also, it includes rental for HD-PVR cause I was stupid enough to believe they were coming up with a new model in just a short while. Wrong choice.

Neither my wife or I watch a lot of TV, I think. I threw the nine regular shows that I could think of into a spreadsheet and added up the 1.99 for SD and threw in some in HD for 2.99. I'm already at $96.00 a month based on an episode/week times 4 weeks.

So for the luxury of watching when I want (which the PVR mostly lets me do anyways) I'm already over what I paid before and that's without accounting for any random, spur of the moment programming I might choose on top of it.

The web page mentions a "season's pass" choice which might be more economical but I think I may watch less TV than many people so I can't imagine how this would be economical for a more avid watcher.

Definitely a cool device though that I wish I could justify owning. It does many things besides TV, as has been pointed out.

I don't disagree. The cost model isn't quite there yet. But it's also highly dependent on what and how many shows you watch.

I know people that pay $50-$60-$80+/month to watch four or five shows a week. Shows where the "Season Pass" via iTunes (or whatever) would be $12-$15 per show. So paying $60, $80, $100 for every episode of the half dozen shows you watch is actually less than paying $60-$80/month for the 3/4 months each "season" runs.

But of course, if you watch four-dozen different shows, all the time, or just like to channel surf, then an ala-carte model doesn't work so well.

And absolutely, sporting events are a problem. Though I think they'll figure it out. NFL Sunday Ticket works, as do Pay-Per-View events. But no, until you can just click a few buttons and watch that race or game that's occuring right now, it won't work.

It's getting there, however. I noticed our AppleTV had many of the Olympic events broken down into individual programs. So if you wanted to watch just figure skating, you could buy the Ladies' Short Program, or the Long Program, or Men's practice, or the whole season pass for all of the men's or women's figure skating events, etc. They didn't have it for every event but they had several of them. But it was the day after the event actually aired, making it less useful. Had those events been live, that would have been quite nice to just "buy a ticket" to those individual events. Rather than having to sit through the 4-hour block of NBC's programming just to get to the 30 minutes of event that I cared about, for example.

Oh well for D*.

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=188664&site=lr_cable