There's a new TiVo out.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/08/20/tivo-roamio-plus-review/
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/20/4638390/tivo-roamio-pro-review

Most interesting is the "Pro" model ($600 + service), which includes a 3TB hard drive and six tuners, and they've included a faster CPU, so the UI isn't as sluggish as before. Tack on a TiVo Mini ($99 + service) and I could make the TV in our bedroom far more useful than before.

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

The Mini with lifetime service? $250

The TiVo Romio with lifetime service? $1100 ($100 less if you've already got a TiVo in the house, given their multi-service discount)

My total cash outlay for home TV awesomeness: $1250. Then, my current TiVo Premiere XL (with lifetime service) seems to command $460-500 on eBay, so the net cash outlay is $750 or so.

Thoughts?

I'm excited to see a new Tivo out, even though I'm unlikely to be buying one anytime soon, just not watching a lot of TV these days. This seems to be the "One Box" that the Premiere was touted as being, and with the faster hardware and support for Flash, it should perform well and get more frequent app updates - as I understand it.

The jump between the Pro and the Plus, which only nets you a larger HDD, 1TB->3TB, is on the big size IMO, but this is a pretty normal practice. A 1TB would meet my needs, and in time I'd probably upgrade to the max size, just because - this is assuming Tivo have not blocked aftermarket HDD upgrades.

The promise of outside the house streaming is interesting, and I do hope will including streaming to standard browsers. Stream anywhere will very much make the Roamio the hub that Tivo want it to be. That and significant app support on the Mini's.

I'd have liked to seen the Mini's dropped in favor of a Stream requirement (to convert from standard TiVo MPEG-2 to a Roku support MPEG-4) and a Roku Channel due to the Roku's lower price point and better application integration. But this would put less money in TiVo's pocket.

My life is in flux right now, so who knows, maybe in 6 months I'll have need of more tuners or Mini support, but today's need are met but a two tuner Premiere. And if I needed to stream from it to a second TV, the spare lifetimed Premiere I picked up for cheap will do nicely.

Might DIAL Support mean that a Mini could be replaced by a Chromecast?

You could certainly imagine somebody developing a proxy server that runs on your computer that sucks out content from your TiVo, converts it to h264, and streams it to a Chromecast. (Maybe this would include an on-screen UI, or maybe it would use your phone. I don't know.)

The TiVo UI, itself, is built in Flash, and given the glacial pace of software development at TiVo, will not be rewritten any time soon to run in HTML5.

Got a quick lesson on DIAL and Chromecast, in short both are DIAL players, so much for my wishes

The proxy server idea would only work for unprotected content, as it would be copying it, not streaming it. Though a cool project none the less.

Dammit, you are making me want one...for no good reason!

I'm kind of salivating over that top-end Roamio. I currently have the Premiere XL4, so there aren't a ton of upgrades, but the fact that it has a Stream built in is pretty big, plus two more tuners, antenna support, and a much faster interface. It also has an RF remote which is a huge improvement over bluetooth (anything is an improvement over bluetooth).

Here's the thing, those upgrades aren't enough for me because of one thing: Tivo doesn't support Android yet. Apparently they're working on it, but I've heard that before.

I also still don't like the banner at the top of the interface. But I can live with that.

antenna support is only on the bottom-end Roamio, and at that it is either all OTA or all cable, no mix & match

The lack of mix-and-match is a bit unfortunate. My parents are using a Premiere in dual mode, because their condo provides them free, standard definition, analog cable and they supplement this with an OTA antenna to get high-def locals. I don't know how common this usage pattern might be, but TiVo has basically killed it.

(I suppose you could buy *two* Roamios, one for OTA and one for cable. But somehow that's just wrong.)

Two Roamios wouldn't work either, as they don't support analog cable. Now might be the time to pickup a spare Premiere...

Except the only Premiere models that support streaming are the ones that are cable-only, right?

I assume you mean Roamios, and yes, the only Roamios with iDevice (and Android apparently coming late Fall) streaming built in are the Pro and Plus. The bottom end Roamio can use the same external Streamer that the Premiere4 have today.

If you did mean Premiere, then yes, you need a 4 tuner Premiere to support streaming to a Mini, and the only 4 tuner ones are cable-only.

The latter. Yes.

As attractive as the Roamio is, I think I'm going to skip it and just get a Stream. It just doesn't make sense if you have a Premiere XL4. The only huge addition that the Roamio will have is streaming outside the home. That's huge. I wonder if Tivo will add that to the Stream at all...