TiVo TCD746500 Premiere DVR - Black

• Connects to your cable service and replaces your cable box. Works with HD digital antenna, does not support satellite*
• Records two shows at once, up to 75 hours of HD programming
• Integrated access to Netflix, Pandora, YouTube, Hulu Plus and more**
• Full HD support, including 1080i and 1080p
• Monthly subscription required

Tivo has made a fairly small upgrade to their base Premiere model, increased the hard drive from 320GB (45 hours of HD) to 500GB (75 hours of HD). The old 320GB model is still for sale in some areas, here at Amazon, for example, but not on the Tivo website any longer. The price of the 320GB model had been falling, and tends to hover at around $75. This model is twice that at the moment, but you can expect retailers to start discounting it eventually. As the price falls towards a hundred, this becomes a much better deal.

In the process of upgrading their base model's storage space, they've also changed their Premiere subscription rate, reducing it from $20 to $15 per month for new contracts only, and reducing the Multi-service discount to $13/mo. You can still get the new rate on your old Premiere, even the 320GB model by signing up for a new 1 year commitment though. There is also one relatively recent feature, now officially available to all Tivos (including the older 320GB model) called multiroom streaming. Instead of actually having to transfer programs between tivos and having some wait time and multiple copies, you can stream shows between two subscribed Premieres in different rooms, which really is more convenient if you have a wired connection to both tivos.

Should you get this 500GB model instead of the still available, cheaper 320GB? If you feel constrained by the 45 hour limit, I might recommend waiting until this new base model gets marked down -paying nearly double for less than twice the space is iffy. I don't really recommend the expansion drive option as an alternative to the 500GB model, because of the way Tivo formats them -such that if your external drive fails, you lose all of your recorded content, even those shows stored on the internal drive.

But if you can't wait or you aren't as cheap as me, it's a great device and the tivo experience is still top notch. With lower subscription rates and more features, it's a great time to buy any premiere model.

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I've been waiting for years for a product like this, and I never thought I'd see it at this price. It was advertised in our local paper two days ago and I promptly logged on to Amazon and ordered one. It arrived the next day.

My goal was to replace my satellite service with free off-the-air programming, but I couldn't live without HD DVR and previous solutions were too expensive. My satellite service costs $60 a month (after my discount!) and all I use it for is local network TV... that's just ridiculous. Now my bill will be one-quarter that with no real compromise.

Set-up was pretty painless, but it did take a while to do a channel scan, download guide data, and do a system software update, so be patient. Obviously, if you need a rooftop antenna, that's the hardest part.

Note that you can use the basic functionality before signing up for the TiVo service (but I believe that after a week, it forces you to). This was good for me, because this purchase was a huge gamble.... Over The Air (OTA) HD reception has always been spotty in my neighborhood and in the past, unless the antenna was perfectly aligned, I only got local spanish stations, so I figured there was a 50% chance I'd have to return this. Turns out, the tuner in the TiVo is remarkable! With my cheap Radio Shack antenna, I now pick up 84(!!!) stations, mostly from San Francisco, almost 50 miles away. And I haven't seen a glitch yet.

Also note that once you sign up for TiVo service, it can take up to 24 hours for your box to register and activate, but after an hour or two, you can go to Network Settings and force an early registration.

Linking the box to my Pandora, Amazon and Netflix accounts was a snap.

I haven't tried linking to an iPad or Android device yet.

The only complaints so far are minor:

* The UI has an odd mix of HighDef and Low-resolution screens (the classic TiVo look). I'm very surprised that a company that puts such an emphasis on the user experience isn't consistent in their UI. Navigating to the third-party services seems a bit clunky for TiVo as well. (I'm actually a UI developer for a competitor's DVR, but TiVo's OTA capabilities makes it the most cost-effective choice for me. ;^)

* When setting up Season Passes, it sometimes defaults to a station that I do not actually receive and I have to force it to choose the appropriate local station.

* I was also hoping there would be a tighter integration between the traditional content (DVR, OTA, Cable) and the internet services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, but you still have to navigate to a dedicated Netflix environment to get Netflix content. Wouldn't it be cool if the search feature also looked in these accounts? You bet it would. The digital world needs a good content aggregator product. This one comes closer, but leaves room for new features later on.

PROS:

* AWESOME dual tuner

* Great TiVo DVR

* Built in Internet apps (Netflix, et al)

* Fantastic price (plus not-so-great $15 month for TiVo service, or $499 for lifetime)

* Home Networking, and file sharing with computers

CONS

* None at all. Deal of the year.

I just installed the TiVo Desktop while writing this. No problems, and now my TiVo has access to my complete iTunes library and I can copy recordings from the TiVo to the Mac (although it's a bit slow).

Wow. This thing really impresses me. This is going to be one of the coolest tech gadgets I ever bought (and I've bought a LOT) and it's going to be pure money in my pocket after 3 months.

The return of [almost] free TV with all the convenience and quality and no almost no compromises!

Thanks, TiVo!

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I've been using TiVo's for about 10 years--mostly via the boxes they produced for use with DirecTV. I have always raved about my TiVo just like I rave about my iPhone. TiVo has always been better than the generic DVR's, which I have unfortunately used, as well. So, when I finally decided to ditch the satellite dish and switch to streaming and over-the-air HD, TiVo Premiere seemed like the obvious solution for me. I have been using it for a couple of weeks now, and I have to admit that I am fairly disappointed. Here are the significant drawbacks that I have encountered:

Streaming with TiVo Premiere compared to my Roku box is far too complicated and unnatural. In fact, after hours of trying to log into my Hulu Plus account unsuccessfully, including emails to both Hulu and TiVo, the effort was a bust. I got the Hulu welcome screen but could not play a single video. It just wouldn't work. However, in another room of the home hooked up to the same network, my Roku box was working just fine on Hulu Plus.

Amazon Instant Video is also a bust on TiVo Premiere. I was unable to log into my Amazon Prime account, as I do on my Roku box (there was simply no way to log in--it wasn't an option). Hence, I didn't have all the free videos that are available to me for instant viewing on my Roku box. When I contacted Amazon for help, I was told that I can only download videos on my TiVo Premiere, not stream them. Worse yet, I didn't get all the free content for being an Amazon Prime Member. For example, on my Roku box, which is always logged into my Amazon Prime account, I can immediately stream episodes of Blues Clues for the kids FOR FREE. With TiVo Premiere, 1 episode is $1.99, and you have to wait for it to download. No thanks!

Setting up my TiVo Premiere took far too long. It literally took me several hours to hook everything up and go through numerous setup screens and downloads before I could use the unit. Still, it did not go off without a hitch. Somehow, my Tivo Premiere does not know what stations I get over the air. I have to tell it. Dumb. Very dumb. Further, when I use the channel up/down arrows on the remote, I can only get up to channel 28 before TiVo takes me back to channel 2, even though I get channel 29. I have to manually type in 29 to get there. Weak.

In the end, I decided that TiVo Premiere is still my best/only option for a DVR that can record over-the-air broadcasts in HD with a halfway decent user interface. However, I have decided to supplement both TiVo Premiere DVR's with a Roku box beside it. Why should I have to buy a Roku when I already bought a TiVo? Because the TiVo is SO BAD at anything except recording TV. I would think that one day TiVo will fix their software to work better as both a streaming box and a DVR. However, I have already bought my Roku boxes, and I doubt anybody will give me a refund when that someday arrives. Very disappointing.

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We have used TiVo in various forms since 1999. There is no better DVR, period. Just a couple of cautions though for the Premier versions.

First, the HD menus require a broadband connection to work, no broadband, no HD menus and no on demand content. TiVo does not include a wireless connector (at least with most boxes), so either you have your broadband modem, with a spare ethernet port, near your TiVo, or, you pay extra for a TiVo wireless device, and it MUST be a TiVo wireless device, so box price plus at least $65 for the wireless connector (MSRP around $90). And, even if you are going SD menus and no Internet, you still can't get the guide data without a phone connection, and guess what, there is no phone connector in the back of the box, you have to buy a TiVo USB to phone connector device.

Second, and this one was hard to find in the small print. One of the best deals for on demand content is Amazon Prime for ($79/yr). This price includes many thousands of movies and TV shows at no additional cost, however these "free" shows are streaming only, and for what must be contractual reasons, are NOT available on TiVo, even though TiVo supports renting and buying "downloadable" shows from Amazon. The work around is simply to get a cheap streaming device like Roku ($50), which works beautifully, steaming all the HD Amazon Prime content you want, assuming you have a good broadband connection. Of course this is completely separate from TiVo, and will requrie its own HDMI connections and switching back and forth. Maybe this will change in the future, as Netflix streams fine with TiVo (though the Roku Netflix interface is faster and easier to use), so the issue is not technical, only contractual/legal.

I am reasonably savvy in this area, and both of these items were things that I did not realize before I purchased my TiVo Premier. As an aside, we are satellite cutting, but we live in an urban area with 20 or so high quality HD over the air channels, plus the on demand content over the Internet has becoming increasingly robust and cheap, and well integrated into HDTV and AVR with the work of TiVo. So we are cutting our monthly paid TV content fee by about 60%.

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I've loved all of my Tivos. I've had several of them over the years. Most recently, our Tivo Series 3 has been great for recording over the air TV since we cut the cord a year ago. We've been using it with a rooftop antenna, and it's been working great. Then the hard drive died on the Series 3. It was nearly 7 years old, and a new Premiere is only $99. So I thought, why not get the new thing, and save the trouble of replacing the hard drive? So I got a Premiere. That was a mistake, because the OTA tuner for the Premiere is awful. Really and truly awful. Channels that we have no trouble getting on the Series 3, or on the regular TV, or on the other TV, just won't come in on the Premiere. Plugged in to the exact same antenna cable, a sea of pixelation and dropped channels. After some diagnostic work, it appears that the tuners on the Premiere don't handle multipath signals well, and this was my problem. It's apparently a common problem with the Premiere.

Essentially, I have two options. I could spend a couple hundred dollars getting someone up onto my roof to improve an antenna system that works just fine for everything else, or I could return the Premiere, and just replace the hard drive in my old Series 3. I returned the Premiere and spent the afternoon getting the old Series 3 working again with a new hard drive, and all is well again. Except that now I have to go to the trouble of sending the Premiere back to Amazon, and calling Tivo to cancel the subscription.

I did have a chance to try the new features of the Premiere before I returned it. There's not a single new feature on the Premiere that I don't have on the Series 3, except for the HD menu system, which I personally thought was cluttered and hard to navigate (just personal preference). I went back to the SD menus after about 20 minutes.

All in all, not a good experience. I still love my Tivo, just not this one.