Now Tivo boxes offered for Direct TV clients.

Where did you read that?

 

AT&T Begins Rolling out DirecTV Now Beta 2.0

More stuff.

 

This headline is misleading. The article must have been written by a bot or something, combining 2 separate things together.

 

I think it's over a year old also.

 

And some of the comments go back to 2012.

 

I can't hardly find any references to TiVo on the DirecTV site.

-KP

 

Agree. It looks like one of those bot sites.

 

Given the dateline, I'm going to guess this article is from about the time DirecTV looked in their warehouse, saw a pile of DirecTiVos, and said "hey, let's dust these off and offer them again". The quality of research these days has declined to zero, so many people just decided to believe it was a new release and regurgitated the press release as 'articles'. You think Hydra is bad with the gory murder of features, the DirecTiVo is what...a series 2 with half the features slaughtered?

 

The THR22 is effectively an HR10-250 that can receive MPEG4 transmissions and connect to your home network. Even basic DirecTV features such as VoD aren't supported. (The box claims it can do it, but DirecTV now admits that it doesn't work.) It satisfies my wife, who doesn't care about the other features, but I think most of us would be disappointed, especially as there's a $5 TiVo surcharge for it. (We also have an HR44.)

 

Bummer. I've never been a DirecTV customer, but kind of hoped this was real.. for "more competition" even if between Tivo boxes.. Yes, I'm streaming stuff nowadays, but usually only AFTER I have Tivoed it (and watch the stream on Hulu no commercials which I mostly have because _for me_ Tivo downloading to iPad doesn't really work). I want to be able to record stuff and keep it as long as I want as an option... even if it's copy protected and only lives on my Tivo (yes the hard drive will eventually die).

If I could stream everything 'forever' (or with expiration dates known well in advance, with the UI being able to easily sort by expiration), then I'd be a lot more willing to stream everything. (Though I would hope I could also pre-download-copy-protected-version to deal with poor connectivity.)

Basically, I was hoping a 'new' DirecTV Tivo would keep something like the existing cable model going a bit longer.

 

I have both TiVo (on Comcast) and DirecTV, with one of their Genies. One area where TiVo really stands out is trickplay. The FF/REW, 8 sec rewind, etc, is far superior on TiVo. Miles ahead. And of course SkipMode.

I would be thrilled if DirecTV offered a true TiVo experience. Having said that, the rest of their DVR experience isn't bad. It's gotten much better than it was 5-6 years ago.

 

AT&T/DirecTV is never going to offer another TiVo. In fact, I'd say that the current generation of Genies is the end of the road for that format of DVRs. They've stated that the look and feel of the UI they've developed for v2.0 of their DirecTV Now app (which I'm currently beta testing) will eventually be rolled out across all their TV services. After DTV Now, it will be incorporated into a revamp of the mobile app for DTV satellite users. And, eventually, they've stated, it will be incorporated into the actual STBs/DVRs for DTV satellite too.

I think that will happen with the next generation of DTV STBs, which were submitted to the FCC for approval last October. This forthcoming line of STBs (code named Osprey, with model numbers starting "C71-KW") are thin clients (no hard drive) like the current C61 Genie Mini, and will likely be used in conjunction with the next-gen HS-27 home server, which actually contains the satellite tuners and DVR hard drive. Like the current HS-17, the HS-27 will act as a central hub for live and recorded satellite TV and feed that content wirelessly to the little C71 boxes connected to TVs around the home.

This C71 box, per the FCC docs, will run Google's Android TV operating system. I'm sure it will be a customized version though (Android TV Operator Tier) that auto-boots into the next-gen AT&T UI (basically the same UI as in the upcoming new DTV Now app). But the user will be able to navigate away from the main AT&T UI and launch apps from the Google Play Store such as Netflix, YouTube, Pandora, etc.

I'm wondering if AT&T won't also use one of the C71 models as a standalone STB for accessing their OTT TV service. They've stated that they're going to take the underpinnings of DTV Now and extend it to support a second OTT service, which comes with its own dedicated STB, to roll out later in 2018.