picture in picture

Every feature takes resource to implement, so you have to weigh the usefulness against the time and cost to develop and support the feature. For tuner viewing on Tivo, PiP would be nice to have but not all that necessary. With Tivo, you can pause the tuner, switch another tuner, watch for a while, switch back first tuner, and resume. PiP would still have some usefulness on Tivo. Like, there are times when there might be two games on at the same time. You want to watch one but keep an eye on the other at the same time. PiP would be useful there, but most of the time people will just pause and switch between each tuner as necessary.

However, one place it would be really useful to have PiP is with ad-supported streaming services. Since they have unskippable commercials, it would be nice to be able to switch to a tuner or recorded show and have the streaming channel in a PiP window during that time. But again, that feature would probably be used so rarely that it wouldn't be worth it to implement.

 

The utility is in watching live TV on the OTA product lines. Back in the NTSC days, it was common for TVs to have multiple tuners because whether OTA or cable, the channels were all on and available without decoding. Mitsubishi implemented what was my absolute favorite feature of all time, they allowed watching one channel in the main screen while putting a second channel in the PIP window. This worked for OTA as well as cable while cable was still analog. What was so nice about this was the pip channel had its own channel changer so you could peruse what else was on, and a swap button to throw the main channel into the pip and switch the pip channel into the main screen. This was absolutely fantastic when looking for content. If a commercial came on the main screen, swap to the pip channel, and vice versa. The proliferation of set top boxes kind-of ended the utility of this capability because of the need to switch inputs. It's been a long time since this capability existed, and TiVo could bring it back for live TV watchers. Not everyone who owns a DVR uses the DVR for time shifting. Some of us just want to see what's on when it's on.

 

My tv has PIP and P and P. It supports multiple inputs. It is only 2 years old.

 

Advertisements

Does it have dedicated buttons for changing the PIP channel, with a swap, or do you need to juggle remotes to do that?

PIP for multiple inputs is not new, that's not what I'm saying.

 

Like this one here

 

I use an AVR as a switcher. But yes. If I used it that way.

 

Sounds difficult to me.

 

Set each tuner to the channel you want, in my case 6 different channels, then select live TV (upper right button on TiVo remote) to rotate through tuners. Each tuner stores 30 minutes of live video so you can go back 30 minutes on each tuner. Poor man's PiP but easy and free to implement.

 

Not the same at all. I use PIP to keep an eye on a game while watching other stuff.

 

I know its not the same. The PiP debate have been going on for years in this forum. I was offering another way to take advantage of all the TiVo tuners.

 

If you search through the forum here you can see a picture of something called “sports bar mode” (or some similar name) that TiVo had thought about implementing but abandoned. It was multiple PIP if I recall correctly and looked pretty awesome. Not sure why it didn’t happen. On days like this with all six of my timers on college football games, it would be great.

 

With commentary by you (you're consistent ):

SPORTS BAR? How?..

 

Bumping this topic just because every year during the NCAA tournament i find myself wishing my TiVo could do this.