TiVo Mega Offers 24 TB of Storage Capacity
Getting tired of deleting all your favorite recordings on the DVR to make room for new content? Come next year, those days will be over, as TiVo plans to launch a "Mega" DVR with 24 TB of storage capacity. That's over 26,000 hours of SD-based TV, making your favorite episodes of Glee just a button-press away.
"Size matters. People hate being forced to delete cool stuff from their DVR before they want to or finding a TV show they had recorded is now gone. Now, with TiVo Mega they can always know their show or movie is still there to watch later," said Ira Bahr, CMO at TiVo.
Offered in a rack-mount form factor, the TiVo Mega makes the solutions provided by cable and satellite providers look puny in size and function. The device includes six tuners so that users can record multiple content simultaneously. There's also mobile connectivity so that tablets and smartphones can stream and download recorded content, and it has support for TiVo Mini, which brings the recorded content to all TVs in the house.
The TiVo Mega will have 24 TB of storage in RAID 5 and hot-swappable drives. The device will also come with the TiVo Slide Pro Remote, which consists of a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and an RF signal. Content navigation will include a channel guide with filters, "What to Watch," "Collections" and universal search across multiple content providers.
Additional features will include MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) and Ethernet connectivity and a free smartphone/tablet app for managing the DVR via remote Season Pass.
"TiVo Mega offers more than twelve times the storage of any cable or satellite DVR," Bahr added. "TiVo Mega is the solution for the power user who wants to record everything. We salute you and enjoy!"
The TiVo Mega is expected to land during the first quarter of 2015. So far, the company hasn't set a final price tag, but TiVo expects the pricing to be around $5,000, which includes product servicing throughout its lifetime.
Of course, if $5,000 is a bit out of your price range, there's always the $599.99 TiVo Roamio Pro, which allows customers to record six shows at once, stores up to 3,000 hours of video, and allows owners to watch live and recorded TV anywhere. If that's still way too expensive, TiVo also has the Roamio Plus for $399.99 and the Roamio (vanilla) for $199.99.
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It's just TV. If you are worried about losing stuff then either copy important stuff onto another drive or use RAID 6. Seriously, that is way too much TV for a single family. Go outside and play.
My upload speeds in Michigan are so slow that its not even rational to think that 50GB of cloud storage is worth my time.. and they want to offer well over 1TB to me...? No thanks
Until fast networks are mainstream, this kind of crap just makes me laugh. Even if we had 1gbps up and down in every single home on the planet, backing up and uploading 24TB of data (or even just 12TB) would take a ridiculous amount of time.
No, the difference between your raw video and the video you get from a streaming service is that the stream is already quite compressed, so storing it in an uncompressed format would be a waste. Netflix currently compresses its 4K streams down to around 15mbps, which works out to around just 7GB per hour, similar to the bitrate for typical 720p/1080i broadcasts from cable or satellite providers. Even if the Tivo is re-encoding the video, you're going to see significant artifacts whether the stream is re-compressed or not. And that's assuming the Tivo can even handle 4K video, which it probably can't.
When it comes down to it, there simply isn't much 4K content out there, and there probably won't be for quite some time into the future. Broadcasters and Streaming providers don't even provide content at 1080p Blu-ray quality yet. A 4K stream with a bitrate lower than many 1080i broadcasts for a few shows seems like little more than a pointless gimmick. Content providers are not going to support 4K to any meaningful degree in the near future, and most people are unlikely to see much benefit from replacing their existing HD sets with 4K models.
In any case, I suspect this product is primarily aimed at video hoarders who record anything they might, at some undetermined point in the future, consider watching. And honestly, it seems like a bit of a rip-off at $5000. Six, 4TB drives currently cost around $900 total, and a typical Tivo runs a few hundred dollars. Even considering higher spec equipment and a larger case, there's still a good $3000+ markup in there.