After a steady trickle of leaks for most of the summer, the 4K UHD-capable TiVo Edge DVR with Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision support, is finally available for sale, while the rumored TiVo+ live TV streaming service is officially “coming soon.”
Available now on TiVo’s website, the Tivo Edge for over-the-air antennas costs $350 and features a 2TB hard drive (good for about 300 hours of HD recordings) and four tuners. As usual, you’ll also have to pay for a TiVo service plan, which goes for $7 a month, $70 annually, or $250 for a lifetime subscription.
Meanwhile, the $400 cable version of the TiVo Edge has the same 2TB hard drive as the OTA model but adds two more tuners, for a total of six. Subscription plans for the TiVo Edge for cable go for $15 a month, $150 annually, or $550 for lifetime service.
According to a TiVo press release, both versions of the TiVo Edge will offer such existing TiVo features as OneSearch, which serves up search results from live TV, your DVR recordings, and your various streaming apps; SkipMode, which lets you press a button to skip to the end of a commercial break; and OnePass, which finds and organizes the episodes of your favorite shows on your My Shows playlist, regardless of whether the episodes are live TV recordings, on demand, or on a streaming app like Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon Prime Video.
Like the existing TiVo Bolt, the 4K-capable TiVo Edge boasts Dolby Atmos object-based audio support, and it’s also adding Dolby Vision HDR support, a first for TiVo DVRs.
TiVo+ TV streaming service
Besides the new TiVo Edge devices, TiVo also accounced TiVo+, an upcoming live streaming service for TiVo customers.
The service will offer a “gazillion” (so says the TiVo website, anyway) hours of “carefully curated” free streaming-TV that will be accessible in the main TiVo programming guide, no apps required.
At launch, TiVo+’s live TV-streaming offerings will be limited to such channels as Adventure Sports Network, Ameba, America’s Funniest Home Videos, BatteryPOP, FilmRise Classic TV, FilmRise Free Movies, Hell’s Kitchen | Kitchen Nightmares, Outside TV+, Puddle Jumper, TMZ, and Unsolved Mysteries, TiVo said.
Besides ticking off a list of streaming channels, TiVo said the TiVo+ service “opens up new opportunities” for advertisers to reach viewers with “targeted messages,” which sounds like at least some of these channels will be ad-supported.
TiVo hasn’t set a solid launch date for TiVo+ beyond a vague “coming soon” promise.
Word of the TiVo Edge first began leaking in June, while chatter about TiVo+ began in earnest last month.
News of the TiVo Edge and TiVo+ comes on the heels of TiVo’s unwelcome announcement that it will start adding pre-roll ads to users’ recorded shows within the next 90 days. The pre-roll ads will appear before recordings of standard shows but not before shows on premium channels like HBO.
TiVo confirmed that the pre-roll ads will show up on recordings made by TiVo Roamio and Bolt DVR users, and it’s reasonable to assume they’ll pop up on the TiVo Edge DVR as well.