Well, we thought it would never happen. We thought that development on PATA drives was pretty much over. But Western Digital surprised us and there’s a 320 GB drive that works (very well!) in the AppleTV.
So we’ve added that option to our site in two ways. You can:
1 – Buy a complete AppleTV with 320 GB of space
2 – Upgrade your AppleTV to 320 GB of space
Either way, see our AppleTV Upgrade page.
We’ve added a new series of TiVo Upgrade Kits to our website. These allow you to add a 1 Terabyte drive to your TiVo or Humax Series2 unit. Yes, that’s 1,000 Gigabytes.
We’ve been selling 1 Terabyte replacement drives for these models for some time. Now we completed testing of the “add” configuration and we’ve begun shipping these units. For more information on the difference between “add” and “replace” kits, see our TiVo upgrade add v. replace page.
These kits add about 1275 hours to all models at Basic Quality, or about 350 hours at Best Quality.
Here’s a screenshot of a unit with a kit added. The unit was originally an 80 GB model:
These kits are available plug-and-play for these TiVo models:
and these Humax models:
These are the largest “add” kits ever!
TiVo, Inc. issued their financial year-end results today via a press release. Beside the numbers (profit is up, but not on a large scale; subscribers are down, but not on a large scale), there is an interesting tidbit on the progress of the DirecTV HD DVR:
“Additionally, we continue to work on our new DIRECTV HD DVR. The new HD DVR will include popular TiVo broadband features, and will be immediately accessible to DIRECTV’s entire national customer base on day-one of the launch. We have had a very successful history with DIRECTV and those subscribers are some of our most loyal customers. Now, as these customers look to upgrade from standard definition programming, they will have the option to choose the TiVo experience to help them truly get the most out of their high definition viewing experience.”
TiVo announced today that they’ll be working with a company called SeaChange to enable many cable companies to pump the cable companies’ video-on-demand content to TiVo boxes. SeaChange sounds like it’s basically a competing technology to tru2way which TiVo also hopes to adopt in the future.
VOD is a big issue, at least among our customers, and potentially one of the top reasons a customer wouldn’t choose a TiVo. But our experience is that a TiVo is actually far more broadly connected to the world of online content, and is actually a great choice for customers wanting VOD – just not necessarily VOD from the cable company. TiVo DVRs connected via broadband can get content from Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, and TiVo’s own TiVoCasts, among other sources. And more are coming. Yes, Amazon and Netflix cost money, where a lot of cable company VOD content is free, but they also have a much wider range of content. Further, Netflix content is free for those who already have Netflix plans for physical DVD mailings.
TiVo is a growing platform for online video sources. They’ve been aggressive about adding new content, and we expect that to continue. A TiVo DVR is really a combination of three types of units at this point, and it’s really poised to bring the most content to your TV. The three categories that a TiVo now covers are:
More VOD is better, and TiVo is, again, leading the way.
We hear from a lot of customers who have problems with their TiVo modems. And we sell a TiVo external modem kit to address many of those problems – basically the ones either involving hardware failure, or VoIP phone lines such as Vonage.
But there’s another issue that accounts for many modem failures at the moment, and you don’t need our modem kit to fix it: a problem with local dial-in numbers. We’ve been getting calls from many customers over the last week about this problem, and TiVo has a support page up for these problems. They are basically telling customers to access a new dial-in number by having them query the main TiVo number for an updated list of local access numbers.
So if you think you might be having a problem getting local guide data, and you use a phone line to access TiVo, then you should visit the above link, or, if you have a Series2 or Series3 TiVo, consider networking your TiVo to avoid these problems.