My plans for my second TiVo did not go as planned.
Let's review what I wanted to accomplish with my second tivo:
1. No subscription. Record only on time & station.
2. Watch content on any TiVo from any TiVo.
3. Stream Music & Photos to the second TiVo location.
That's not a bad little list. Let's see how things worked out:
1. No subscription. Record only on time & station.
Nope. It turns out that TiVo disables ANY recording functionality without a valid subscription, which costs $299 lifetime or $13.99 a month. Needless to say, this sucks. AND you can't download program updates without a subscription, either. So, I grab my credit card to pay for my monthly subscription. A nice little surprise is that since I have 1 TiVo, my second TiVo's monthly subscription is only $6.95 a month, even though the other tivo is a lifetime subscription. So that's OK, but not great and at least I get full functionality from both tivos.
2. Watch content on any TiVo from any TiVo.
This actually works as advertised. Sort of. What actually happens is when your TiVo is on the same nerwork as another TiVo, is that the other TiVo actually appears at the bottom of the 'Now Playing' screen. From there you can browse the content of the other TiVo BUT you can't actually stream the content over the network. First you have to transfer the content from one TiVo to the other. This takes a LONG time. Almost the length of the actual show. You can start watching the content at any time, but it may stop and studder while you are watching it. Also, this happens one program at a time. If you want to transfer more than one program at a time, each program goes into the transfer queue, and gets transferred one at a time.
3. Stream Music & Photos to the second TiVo location.
This works as expected, and I have no qualms about the functionality.
So, all in all, not a bad purchase. I still came out ahead for the 80 hr TiVo I paid for. An I figure that at $6.95 a month, it would take about 3 1/2 years to pay for the lifetime subscription. By that time, I will have moved on to my next TiVo ( or whatever PVR company is around by then ).
