TiVo Streaming Apple TV App Will Be Limited to 720p at 30 FPS

[MacRumors]

TiVo's upcoming Apple TV app will limit streaming to 720p at 30 frames per second and won't support native MPEG-2 broadcasts or 5.1 surround sound, it has been revealed.

TiVo's app is coming to Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV later this year​

During CES, TiVo announced it would release an app for Apple TV in the third quarter of this year that would allow TiVo users to stream live and recorded content to other televisions without incurring additional cost.

However, users hoping to enjoy TiVo content on their Apple TV at the same level of audio and visual quality are in for disappointment. The admission was made in a TechHive interview with Ted Malone, TiVo's vice president of consumer products and services.

Malone explained that the limitations, which will also apply across the company's forthcoming Amazon Fire TV and Roku apps, is a necessary compromise that has do with the TiVo's hardware resource allocation:

"I want 720p 60 [fps]," Malone told the publication. "I've done some internal demos proving that 720p 60 [fps] is actually noticeably better than 720p 30 [fps]. It's really a battle for resources and just getting it done."

[...]

Malone said the TiVo hardware can technically support higher-quality streams, but not without dialing back some other capabilities, such as streaming to TiVo Mini Vox boxes.

As it stands, TiVo users who want to view live programming and DVR content on additional televisions have to resort to a TiVo Mini. The first-party Mini costs $180 but includes support for high-quality streaming, which means it will remain the best solution for expanding the availability of TiVo content to multiple rooms.

Article Link: TiVo Streaming Apple TV App Will Be Limited to 720p at 30 FPS

 

[2010mini]

This is a joke for such an established company. Silicondust, a much smaller company can do this and Tivo can’t?!??

 

[levitynyc]

Nope.

 

[schmidm77]

Streaming over the existing iOS app is kind of wonky too, although it does fine over local wifi. Only works sometimes away from home network in my experience though; defintely no sling box as far as streaming is concerned. The TiVo Mini is definitely the way to go at home though; but it requires a wired connection to the base unit, either ethernet or moca. I do wish that TiVo could get this working better, because I still love it more than the absolutely horrible Fios DVR.

 

[maxfromdenmark]

What the heck!? Not even the fullHD in 4K era where 8K is on the way? Nope, thank you.

 

[thisisnotmyname]

DOA

 

[EdT]

DOA

Because of my wife’s desire to record shows and play them back later I was interested in this app. Was.

 

[MrGuder]

Better not cut that cord yet lol

 

[Ted13]

For years now I have been playing TiVO recordings on the AppleTV with the fantastic Infuse Pro app:
Download the recording on my Mac with cTivo, and then play on AppleTV in its original format, with 5.1 sound on the AppleTV via Infuse Pro.

TiVO’s own software, has been getting worse: their iOS app was ruined completely a couple of months ago

 

[Bin Cook]

This is a joke for such an established company. Silicondust, a much smaller company can do this and Tivo can’t?!??

Won’t rather than can’t. They need to leave a reason to upsell to the $180 device.

 

[JustaTecho]

Well damn, that is NOT what i wanted to hear... I would be willing to pay a small monthly fee if they would stream in higher quality and allow full features. Say 5 dollars a month, because that for me is cheaper than having a second tivo box in my bedroom.

 

[a104375]

So in other words, this app can't do anything. Since most of TV today is still mpeg2, and a lot is 5.1 now.

 

[George Dawes]

With catchup streaming services I really don’t see the need to record anything anymore .

If you want to watch it again wait until it comes out on iTunes or buy the blu Ray .

 

[Ant2369]

Well damn, that is NOT what i wanted to hear... I would be willing to pay a small monthly fee if they would stream in higher quality and allow full features. Say 5 dollars a month, because that for me is cheaper than having a second tivo box in my bedroom.

I agree, offer the app for free with a lower quality streaming and no
5.1 or an upgrade $4.99/month for full had and 1080p at least they’ll get revenue for the app use

 

[an-other]

For years now I have been playing TiVO recordings on the AppleTV with the fantastic Infuse Pro app:
Download the recording on my Mac with cTivo, and then play on AppleTV in its original format, with 5.1 sound on the AppleTV via Infuse Pro.

TiVO’s own software, has been getting worse: their iOS app was ruined completely a couple of months ago

This intrigues me! What's the time frame on processing. That is, how long does it take you to download a TiVo recording, strip the copy protection, and push it out?

TiVo to Go used to be ridiculously slow.

 

[Sasparilla]

I agree, offer the app for free with a lower quality streaming and no
5.1 or an upgrade $4.99/month for full had and 1080p at least they’ll get revenue for the app use

Looking at the article - looks like its resource allocation on the TiVo side that is the problem (maybe because it has to trans-code the mpg2 on the fly to something the AppleTV can digest for one thing) and if they went for higher quality or mpg2 it'd bring TiVo's CPU's to their knees. The TiVo has a silicon solution (separate chips) for local playing mpg2 (video and sound formats) and guessing the AppleTV does not (remember Apple keeping mpg2 out of quicktime for example way back when).

TiVo's CPU's have always been way low on the power scale (they weren't able to play blue ray video rips without transcoding until the very latest versions that came out like 2 years ago) so this sounds valid. This is also a solution TiVo would want to work - to keep people using their boxes as cable cutting keeps happening.

 

[BaccaBossMC]

So it's completely useless thanks to the potato quality. Great.

 

[0970373]

Better not cut that cord yet lol

That doesn't have anything to do with this. Not really. I don't think this is meant to be a standalone app. It's meant to replace the TiVo Mini for additional TV's but you still need the main TiVO box, with cable or OTA/antenna. I take it you don't have a TiVO?
[doublepost=1548345755][/doublepost]

This intrigues me! What's the time frame on processing. That is, how long does it take you to download a TiVo recording, strip the copy protection, and push it out?

TiVo to Go used to be ridiculously slow.

You can't strip copyright. cTivo won't let you download anything that is protected. But a 60 min show takes about 20 min to download. I encode them to MP4 and add them to my Plex, another 30 min. These are rough estimates and depends on your own network and processor of the machine you're using.
[doublepost=1548346219][/doublepost]

What the heck!? Not even the fullHD in 4K era where 8K is on the way? Nope, thank you.

While I understand the 1080 complaint, not really sure what 4K or 8K has to do with it. Very few places offer 4K - really just Netflix & Amazon Prime. Absolutely no network or cable broadcast is in 4k. We record everything for special events in 4k these days but it's 99% archival & future-proofing but down converted to 1080, and even 720 for some networks (ahem Audience Network), for the actual broadcast. Standard TV shows still only shoot in HD. Netflix is the ONLY streaming content provider that requires 4K on delivery but even they waive it depending on budget. I haven't had to deliver anything to Amazon in 4K.

EDIT: I'd like to add that my entire Tech team would laugh in may face and then walk out the door if I asked them to shoot in 8K. And then they'd come back with a budget that was 10x what I have. 8K is really only for specialty movies right now. And any of those movies, when they come to TV for broadcast, would be down converted to 1080p.

 

[EdT]

While I understand the 1080 complaint, not really sure what 4K or 8K has to do with it. Very few places offer 4K - really just Netflix & Amazon Prime. Absolutely no network or cable broadcast is in 4k. We record everything for special events in 4k these days but it's 99% archival & future-proofing but down converted to 1080, and even 720 for some networks (ahem Audience Network), for the actual broadcast. Standard TV shows still only shoot in HD. Netflix is the ONLY streaming content provider that requires 4K on delivery but even they waive it depending on budget. I haven't had to deliver anything to Amazon in 4K.

Most cable/satellite/OTA systems have just caught up to 1080P. OTA MIGHT have the cheapest path to upgrade to 4 or 8k but most of those are local area companies who don’t have either big budgets or big revenue streams. Cable will require a lot of hardware upgrades and replacements all through their network and Satellite needs new satellites launched and receivers to customers distributed without disrupting current service. Really, Internet and OTA have a possible advantage here but since it requires a company to look way way way beyond just the next quarter to see profits I think they will also be dragging their feet to implement a cost effective (for the customer) system.

 

[0970373]

Most cable/satellite/OTA systems have just caught up to 1080P. OTA MIGHT have the cheapest path to upgrade to 4 or 8k but most of those are local area companies who don’t have either big budgets or big revenue streams. Cable will require a lot of hardware upgrades and replacements all through their network and Satellite needs new satellites launched and receivers to customers distributed without disrupting current service. Really, Internet and OTA have a possible advantage here but since it requires a company to look way way way beyond just the next quarter to see profits I think they will also be dragging their feet to implement a cost effective (for the customer) system.

This is exactly it. When the industry switched to HD in the mid to late-aughts, it still took a while for everyone to get on board. 4K equipment is being deployed but very slowly as the cost is still too high. This doesn't even take into account post-production on a 4K shoot. We're spending double to triple on storage and conversion than we were a few years ago, which is really prohibitive on the ever tightening budgets of most networks.

Aside from the equipment to shoot & edit in 4K, most NOCs (Network Operating Centers) don't have the ability to broadcast in 4K and would require an overhaul of the entire system, which again, people aren't going to do since the investment to HD is still being amortized. 4K files are incredibly large and current cable or OTA system are incapable of sending files that large on a regular basis.

Small anecdote: I was working on a show in 2011 and we were still recording to tape. We were starting to record to digital media but only as a back up as it was still failing a lot, so mostly, it was a test. But the 2011 tsunami in Japan destroyed the Sony factory that made the tape most used. We were forced to move to digital recording out of necessity, not desire. Digital media became a lot more reliable after that, again, out of necessity since tape costs were outrageous at this time since it was so scarce. It helped in getting everyone to make the big leap to HD though.

 

[Ted13]

This intrigues me! What's the time frame on processing. That is, how long does it take you to download a TiVo recording, strip the copy protection, and push it out?

TiVo to Go used to be ridiculously slow.

Doesn’t take long at all, but cTivO only works with not copy protected channels- I.e. all the over the air ones

 

[Mac 128]

What the heck!? Not even the fullHD in 4K era where 8K is on the way? Nope, thank you.

1080p is not a broadcast standard. 720p is. Half of all TV programs TIVO is designed to record is 720p, and the other half is 1080i, not even full HD, either. Other than OTA broadcast, most cable and satellite signals are so compressed the MPEG-2 signal is hardly optimal, and many other streaming codecs are better in many ways. I'm not sure why this is a problem.

 

[EdT]

This is exactly it. When the industry switched to HD in the mid to late-aughts, it still took a while for everyone to get on board. 4K equipment is being deployed but very slowly as the cost is still too high. This doesn't even take into account post-production on a 4K shoot. We're spending double to triple on storage and conversion than we were a few years ago, which is really prohibitive on the ever tightening budgets of most networks.

Aside from the equipment to shoot & edit in 4K, most NOCs (Network Operating Centers) don't have the ability to broadcast in 4K and would require an overhaul of the entire system, which again, people aren't going to do since the investment to HD is still being amortized. 4K files are incredibly large and current cable or OTA system are incapable of sending files that large on a regular basis.

Small anecdote: I was working on a show in 2011 and we were still recording to tape. We were starting to record to digital media but only as a back up as it was still failing a lot, so mostly, it was a test. But the 2011 tsunami in Japan destroyed the Sony factory that made the tape most used. We were forced to move to digital recording out of necessity, not desire. Digital media became a lot more reliable after that, again, out of necessity since tape costs were outrageous at this time since it was so scarce. It helped in getting everyone to make the big leap to HD though.

Good to hear from someone actually in the industry. My father in law had been as a program manager but that was back in the 1960s, and he passed away a few years ago. I still heard a lot of stories about how and why things were done. Some weren’t obvious but made sense after he explained it and others made no sense even then.

Even though most area tv markets are owned or controlled by a big media company they still have to make enough profit in their market to justify to their owners the cost of new technology. The smaller the market, or the smaller the share of a medium to big market, the harder it is to get approval for upgrading to new formats, especially when they have just finished going through that cost to implement HD.

 

[0970373]

Good to hear from someone actually in the industry. My father in law had been as a program manager but that was back in the 1960s, and he passed away a few years ago. I still heard a lot of stories about how and why things were done. Some weren’t obvious but made sense after he explained it and others made no sense even then.

Even though most area tv markets are owned or controlled by a big media company they still have to make enough profit in their market to justify to their owners the cost of new technology. The smaller the market, or the smaller the share of a medium to big market, the harder it is to get approval for upgrading to new formats, especially when they have just finished going through that cost to implement HD.

It's kind of fascinating now that I think about it in the larger sense of history. Part of why we were still recording to tape was because many post-production houses weren't fully capable of all-digital media yet. They were slow to upgrade their equipment as well because it was very costly and old school producers just didn't trust digital (fail rate was high). It was faster to digitize and intake tape media still as there were multiple bays to do so. Trying to import drives was still one, maybe 2 drives at a time.

But when that tsunami hit and everyone started recording to digital media, they were forced to add more equipment in order to meet demand. A bunch of post houses were basically like "welp! we might as well upgrade it all now." The main manufacturer of the digital drives really had to step it up as well. They weren't backup or test & experimental runs anymore, they were the primary media and if that media failed, the show is lost or severely compromised. At that point, control rooms and media trucks also made the full time switch to digital media...which is really what allowed the evolution to 4K to happen so quickly. Crazy, isn't it?

 

[ChromeAce]

This guy is a moron and makes zero sense. If TiVo doesn’t morph into a content app like DirecTV Now or YouTube TV, they’re dead in the water. Crippling their  TV app is just one more nail in the coffin. Recording broadcasts is over.