TiVo Roamio Reinvents the Cable Box for the Digital Streaming Age

With the TiVo Roamio line, TiVo hopes to marry the cable TV with digital streaming services. But is it enough to keep the company relevant?

I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for TiVo. Even before I bought my first TiVo box back in 2003, I was a fan of the service and its functionality. Cable DVRs were only starting to roll out — and the interface was a gigantic mess. Moreover, my TiVo had features such as home network support, box-to-box transfers and the ability to stream podcasts. TiVo was a product literally years ahead of its time.

The problem was that the shift to HDTV worked against the company. A box that once worked well with SD channels on an HDTV didn't adapt to the HD world. Instead, using a TiVo required cumbersome adaptors and crucial trade-offs. At the same time, it just became easier to use the DVR built into the cable company's set-top box. Even worse, television viewing increasingly shifted to include web programming — something TiVo was late to address. Read more...