TiVo Roamio, I Think I Love You

Maybe I shouldn’t write this review of the new TiVo Roamio. Maybe I should recuse myself. Because, frankly, I come with a built-in bias the size of Mount Rushmore.

Which is this: I already love TiVo. I always have. I bought the first one ever, back in 1999. I was giddy about it.

I could look over a list of every show that would be on TV in the next two weeks and select the ones I wanted to record — without ever knowing or caring about the time or channel. I could auto-record every episode of some show (creating what TiVo calls a Season Pass). By punching in a secret sequence on my remote, I could create a 30-second-skip button for vaulting past commercials.

Since then, of course, a terrible thing happened to TiVo: cable companies. Your Comcasts, your Time Warners. They created their own TiVo-like boxes, which you don’t have to buy — you can just rent them — making them very popular.

Then, as though those of us in the Cult of TiVo needed any further reason to be depressed, the world started watching TV shows online: Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Hulu and so on.

But guess what? Even in the age of Internet TV, Americans still watch 2.8 hours of old-fashioned TV a day, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Furthermore, those cable-company boxes are amateurs compared with the TiVo — particularly the newest TiVo. It’s called the Roamio, and it’s an expensive, beautifully designed, premium, do-everything recorder for TV in the Internet/mobile age. (How expensive? $200 for the low-end model, $400 and $600 for the better ones.)

Here, for example, are some things that the Roamio does that your typical cable-company box can’t do:

– Record six channels simultaneously. On a cable-company box, you can usually record only two.

– Store 150 or 450 hours of high-definition shows (on the Roamio Plus and Roamio Pro, respectively). Typical cable DVR? Maybe 60 hours.

– Find your remote for you. When you press the button on the front of the TiVo, the remote control plays a little melody until you find it in the couch.

– Use radio remote signals instead of infrared. In English: You don’t have to point the remote at the TiVo to make it work.

– Come with a built-in Apple TV. The Roamio connects to the Internet. You can watch Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube, MLB.com and AOL On on it, or listen to Pandora, Spotify, Rhapsody or Live365. (Some of these require paid accounts.)

These Internet video and music sources don’t feel tacked on, as they did in previous TiVo models. They’re given equal status with what’s on regular TV, which is a radical and thought-provoking design.

(Services still not built in: HBO Go, Google Play, Amazon Premium and, of course, anything from Apple’s iTunes Store.)

– Search TV and online simultaneously. When you use the search box on the TiVo, it shows you matches from both the next two weeks’ worth of cable TV shows and all those online sources. Again: kind of crazy.

– Play videos, music and photos from your computer. The cable company boxes don’t even go there.

– Have smarts. TiVo’s design is filled with smart, elegant grace notes that most cable-company boxes just don’t have. The classic example: If you schedule two recordings that overlap by a few minutes, TiVo doesn’t cancel one of them; it graciously records as much as possible of both. (Of course, since it can record six shows at once these days, that’s an unusual circumstance, but you get the point.)

TiVo also does great work suggesting new shows based on others you’ve watched. (If you wish, it can even auto-record them, if there’s space.)

– Roam. This is the big one. It’s where the Roamio got its name.

Ready for this? Anything you’ve recorded on your TiVo, you can also watch on your iPhone or iPad. (Android versions are in the works.)

This is a big, big deal. It’s as though your TiVo also contains a built-in Slingbox (a set-top box that lets you watch your home TV channels on a laptop or a phone).

TiVo has been inching toward this goal of instant phone/tablet gratification for some time, but until the Roamio, this feature was never built in. It always involved additional add-on boxes.

The iPhone or iPad app is incredibly well designed. Tap My Shows, and there’s the list of everything on your TiVo, looking exactly as it does on the TV.

When you tap a show’s name, you can begin watching it on your touchscreen. Or, if you’re at home, you can toss it to your TV screen, using the phone or tablet as a touchscreen remote for the TiVo playback on your TV.

When you’re away from home, you can still watch your recordings — remotely, using the Internet as the world’s longest video cable. The picture quality suffers if the Internet connection isn’t great on both ends, but you can do it. Sure beats paying $17 to watch a movie in a hotel room.

As though that’s not wild enough, you can also watch live TV on your touchscreen. From the road. Across the Internet.

“But wait,” you’re probably objecting. “What if I’m on a plane? What if I have no Internet connection at all?”

Roamio’s got you covered there, too. It’s also easy to copy a TiVo recording to your iPhone or iPad — even if you’ve already left home. It takes time and eats up a lot of storage space. But the video quality will be perfect, and you won’t need an Internet connection to watch.

The bottom line: TiVo Roamio is ready for the new age of Internet and mobile TV. It crams every conceivable feature into a software design that manages to not be overwhelming.

Owners of previous TiVo models should note something else, too: The Roamio is fast — finally capable of eliminating the button-press sluggishness. Oh, and the 30-second commercial-skip button is built in now. You no longer need the secret sequence to unlock it.

In other words, TiVo cultists like me should prepare to rejoice. But not, however, until they’ve read all the footnotes. It’s a long list:

Footnote 1: Roamio works only with regular digital cable service and Verizon FiOS. It doesn’t work with analog cable, satellite or AT&T U-verse.

Footnote 2: TiVo requires a cableCARD. It looks like a fat metal credit card, and it replaces the cable box (and the cable remote). You get a cableCARD from your cable company. It’s either free or a couple of bucks a month — less, in any case, than the cable box it replaces.

And getting a cableCARD usually involves a visit from a cable-company technician. They won’t charge you, but you probably won’t get instant gratification the day you buy the TiVo.

Footnote 3: TiVo requires a recurring fee: $15 a month.

I’ve always hated this idea. You bought the box! Why should you pay a fee? TiVo says it’s “to access our channel guide,” but the real reason is probably “to keep our company afloat.”

There are two footnotes to this footnote. First, you can pay a one-time $500 instead of $15 a month. That’ll pay for itself in 34 months.

Second, it’s important to note that the $15 may be less than what you’d pay to rent your cable company’s DVR, which is usually $15 to $23 a month. That takes away some of the sting.

Footnote 4: Most of the really juicy features described here require the Plus or the Pro models. The basic Roamio model costs only $200, but it records only four shows at once, stores only 75 hours of high-def shows, doesn’t make your remote control chirp and requires an additional box to stream or copy shows to your iPhone or iPad. On the other hand, the base-model Roamio is the only one that can record over-the-air (antenna) broadcasts, without a cable subscription.

Footnote 5: You’ll quickly discover that you can’t copy certain shows to your iPhone or iPad. Copying can be disabled by a show’s owners — a problem that primarily affects recordings from premium channels like HBO and Showtime.

In other words, getting a TiVo these days requires a certain amount of expense and setup hassle. (Both the hassle and the expense are less if you already own a TiVo.) But if you’ve got the dough — Lord, is it worth it.

I mean, you wind up with a single box that gracefully serves the functions of a cable box, Apple TV or Roku, and Slingbox — and a single remote control at that. You wind up being able to search and watch cable shows and Internet shows identically. You wind up being able to watch its recordings anywhere in the house — on another TiVo, on your iPhone/iPad or over the Internet.

This is, to be sure, a luxury item. Don’t get one if you’re a cord cutter and you get all your TV from the Internet. Or if you already have a basic cable-company DVR that you use only occasionally. Or if you don’t have a phone or tablet, or if you don’t travel much, or if you’re watching your budget.

But this much is for sure: Once you’ve tried TiVo, you can’t go back. At that point, I’ve got four words for you: Welcome to the cult.

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