On Friday Jason Nealis, RCN’s Sr. Director, Video Product and Video Operations, posted in the DSL Reports forums announcing that the TiVo Premiere Q and TiVo Preview would launch in RCN’s Washington, DC service area on Tuesday, November 8th. The initial launch will be in the form of a bundle – one Q and one Preview for $29.99 a month. Additional Previews can be added for $9.95 a month.
Jason is just a font of information. Looking back to a post he made on 10/24 he talks about RCN TiVo Premiere units receiving the 14.9 software, and what some of the fixes included are. I’d have to presume the same fixes apply to retail 14.9 upgrades:
Fixes Black Screen issue (where a tuner will have a black screen and you either need to turn on signal meter or reboot the box to recover the channel)
This code is needed for the Primeres to work with the Q bundle, (thus multi room stream to the Q and Preview)
Fixes Rhapsody
There are some other subtle fixes in tho code as well. Overall you should seen more stability and some slight speed improvements in the UI.
Further back on 10/17 he shared some info about the new TiVo Preview:
Runs SDUI and HDUI
NO Hard Drive , No Buffer, Thus no Pausing ability on LIVE TV
MOCA Built In
NO YOUTUBE at this point, thats coming later.
Pandora and most of the other apps are on the box
Music / Pictures , works with TiVo Desktop
No Fan
1 LED
You can turn off the LED
VOD
In the same thread he also posted photos of the new TiVo Preview. It is a fairly small box.
In another post Friday he mentioned a feature planned for the TiVo Preview, likely in late 1Q12 – the ability to start a recording on the Q. (And, I’d guess, a standard Premiere unit.)
I know many of you are worried about giving up the ability to pause LIVE TV on the preview.. But I did want to share that down the road probably late Q1 2012. The Preview will have the ability to start recordings on the Q. Thus:
You could remotely start the recording on the Q then stream the recording and pause the stream and such.. Thus giving you the sense of a DVR in the bedroom…
TiVo still hasn’t announced any plans to release the TiVo Preview to retail, just to MSOs at this point. But I really hope they do. I’d love to have one for my bedroom to pair to a TiVo Premiere Elite in my living room. And possibly a second one in another room as well. But if Sling Media beats them to the punch and releases SlingPlayer for Google TV or Roku I might just go that route – since I own both a Google TV and Roku, and Slingboxes. I wonder if a TiVo Preview from Charter could be paired to a retail TiVo Premiere Elite…
