Charter Adds The TiVo Preview And Multi-Room To Their TiVo Offering

We’ve known since the initial announcement that Charter planned to offer TiVo as a whole-home solution, it was right there in black and white:“as well as upcoming multi-room and non-DVR platforms”. That’d be the TiVo Preview, currently deployed by RCN, as the ‘non-DVR platform’. However, to this point Charter’s TiVo deployment has only included the basic TiVo Premiere.

But now their support page for TiVo has been updated with a link to a PDF for Multi-Room Experience. The PDF details both the TiVo Premiere and TiVo Preview (no mention of the 4-tuner TiVo Premire Q/Elite though), with a table of features for each. (Click for a larger view.)

I’m a little surprised by no YouTube on the Preview, I would’ve taken that for granted as a standard feature. I’m nearly as surprised by the lack of web video support. It seems like there is no broadband streaming video support at all, only local streaming from a TiVo Premiere. There is some OTT content; music services like Rhapsody, Pandora, and Live365 are supported. It is nice to see that scheduling recordings and setting up Wish Lists are ‘Coming Soon’. We’d heard as much earlier from RCN, but confirmation is nice.

While Charter’s deployment timeline has stretched, it is good news that they’re introducing the TiVo Preview to the mix. I am still a bit surprised by the lack of the Premiere Q. The quad-tuner box was tailor made for MSOs. Unless Charter still has too many hybrid service areas and the all-digital Q wouldn’t work for them. In my area I expected to lose some channels on my Premiere Elite, since I’m on Charter, but it turns out the analog channels I used seem to have digital simulcast and I didn’t notice any losses.

Now, I think someone jumped the gun in posting this. If you look closely you’ll notice the pages are marked diagonally with “Draft For Internal Review – Do Not Distribute”. So either someone forgot to save out a new copy of the document without the watermark, or this wasn’t supposed to go live yet. Just in case, here are the two pages of the document – it’s a bit more compact than the 6MB PDF.

Thanks to reader Sam Biller for the tip.