The convenience of TiVo without the high monthly cost of a cable subscription
TiVo’s new Roamio OTA box will be available September 14 for $50. It’s being sold exclusively at Best Buy.
Like other TiVo boxes, this one sports an easy-to-use programming guide, you can set it to automatically record your favorite shows whenever they air and it hooks into online services such as Netflix, Hulu Plus, Pandora, Spotify and YouTube. You’ll also need to pony up $15 per month to access program listings, which are refreshed via a connection from the box to your home network.
The difference here is that the Roamio OTA only works with an over-the-air antenna, pulling in your free local broadcast stations. Aside from the $15-per-month TiVo fee, there’s no need to subscribe to Comcast or FiOS, in other words. You can record up to four shows at once, and the hard drive can store up to 75 hours of high-definition video footage.
Obviously, the sticking point for most people is going to be the monthly charge. But f you’re big on being able to record broadcast shows — complete with all the multi-show recording and commercial-skipping goodness that entails — you’re looking at shelling out less than $200 per year for the privilege of doing so.
Roamio OTA comes at an opportune time, with online TV service Aereo being run out of town by the entertainment industry. I recently rounded up a few ways to roll your own Aereo-like service, but most options were cumbersome and expensive. This new TiVo box could be the ticket, though.