TiVo Stream

If you're a middle-aged television junkie like me, you likely devote much of your free time to whittling away at the endless list of recorded shows on your DVR. If that DVR happens to be a TiVo Premiere, you might have some extra help. TiVo Stream ($129.99 direct) is a box that connects to your Wi-Fi router and works with an app to stream live and recorded content from your DVR to your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, so you can watch it anywhere in the house. The neatest part: You can also download programs to your iDevice to watch when you're away from home?provided they aren't copy protected. Unfortunately, many of the shows I tried to take on my morning commute were. If you have a Premiere DVR and Apple mobile devices, the Stream is a fine addition to the TiVo ecosystem, but the cost coupled with the copy-protection limitations hold it back. Especially when you consider the many ways you can get video content onto your mobile devices these days.

Design and Setup
The TiVo Stream is compatible with the TiVo Premiere, Premiere XL, Premiere 4, and the TiVo Premiere Elite , which is now the Premiere XL4. If you have an older non-Premiere-branded DVR, you're out of luck. The free TiVo app works with any iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch running iOS 5 or later. (According to TiVo, there's also an Android app in the works, but release timing isn't yet available.) I tested with two networked TiVo Premiere DVRs and a third-generation Apple iPad running iOS 5.1.1.

Resembling an Apple TV or a Roku box , the TiVo Stream is a 1-by-4-by-4-inch (HWD), 4.8-ounce black plastic square. Four blue rubber feet match a blue stripe around the top panel, which frames the familiar TiVo logo in its center. Around back, ports are sparse: There's a connector for the included AC adapter (which is about half the size of the box itself), and an Ethernet port. A white indicator light on the left tells you the TiVo Stream is connected and ready, and the Ethernet port is flanked by two network activity lights. Also in the box: an Installation and Setup Guide and an Ethernet cable.

About that cable: The Stream requires a wired connection to the same router to which your TiVo DVR is connected (not the DVR itself). So that's either Ethernet (the easier solution, provided you have a free router port), or via MoCA adapter, which TiVo sells for $80 apiece. There's no Wi-Fi; but given that the box supports multiple simultaneous video streams, that probably wouldn't work well anyway.

Setup was easy enough. After connecting the TiVo Stream via Ethernet to my Apple Airport Extreme router, I waited for the indicator light on the back of the Stream to turn solid white. (The DVR, the TiVo Stream, and the iDevice must all be on the same Wi-Fi network.) Then I fired up the TiVo app on my iPad, went to the Settings section, followed the instructions, which entailed entering a number from the bottom of the box, and I was up and running.?

The TiVo App and Video Performance
The well-designed TiVo iPad app lets you control your DVR and access your recorded shows. And with a Stream installed on your network, the Watch Now button offers up the new "Watch on iPad" option. Pressing it from the Guide page starts a live recording on your DVR, and after a short buffering period, video will fill your iPad's 9.7-inch screen. What's being watched on the actual TV won't be affected, unless, of course, you're out of free tuners for recording, in which case, you'll need to free one up. You can also stream from your DVR's hard drive of recorded shows.

In my tests, video looked very good. There were times I'd see blocky images or artifacts, but I would attribute that to network bandwidth issues rather than the Stream itself. Like with most things, less network traffic means better quality. According to TiVo, the Stream supports up to three simultaneous streams on a single DVR, and up to four with two networked DVRs. I was working with a pre-release version of the TiVo iPad app, so I was unable to test concurrent streaming on my iPhone. Worth noting:?A couple of times during the test period, the app would indicate that the Stream wasn't found on the network, but unplugging and replugging the Ethernet cable resolved the problem.

What separates the TiVo Stream from free cable company apps that stream content to mobile devices?like Time Warner's TWC TV?is the ability to copy programming to your phone or tablet to watch it on the go. But that feature isn't all it's cracked up to be. The problem is that much of the content I tried to download on to my iPad was protected, and unable to be copied. Anything I tried from Comedy Central, Food Network, or Bravo was off-limits. And pay channels like HBO and Showtime are no-gos. Granted, it's the networks and content owners installing the copy-prevention technology, not TiVo, but that doesn't change the fact that this feature?arguably the most compelling aspect of the product?is largely unusable.

Downloadable content is limited to some, but not all, of the programming on broadcast network channels. I tried saving an episode of Rick Steves' Europe from PBS, and it was protected. I downloaded episodes of Jeopardy! from ABC and a local newscast from NY1, and was able to watch them on my iPad on the subway. Conveniently, when you're downloading shows, you have the option to adjust the video quality, which reduces the file size to save storage space on your mobile device.

If you're a Premiere DVR user with an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, the TiVo Stream is worth considering if you want to watch your backlog of Breaking Bad episodes on, say, the back porch, or in the, ahem, bathroom. But to be truly compelling to a larger subset of that already-limited population, the Stream should offer something more, like Slingbox-like functionality, so you could access your DVR and watch over the Web. Or it should be a free app that doesn't require a $130 piece of hardware?especially when the killer download feature is crippled by copy-protection controls.

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