re: How much do you pay for cable + internet a month?

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Please explain how you are using TiVo. I have not heard about it in years and am curious as to what they now offer.

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I recently bought the Tivos to replace a Windows Media Center system that had served me well for the past four years but Microsoft has deprecated it and recently broke the program guide to the point that it was useless. I bought a Tivo Bolt and three Tivo Minis. The Bolt is the main box/DVR and also supports the three Minis over a wired ethernet network that was already in place. The boxes all come with built-in MoCA (ethernet over coax) so you can use your house cable TV wiring if you don't have ethernet. You can't use wireless to wheel recorded TV around. The Bolt sells for $299 and the Minis for $120 each. I was tempted to wait for Black Friday sales but I couldn't put up with the Microsoft aggravation for a whole month so I got them from Amazon. The price of the Bolt includes the first year of the program guide; it's $150 a year after that.

All four Tivos offer streaming access to the popular sites like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon and Vudu so I was able to retire my Roku boxes. The program guide is very well designed and--a really neat feature--it's integrated with all of the streaming services that you've activated so when you do a search you get not only the OTA or cable program guide but also your streaming content presented together.

I use an antenna (no cable) but the Bolt also has a slot for a cable card that you get from your cable company. These cost just a few bucks a month. You use either the antenna or the cable card, not both. That's the only equipment you need from the cable company. Tivo does not work with U-Verse. DirecTV has some sort of Tivo connection but I don't believe Dish does. I'd be cautious about trying to use Tivo with satellite.

The Tivo boxes are small and quiet. They all come with RF remotes that are paired with their respective devices so you can put them out of line of sight. The Bolt comes in two models, 500GB and 1000GB. The terabyte model is a hundred bucks more. The Tivo does support a USB-attached external hard drive but it's limited to a few AV drives from Western Digital. I already had one that I had bought for my Dish DVR several years ago so I opted to use that. The Bolt itself supports the new 4K ultra HD standard on its attached TV but the Minis are limited to the current 1080p HD.

The Tivo is a mature, well-designed consumer product that doesn't require much in the way of technical knowledge to install and maintain. I had my entire system up and running in an afternoon and most of that was time spent waiting on firmware upgrades. It was a welcome change from what I've come to expect from devices like these.

Hope this answers your question.

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Layabout

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interesting.

outside of the sunk costs for Bolt and Minis, the $150 a year subscription, what else do you pay for? High Speed internet?

and I take it, when you say:

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Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon and Vudu

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this is included in that $150 a month price. you aren't paying for those services on top of all of this huh?

Tree fiddy on my MasterCard biotch

Eta frick you

Was at $185 for cable and internet through Cox with 1 DVR box and sports package. Cut cable and went to internet only, which is about $66 a month. We have Amazon Prime on our Apple TV and Smart DVD player, so we still have most everything we need through that. I do watch sports through my watch ESPN app, but I use my parents cable log in for that haha Cutting corners where I can.