TiVo changed the way we watch television when it launched 20 years ago. 20 years is a long time, however, and there are people who can vote who barely know what life was like before Netflix started streaming. TiVo is still making DVRs, though, and the Edge is its latest model. It's available in both cable and over-the-air models, and it does exactly what it's supposed to do: record live television. At $349.99 for the Tivo Edge for Antenna we tested, in addition to a $70 annual subscription, however, it's a very expensive way to watch TV when you want it, especially when so much is already available on streaming platforms with a media hub for much less, including OTA DVR with the Amazon Fire TV Recast.
Design
The TiVo Edge looks like a stack of two flat, glossy black plastic boxes, with the top box pushed slightly to the right and back from the bottom box. It measures 1.8 by 11.4 by 7.3 inches (HWD) and weighs 1.9 pounds, making it shorter and sleeker than the boxy Fire TV Recast. The front of the Edge features a TiVo logo in the middle and two indicator LEDs (for power and recording status) on the right. The back features an antenna connector, an Ethernet port, an HDMI output, two USB 3.0 ports for adding storage, an optical audio output, a power port, and a remote finder button (which makes the remote beep a tune to locate it).
The remote is standard, button-laden TiVo fare, a chunky black wand with a gentle dog bone shape. A circular playback control pad sits in the middle with Play, Forward, Backward, and Skip arranged around a Pause button. A smaller circular navigation pad sits near the top, with a microphone button between the two sections. The microphone button lets you use the Edge's voice search feature by speaking into the pinhole mic near the top, just below the TiVo/Home button. In additon to these controls, there's a number pad, four color/letter buttons, a Skip button, volume and channel rockers, a dedicated Netflix button, thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons, and a handful of other menu controls.
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Longtime TiVo users will appreciate the remote, but it feels very complicated when compared with media hub remotes for Fire TV and Roku devices, which rely almost entirely on a prominent navigation pad and pare the other controls down to simple playback, volume, and menu buttons.
Features
The TiVo Edge for Antenna features four tuners and a 2TB hard drive. The tuners mean you can record up to four shows at once, or watch (and channel surf) while recording three shows at the same time. According to TiVo, the hard drive can store up to 300 hours of HD recordings (naturally, standard definition broadcasts will take up less space), and the two USB 3.0 ports on the back let you add additional storage with external hard drives.
The TiVo Edge for Cable has the same 2TB of storage, but six tuners instead of four, and a CableCARD slot. The tuners and storage easily eclipse the Amazon Fire TV Recast, which has an entry-level model with a paltry 500GB hard drive and two tuners, and a step-up model with a still-comparatively-small 1TB hard drive and four tuners.
High-definition TV broadcasts are largely limited to 720p and 1080i formats, both of which have less detail than the standard 1080p HD format used by most streaming media. Fortunately, the TiVo Edge also incorporates a handful of streaming services into its system, and can output video to your TV at up to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second.
Still Needs a Subscription
TiVo continues to require a subscription, and for the TiVo Edge for Antenna that means $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year to use the DVR (you can also go all-in with a lifetime subscription for $249.99). The TiVo Edge for Cable subscription is considerably more expensive at $14.99 per month or $149.99 per year, or $549.99 to go all-in with a lifetime subscription.
A subscription includes full channel guide support wherever you are in the country, with show information down to each episode. But this additional cost is a hard pill to swallow, especially when the Amazon Fire TV Recast doesn't require a subscription to work; you just need a Fire TV device like the Fire TV Stick 4K to use it with.
Interface
TiVo has become a bit stuck in its ways in terms of menu design, which long-standing fans no doubt appreciate. The Edge's interface is easy to use, and helpfully shows big, colorful logos for shows and movies you record, but otherwise it's a text-heavy system that feels stuck in the early aughts. Most menu pages are rows of text for each item, with few icons or other art. Whatever you're currently watching, live or recorded, plays in the background of the menu, so at least it isn't simply a dull, flat screen.
While the text-based design feels dense and dated, the menu is laid out in a very intuitive manner. Pressing the TiVo button on the remote brings up the main menu, which displays your chosen shows in large, colorful tiles below a menu bar with buttons for Menu, My Shows, What to Watch, Apps, and Search.
Menu brings up an extensive configuration screen that lets you change settings on the TiVo and control your recordings. My Shows brings up a list of the shows you've added to the TiVo, displaying any recordings or available streaming episodes, with a selection of suggested shows at the bottom. What to Watch is the most visually colorful and modern-looking menu, with rows of suggestions arranged in the same tile design as your shows on the main menu. Apps offers access to a variety of streaming services including Amazon Prime Video, HBO Go, Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube. Search lets you search for shows and movies.
TiVo lets you create running lists of whatever you want to watch through OnePass. While you can individually record anything that comes up in a search or shows up in the channel guide, it's much easier to simply select the show, set up a OnePass recording, and let TiVo do all the work. OnePass can be configured to automatically record any new episode or any episode of any show over the air, and aggregates any additional episodes available through streaming services.
Once recorded, you can watch anything on your TiVo Edge directly on your TV, or on other TVs in your house with optional $180 TiVo Mini VOX boxes, or on your phone, tablet, or computer through the TiVo app. Of course, most streaming services are available in all of these ways already, and most cable and satellite providers also offer whole-home and remote playback for their DVR services.
Performance
I added a handful of shows I like to the TiVo Edge and let it run for a while, but the antenna I set up fell down and most of the shows didn't record. This actually demonstrates the Edge's good signal filtering, refusing to record blocky noise and call it a show.
I put the antenna back up and let it run longer, and the TiVo Edge diligently recorded every show I wanted, from the latest episodes of The Flash to the perplexingly numerous episodes of Night Court. For all of my chosen shows, the Edge also offered me access to every episode in the series, available through Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. I could just keep up with recent episodes by filtering the menu only to recordings, or I could binge from the beginning.
This highlights the somewhat outdated nature of TiVo and conventional DVRs, at least for prime time and syndicated shows and most movies broacast over the air. Without TiVo, I can still just stream over Amazon or Netflix or, in the case of the latest The Flash episodes the day after, the CW TV app. Even major sports games are available through individual leagues' and sports' own subscription services, or through cloud-based DVR on streaming live TV services like Sling TV.
TiVo does offer one notable benefit: Skipping commercials. My recordings had markers that let me skip past commercial breaks with the push of a button. That's handy, though not necessarily handy enough to justify the price of TiVo hardware and service.
The suggested recordings were uneven, and show the limitations of what's available over the air even in the middle of New York City. It was lots and lots of The Big Bang Theory, Judge Judy, and NCIS, and a few episodes of Jeopardy. Of those, only Jeopardy really appealed to me.
Streaming Does More for Less
You ultimately aren't paying TiVo for the function of watching what you want when you want, but for the convenience of gathering everything you want to watch together under one (fairly outdated) menu system. And even if you want to record live TV for the news, game shows, or talk shows, the Amazon Fire TV Recast does the same job without requiring a subscription, and the associated Fire TV device you need to use it provides access to far more streaming services and apps than the TiVo Edge.
The price of TiVo's DVR and subscription is also hard to get past. The DVR itself is $350, with another $70 per year to use it. The high-end Amazon Fire TV Recast has half the storage, but it costs $70 less and doesn't require a subscription at all, just a media streamer as inexpensive as the $40 Fire TV Stick. Even bumping up to the Fire TV Cube will only push your total to around $400 with no subscription to deal with, and it lets you control your home theater with your voice.
The TiVo Edge doesn't fail as a device. It does exactly what it was designed to do, and it does it well. The problem is that those tasks aren't enough to justify spending around $500 in the first year for it, when you can get the same content for a fraction of the price through various streaming services, including live TV. TiVo was revolutionary when it started out, but TV-based entertainment has moved on, and the TiVo Edge feels stuck in the past.
The TiVo Edge is a perfectly serviceable DVR hampered by a high price, a dated interface, and the existence of streaming convenience.
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