Tony, I can offer some opinions on this. My mother and I both have Fios in our homes, yet I have a Tivo and she has all Verizon equipment.

There are two things about the Verizon equipment that I'll give it credit for:

1) compared to other companies' DVRs, I think they're among the best.

2) watching recorded content between devices works really well. It's actually pretty seamless, and feels like you're always watching the content from the place it was recorded.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, here's my negatives:

1) "...if I go with the Verizon multi-room DVR, it looks like I need DVR boxes on the other TVs..."

The only thing the "multi-room box" does is share recorded content with other boxes. It's not sharing tuners. So unless you have the DVR on every TV, you can't time-shift or pause live TV. My mom misses being able to do that. I'm guessing that this is why you've seen that you need DVRs on the other TVs. Otherwise any of Verizon's other boxes will be able to see the content stored on the multi-room DVR (well, the SD box can see the content there, but of course can only play the SD content).

2) The storage capacity is terrible. In fact, her DVR seems to be misreporting the storage space left to a significant degree. At one point she only had about 8 HD TV show episodes recorded, and it said she was nearly out of space. Even if it was calculating the space properly, though, she still wouldn't have much storage. *edit* I just finished a chat with a Verizon rep and to my surprise they now offer larger capacity DVRs. Apparently they come in 160, 320, and 500GB sizes. But you can't expand those like I have with my Tivo to give me 179 hours of HD and 1561 of SD.

3) I said the DVR was good for a cable company's DVR. That's not high praise in the least. IMO, Tivo still destroys any box you can get from your cable company (unless that box is, of course, a Tivo). Even with my Series 3 - which essentially has an 11 year old interface - is still far better than anything you'd get from Time Warner or the like. I'll be honest though, I haven't used the Premiere interface which is slightly different.


As for me, like I said I'm rocking Tivo with my Fios, and it's great. However, unfortunately I can't speak to multi-room viewing because while we have a TV in the bedroom, it's probably only been watched for a total of two hours in the 3.5 years we've lived here. However, here's what I can say about using a Tivo on Fios:

1) *knock on wood*, we didn't have any of the cablecard horror stories you hear so much about with other cable companies. Maybe that's just Fios and they're better about getting you the right thing, but we just had the installer come out and set everything up and it took as long as a normal setup.

2) No, we don't get VOD on our Tivo. No, I don't care. I've seen the selection and the interface for accessing that content, and it's clumsy and the selection of free stuff is crap. It doesn't compare in the least to the services I can get through Boxee anyway, so I meant it when I said I don't care about losing VOD.

3) From what I've heard about multi-room distribution with Tivo, it's not the most elegant solution in the world. It's more like file sharing where you start a transfer of the show you want and start it once you've received enough data. However, the thing Bruno brought up intrigues me! While the Engadget article shows that it's only a survey question for now, I'm pretty sure that other questions like this from Tivo have resulted in actual products.


In the end, I'm constantly urging my mom to switch out her Fios equipment for Tivos. The problem is that it's a significant initial investment. The cost of the hardware is pretty darn high. But once that's over, the monthly cost is right around what you'd pay for the Fios equipment, higher or lower depending on the configurations.