In my continuing effort to slim down our monthly bills, I've decided to investigate switching from Dish Network to FiOS TV. I already have FiOS internet, so the savings on a package deal seem enticing, and they seem to have beefed up their channel lineup significantly since I last looked.

The one concern I have is about their DVRs. At the time I signed on with Dish Network, their multi-room DVR was superior to other offerings from DirecTV and cable providers. Looking around, it seems like Verizon has a multi-room DVR now, but they don't guarantee any specific model, so it's hard for me to tell how good they would be compared to what I have.

It looks to me like you can either use Verizon's multi-room box, or you can get a cablecard from Verizon for $4/month and use a Tivo Premiere. They both seem to have advantages and disadvantages. What I really like about my Dish DVR is the fact that it can share the two tuners and all DVR recordings with multiple rooms via a simple coax cable (or with component cables if you want to run HD to the other TVs) with no need for any converter box on the additional TVs. You're limited to two tuners (thus two concurrent DVR recordings) visible on any number of TVs, but the benefit of having just one DVR box and no other set top boxes anywhere is appealingly simple and convenient. (You do need to use RF remotes on the remote TVs, but that's not much of an issue.)

It doesn't look like anyone else offers this sort of whole-home distribution setup, or at least I haven't seen anyone else doing it. If I go the TiVo route, it looks like I need a TiVO on each TV with a cablecard to view recordings in multiple rooms, and if I go with the Verizon multi-room DVR, it looks like I need DVR boxes on the other TVs (at $10 each per month) that talk to the multi-room DVR. Has anyone else solved this problem with some sort of custom home distribution / Slingbox / Sling catcher type setup? Is there another DVR option out there I should look into? Is anyone else on FiOS and can comment on their DVR offerings?

TiVo may come out with a multi-tuner box (4 tuners?) and smaller client boxes that you'd connect to other TVs in the house to stream onto. I have no idea what the timeframe is for that, as I just saw something about it today online.

If you wanted ATSC only, then I'd have another suggestion for you. And no, not an HTPC.

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.

I'm on that TiVo survey. IIRC, that was one of the things that was presented as "we're pretty sure we're going to do this".

They'll only be 6 or 7 years late to the party, but better than never.

They've actually had this for quite a while as "Home Media Option", or something like that. This was apparently a new thing where there would just be one DVR, but small satellite slaves for the other TVs.

There were also questions about direct playback from other DVRs instead of the need to transfer the data first, among a number of other things, like new search options, both automatic and manual, being able to remotely program another DVR almost as if it were an extension of the TiVo, and, uh, a bunch of other stuff I can't remember at the moment.

They've really needed to focus on software development for a while. Hopefully this is an indication that they've realized that.

We currently don't have a DVR, but have had TiVo in the past and are returning to it. I'll be purchasing a Premiere with life time subscription for $486. I did not consider the DVRs from Comcast (current basic cable provider) or Verizon (current internet provider, 10mbit FiOS) as I'm planning on going OTA, and the ability to easily upgrade from the provided 320gb to 2tb of capicity.

From recent reading on the TiVo forums transfer speed is improved on the current boxes to the degree that you can start watching shortly after the copy has begun. But yes, this would require a TiVo for each TV.

I do know someone who is broadcasting the output of their DVR to other TVs in the house over coax on channel 1. Not sure of the details. Down side is that every TV is showing the same thing...don't know if that is a solution for you.

About 17 years ago my dad actually had our house set up like this. We had satellite, and the main home theater had a box of it's own, but there was one box in the basement that would broadcast to the three other spots in the house on channel 3 or whatever. We then had IR signal injectors on those three lines to control it. It was pretty cool stuff for the time, but it still meant watching the same thing on all three of those TVs.

Yeah, I'd read about the Tivo survey, but if they're just putting out feelers now, I wouldn't expect it to be available for 6-12 months, so if I switched providers now, I'd need to get an interim solution in place until then.


What's the UI for this? Like, suppose I have a multi-room DVR in my living room and a regular DVR in the bedroom (so someone watching TV in the bedroom can pause live TV, record stuff, etc.) Do the recordings on both devices show up separately from each other, or are they all pooled together in the interface? I remember from my ReplayTV days having to remember which device had which timers, which was annoying.

The great thing about the home distribution method that Dish uses is that there's just one box recording everything with multiple tuners, so the other TVs are all browsing the same central show library instead of having to switch between them. My hunch is that going to Verizon would be a step backward in this regard.


That's good to hear -- I'm sure they'd give me a 500GB as a prospective new customer. I'm less worried about capacity as I am with having to pay $20 for a multi-room DVR and $10 for a regular DVR to be able to pause live shows on two TVs. That significantly undercuts the cost savings of going to Verizon's "double play" package.


Hm, I didn't think about VOD. I agree that free VOD offerings are often crap, but that's still something to consider -- the landscape of who has which free content at a particular time changes often, so I'd prefer to have as many choices as possible.


Wow, that's sad -- my old ReplayTVs did better than that. Hearing that makes me think I'd probably be best off getting the Verizon multi-room setup initially and possibly moving to Tivo if/when they get their act together on multi-room viewing that doesn't suck.

It sounds like our multi-room convenience takes a hit no matter which direction we go, leaving aside the murky details of the future Tivo thing. I guess I'll have to do the math on exactly how much we'll save to figure out if that's worth it or not. It may just be that our setup (two tuners distributed across 4 TVs) is particularly suited to the Dish way of doing things.

Moxi has a pretty seamless whole-home solution. I have a Moxi three-tuner DVR in my living room and one Moxi Mate in the bedroom. The Mate can stream live TV from the DVR and also access all its recorded shows. The Mate has the exact same interface as the DVR. Channel changes and trick-play is slower on the Mate than the main DVR unit, but that's to be expected since the Mate has no internal storage. It also has no active cooling which is great for bedroom use.

I don't like the lack of support (no software updates since mid-2010). The Mate is also unable to schedule or delete recordings on the DVR, but an iPhone/iPad app exists which helps this shortcoming.

Other than those things, it's great. I pay $2.50/month for cable card rental (Cablevision) which costs much less than Cablevision's terrible DVRs. Moxi has a high up-front cost, but there is no monthly fee after that. They seem to hold their value well for resale on ebay.

Nice to see Moxi is still out there. I was tracking their progress for a possible replacement when ReplayTV was going downhill business wise.

Hm, somehow I'd never even heard of Moxi. That does seem to be a more elegant solution than the Verizon DVR or the Tivo multi-room feature, but the $300 price tag on the Moxi Mate is ludicrous. If that were closer to $100, I could stomach the $600 price tag on the main unit no problem.

Update: Okay, so the bundles bring the cost of the Mate down to $200. Still too high for what it does, but maybe not a bad option if the devices last a long time before they die or are obsolete.

I guess what I'm running into here is that we don't use our other TVs very much, so paying $200 for each of them seems crazy. (One of them is in the basement for when I'm folding laundry -- it's great to have, but I wouldn't pay that much to retain it if we changed our TV provider.) This reminds me of when I transitioned from analog cable to digital cable -- suddenly the need to pay for a box on every TV meant I needed to decide how much I needed each of my TVs. With Dish, I don't really need to make that choice, but with FiOS, it seems I would have to no matter what route I go for DVRs.

Because I don't live with it every day I'm having a difficult time remembering at the moment (also, my experience is with a 2nd box that's not a DVR with its own content), but I'm pretty sure the content shows in the same place on each box.

But also remember that you'll only get one DVR that can share content. With Tivo, all the boxes can share with each other, so you can the total storage capacity and tuners of all the boxes. Either way, you're not going to have your Dish setup with one central box handing everything out, but with Fios the multi-room viewing is limited to a single box's storage and tuners.


It appears that my input might soon carry a little less weight, sir. Everything I'm telling you is based on what I know of the Fios service from the past 20 months or so, since my mother moved into her home. Coincidentally, just today I noticed that Fios is starting to push out software updates to their HD DVR boxes that brings a new interface. I can tell you the old one was pretty lackluster. It also seems they're starting to ship new DVR boxes that aren't like the ones my mom received. So like I said, any insight I can give you might not be relevant to what you're going to be getting.


I would agree with you, but for the fact that ALL the free content on Fios VOD is terrible and unwatchable. Tivo not only has Amazon video and Netflix, but it integrates those services into the Premiere interface really well, from what I've heard. For example, in searches you'll get results from Amazon's library in addition to what's showing on your Tivo's guide data. I'm pretty sure the same applies for Netflix. Trust me, I don't miss the Fios VOD in the least, and I have so much video content available to me via Tivo, Netflix, and vudu, I couldn't possibly need another source for content, and I consume a ridiculous amount of content (seriously, it's too much, I think I'm a little addicted ).


Don't get me wrong, from what I hear it doesn't actually suck (see the post before yours), it's just that you can see the edges. It sounds like it's akin to renting a movie on Apple TV, where you need to let it buffer a little bit before it can start playing. The advantage Verizon has here is that while Tivo needs to use your network to transfer the content, Verizon uses the coax connection to talk to the other boxes. I'm honestly not sure how this works. Anyone know?


It sounded to me from your initial post that you were leaning more towards the side of using Verizon's equipment in the first place But you're right, it sounds like any setup is going to be a slight step down from your current situation. However, I will point out that having a DVR in each room means you'll go from "two tuners for the entire house" to "two tuners for the entire house and two for each of three TVs." And that's for Fios. Like I said, with Tivo, you'd essentially have eight tuners for the entire house AND their combined storage.

I also can't stress enough the superior interface of the Tivo. It is miles apart from what you get with the Fios UI in every aspect. Even fast forwarding and rewinding with the Fios equipment is...unresponsive is the only word I can think of at the moment. It'll constantly mess up like that. Tivo also still has the fantastic season pass manager, which can now be organized via web interface (a great feature).

As you can see, I'm pushing the Tivo route, but like you said, there's no telling when or if they'll be releasing that multi-room product. I guess we'll have to see, and in the end I don't believe there's any commitment to renting the Fios equipment. I'm pretty sure that at any time you can simply return it and get Tivo or Moxi or whatever.

BTW, the return process for Fios is soooo much better than most cable companies. When we got rid of Cox Cable, we had to drive 40 miles out to a headquarters and stand in line for half an hour to return the equipment, which seemed to take forever and involved a long, annoying process. Shortly after getting Fios, my mom realized she wasn't going to use one of the TVs we'd set it up on, and the process for returning the box was to take the box, power cable, and remote to the nearest UPS store (which was a mile away), and put it on the counter. They said thank you and I left. Super easy.

Yeah, that's a pretty ridiculous price. However, it doesn't have the monthly contract, so you make up that cost very quickly.

How do you like the interface, Rob?



I was just thinking about the possibility of that multi-room Tivo product. While I think that the actual technology is greatly needed from a usability standpoint, what is really necessary from Tivo is a better pricing model. Currently, there's a slight reduction in contract price for additional boxes in your home, up to something like four boxes. Really, it's not enough of a price cut.

I'm wondering how they'd price the plan for such a product. Would they require that same reduced-cost plan for each "dumb" box you added to your system? Would it just be a single price for the main Tivo box? If so, the savings cost over the Fios DVR would be huge.

I'm very happy with my TiVo's ability to let me suck stuff out (via iTiVo), transcode it, and dump it on my phone. I regularly use TiVo's built-in Pandora support. I'm mostly happy with TiVo's ability to stream content from my Mac (via pyTiVoX).

What's the status of these sorts of functionality with other DVRs?

As far as I know, absolutely abysmal (to non-existant) unless you've got a home-brewed solution like MythTV, SageTV, MS Media Center (with hacks) or Media Portal.

It's funny -- I used to copy and transcode from my ReplayTV back in the day, and when I joined the Dish Network DVR club, I lamented the loss of that functionality. But with hard drives on the DVRs getting so large, and not wanting to watch recordings on a small smartphone screen, it's not nearly as important to me as it used to be. I used to try to build up a giant library of archived shows, but then I realized I was never watching them, and now I can get many of the ones I'd care to from Netflix instant.

Warning: If your cable provider decides (like mine, Time Warner) that everything that can legally be restricted must be restricted, this means that the only thing you can get off of your TiVo is broadcast network programming. (Though you can get that off even if you received it over cable and not the air.)

Same here, and it was so easy off a 4500 or 5000 series unit too. Load up a java app that emulated a ReplayTV, pull them over the network, then fire up a program that understood all the commercial skip markers. Few minor tweaks, and I could export a commercial free archive copy of a show with little effort. And all without any hacks to the ReplayTV to add a network card and other such things TiVo owners of the time were doing.

The auto archiving of the Java emulator was really useful. I bought a low end ReplayTV unit with I think 40GB of storage. It was enough to handle a few days of recordings, and then the Java program could kick in to pull them off and stash them on my home server/NAS. Because of how well the streaming worked back to the ReplayTV, the experience was pretty much the same watching locally, or pulling the show back in from the archive.

Oh, and the internet TV show sharing was also handy. I missed a few shows due to power outages or other issues. A quick visit to an online site helped me coordinate with other ReplayTV owners, and allowed me to pull in the show from their unit.

It's not a wonder ReplayTV was sued, the tech was just too good :-)

In practice, with my Comcast cable, they copy-protect everything on the premium channels (HBO, etc.), and they seem to probabilistically copy-protect content from some HD standard cable channels with no particular rhyme or reason. All the SD cable channels are unprotected.

All that protection must be working wonderfully. Pretty much any show is available in a 720p rip the same night it airs - within minutes. For people on the West coast, usually before the show airs. It doesn't matter if it's network or premium either.

Personally, as long as someone is broadcasting ATSC, I won't be paying for network programming.

To be clear, my comment wasn't hypothetical. I have a TiVo, and 100% of the content that wasn't broadcast by my local ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, or PBS stations is restricted by Time Warner.

They apparently also do something that cripples the TiVo's ability to record suggestions.

Yes. Shockingly, DRM is irrelevant to those that are explicitly trying to get around it, but prevents those of us who just want reasonably access to our media from having it.

I'm pretty sure that that's never been shown before.

Looking further at the pricing details, and factoring in either Verizon's monthly DVR/STB fees or a lifetime-activated Tivo, we'd end up paying significantly more despite the bundle savings. The Verizon TV plans are priced competitively enough, but once you add $30-$40 for the multi-room DVR and additional set-top boxes, it's a wash, and that's even if we drop down to 3 TVs. Combined with the need to get into a new 2 year contract, I think we'll probably stand pat.

Maybe in six months or so the new whizbang Tivo thing will be out and it'll make more sense, but it seems to me that Dish still has the best setup for anyone who has multiple TVs but doesn't necessarily need to be watching three or four things at once. The prospect of upgrading my game room TV to HD complicates things (the 2nd output of the Dish DVR only does SD) but I think Dish still comes out ahead price-wise if I decide to add another HD DVR in the other room.

Directv's offering allows one DVR to serve the whole house. Other rooms have sat tuners that can tap the recordings on the mothership.

One thing to note, the fine print says "Limit one remote viewing per HD DVR at at time." Bummer! Or maybe not, depends on needs.

Fortunately, Fios doesn't seem to do this.


Sorry, I re-read your post, and for some reason I initially thought that for some reason you HAD to move to Fios for TV and use their equipment or Tivo's. Not sure why I thought that. But yes, for your use-case, I guess it makes sense to stay with what you have. Personally, I can't ever give up the Tivo interface. Besides, none of the competing products make those *bleep* *bloop* sounds

The main interface is very similar to the PS3's cross media bar. You have channels, categories of programming (Movies, sports, HD, etc.), games, DLNA, recorded content, and settings on a horizontal bar. When in one of those categories, a vertical bar of your options appears.

This means that channels are not presented in a grid view by default. You can switch to a grid view, but I don't find the need to ever do that. The normal XMB-style interface suits me fine. That said, there is simply too much on the horizontal bar. Live programming is categorized into about 10 different types that cannot be hidden. This makes going from one side of the bar to the other needlessly long. The only category I've ever used is the HD one since my cable operator sticks most HD channels in the 700s. Browsing with the HD category just shows those channels, which is handy.

The Moxi and Mate are DLNA compliant. I have used them with PS3 Media Server running in OS X and it works as well as any other DLNA device. I have Boxee Boxes, so I obviously don't use the DLNA feature at all. Boxee is just a million times better.

It could be one of the places Sony got inspiration for their UI, since Moxi predates the PS3 and PSP. I didn't know they were till around After visiting their booth at CES in 2005 and seeing that their announced/demonstrated partner plans didn't work out, I thought they had closed up shop a few years later.

Can the Moxi do picture-in-picture at all? I managed to find a Verizon FiOS bundle that would save me about $30/month with their equipment, but then I thought to look for PIP functionality, which is absent. In fact, I haven't seen any other providers do PIP, which is surprising considering the fact that the DVRs all have multiple tuners now.

No PIP on the Moxi. All outputs aren't active at the same time either. You can't output HDMI and component video simultaneously, for example.