TiVo, answering the calls of the country's seven most crazed TV addicts, has just unveiled the TiVo Mega -- a massive 24-terabyte DVR with six separate tuners, capable of recording up to 26,000 hours (three years) of TV. TiVo Mega will be available in the first quarter of 2015, priced at a rather astronomical $5000.
We've all been there: You want to record a TV show, but yet again your last-gen DVR has run out of hard drive space -- and yet again, you are forced to leaf through your massive media library, deciding which recording gets culled so that you might squeeze in another episode of another show that you'll probably never watch. While a few stop-gap solutions do exist in such situations -- plugging in an external hard drive, or offloading recordings to some kind of offline storage -- TiVo has another, much more first-world solution.
Enter the TiVo Mega, a DVR that looks more like a 4U multi-CPU server than a TV recording box -- and indeed, the Mega is actually rack-mountable if you so wish (you're not a true millionaire and/or mediaphile if you don't have an AV rack). Inside the hot-swappable hard drive bays is a total of 24TB of RAID 5 storage. RAID 5 is striped for speed, like RAID 0, but with parity data spread across the drives for redundancy (if one drive dies, you can slot a new one in without losing any data). Tivo hasn't shared the exact drive setup, but there's probably six 4TB drives, for 24TB total capacity but only 20TB of usable space (RAID 5 parity takes up one drive's worth of space). The hard drives are user-replaceable (and upgradeable, I assume). With its base configuration, Tivo says the Mega is good for 26,000 hours of SD recording or 4,000 hours of HD. (That's about 5,700 episodes of your favorite 42-minute HD TV show.)
The much more sensibly sized TiVo Roamio and Mini
Because it would literally take you years to fill up a TiVoMega with just one or two tuners, TiVo has instead opted for six separate TV tuners. (Why stop there, Tivo? Why not 10? or 15?) For playback, the Mega can power a whole home of Tivo Minis, or it can stream to smartphones and tablets (either at home, or over the internet). There's some app that lets you manage the DVR from your mobile device, too, and the Mega comes with the Slide Pro QWERTY remote control. "TiVo Mega offers more than twelve times the storage of any cable or satellite DVR. TiVo Mega is the solution for the power user who wants to record everything. We salute you and enjoy!" says Tivo's Ira Bahr.
The current TiVo iPad app, which is basically a glorified remote control
TiVo Mega is being shown off at Cedia Expo this week, with an expected retail release of Q1 2015. The final price will be announced in the next few months, but $5,000 is the target. There's no word on warranty length (a serious consideration when you're dealing with so many hard drives), but I doubt it'll be anything over the usual 90 days that TiVo offers.
If you think that $5,000 is a lot to pay for a half-dozen hard drives and TV tuners, then you'd be right. If we tally up the cost of the TiVo Mega's components -- six hard drives, six TV tuners, a big chassis, some kind of embedded computer controller -- we arrive at around $1,500. Of course that doesn't include TiVo's software and the myriad other pieces of the DVR puzzle, but there are plenty of commercial, free, and open-source tools that can approximate roughly the same experience (MythTV, Freevo, SageTV, NextPVR, EyeTV). If you build your own DVR it can also double up as a general media hub/torrenting box, too.
Of course, no discussion of gratuitous storage solutions would be complete without mentioning Backblaze's 270TB storage pod. For about $15,000, you could build a DVR that's the same physical size as the TiVo Mega but with more than 10 times the capacity. Salute that, TiVo.
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