The Philips and TiVo brands will be reunited this Fall on a line of Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) designed for use by consumers looking to avoid pricey cable or satellite TV subscription services.
An executive with P&F USA, which licenses the Philips brand for the sale and marketing of TVs and video-related products in North America, confirmed that a Philips-branded “concept” PVR the company showed at its booth in the Renaissance Hotel during the recent CES 2017 in Las Vegas should be coming to market this September, under the name “Philips HD Personal Video Recorder Powered by TiVo.”
Read more on the Philips TiVo PVR after the jump:
Exact features, model numbers and pricing will be announced shortly, the company told us. The concept product on display at CES was a 2-tuner TiVo PVR equipped to receive and record free over-the-air broadcast television programs, similar to TiVo’s Roamio PVRs.
P&F’s TiVo PVR was showed to potential retail buyers at CES to gauge interest in carrying the product. The product was listed as incorporating a full-functioning TiVo programming guide as well as 802.11ac Wi-Fi networking to distribute playback of recordings. The company listed the possibility of three versions of the product, each differentiated primarily by hard-drive capacity. Other features and pricing (including pricing for the EPG data service) are being determined.
Karl Bearnarth, P&F USA marketing VP, said at its base level the PVR will OTA tuning and a fully functioning TiVo electronic program guide.
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When the products arrive they will mark a re-association of the Philips and TiVo brands, which first began with TiVo/DirecTV PVRs and TiVo Series 1 PVRs, the latter of which launched in 1999. Although TiVo PVRs have gone through multiple iterations and advances, the Philips TiVo Series 1 PVRs continued to work with full program guide data until October 2016, when TiVo stopped making programming guide information accessible by Series 1 devices. Any of those products that were still functioning could still record television programs manually but did not have the use of the subscription (or lifetime fee) EPG data to find and program recordings.
The Philips TiVo PVR in development would have similar capability to TiVo’s Roamio PVR, which was developed for cord-cutters. The TiVo Roamio PVR, which included OTA tuners and was not designed for use with cable or satellite TV, however, included integrated over-the-top streaming services and factored in a lifetime subscription for the EPG data service. A 1 TB Roamio currently starts at $399.
By Greg Tarr
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