TivoPremier
Latest
TiVo Premiere vs Windows 7 Media Center
Although TiVo and ReplayTV were the first DVRs on the market, Microsoft's software actually powered the DISHPlayer Satellite DVR in late 1999. So here we are over 10 years later and while TiVo and Microsoft took different approaches to the same space, of the three original DVR software companies, they're the only two left. Which is the bigger success depends on your perspective, because while TiVo has the mind share (and sold more consumer branded products) Microsoft's technology is present in many other brand DVRs, like Verizon's FiOS DVR, and AT&T's U-Verse (which is built on Microsoft's Mediaroom platform). But our perspective of success is based on the user interface experience, so while we previously reviewed both the TiVo Premiere and Windows 7 Media Center, we wanted to also tackled the task of directly comparing the two. Of course there are some obvious differences that might sway someone in one way or another, like TiVo's simpler out of the box setup or Media Center's 3rd party plug-in architecture, there are many other points of distinction to discover if you click on through and read about the less obvious user interface differences as well as a few other baked-in non-DVR features. %Gallery-97269%
The processor in the TiVo Premiere is over twice as fast as the Series3
Just about all of you can tell us exactly how fast the processor in your computer is, but what about your DVR? We don't give it much thought ourselves until things slow down, but this chart from TiVo Community's Premiere FAQ really opens our eyes to why so many DVRs have such crapy interfaces. As you can see, the new TiVo Premiere sports a processor that is way faster than just about any DVR out there, and easily dwarfs the old Series3 and TiVo HD. This not only makes it easy to understand why the new Premiere interface didn't get back ported to the Series3, but it also makes us wonder what other capabilities might be leveraged by TiVo with this new found power.
