RECORDING SHOWS OVER THE AIR

As always, when I refer to "cable," it means cable, satellite, U-Verse, etc.

Unless you bought your own TIVO with Over the Air (OTA) tuners, when you turn in your cable TV equipment, you also turn in your DVR and, supposedly, the option to record shows.  Until recently, there were few viable options for recording OTA shows.  Now there's a good one, and it's not that expensive.

THE TIVO ROAMIO OTA:  TIVO, in it's wisdom to serve all consumers, has produced  a budget version that only records OTA programs.  The Roamio OTA costs $50 if purchased from Best Buy, with free shipping.  

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/tivo-roamio-ota-digital-video-recorder-black/8758098.p?id=1219364357147&skuId=8758098

While being budget in price, it's not budget in features: it has four built-in tuners to record up to 3 shows while watching another and it has all of TIVOs well known features, which are too numerous for the scope of this article.  There are two catches to this model. The first is that there's no cable card or option for a cable card.  This will record OTA programming only, and nothing else. The second is that TIVO charges $15 per month to use the service, and there's no "one time" (lifetime) price as there is on other TIVO models.  That's only fair, since TIVO isn't making any money off of the device by selling it so cheaply: similar DVRs with cable ability start at $199 and go up rapidly thereafter.

What you get for your $15 per month is TIVOs well-known programming guide, a "suggestion" service that automatically records what TIVO thinks you'd like to watch, integration with several of the most popular streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, etc.) and of course the ability to record shows at any time of day or night.  Again, there are more features than can be covered here, and there are many places to learn about all of TIVO's good (and bad) features.  The main point for cable cutters is that we can still record shows if we aren't around, or even if we are.

While TIVO does allow you to use the most popular streaming services, there's a much better device that has far more options.  I'll cover that in my next post.