TiVo Edge review: A once-great DVR in decline

The best thing about TiVo has always been its fundamentals. No other DVR gives you as much control over which programs to record and how to record them, and no other DVR makes live TV viewing so convenient.

All the more frustrating, then, that the new TiVo Edge DVR makes no improvements in the areas where TiVo needs them most. The hardware is slicker (and quieter) this time around, and now it supports Dolby Vision HDR. But you still can’t use other streaming TV devices, such as Roku, to access your DVR, and TiVo’s own selection of built-in video apps is falling further behind dedicated streaming players. Even worse, the core DVR experience is now deteriorating with pre-roll video ads.

As TiVo stands still, other over-the-air DVR solutions such as Tablo, Channels DVR, and Fire TV Recast are adding more of TiVo’s core features while offering those that TiVo still lacks. As such, even a slightly improved TiVo Edge is harder to recommend than its predecessors were.

New look, less noise

For this review, I evaluated the TiVo Edge for Antenna, which costs $350, has 2TB of storage, and can play or record up to four broadcast channels at the same time. DVR service costs an extra $7 per month, $70 per year, or $250 for the life of the hardware.

For those who plan to plug in a CableCARD, the TiVo Edge for Cable costs $400, also has 2TB of storage, and can play or record up to six channels at a time. TiVo charges $15 per month, $150 per year, or $550 for lifetime cable DVR service.

With both TiVo Edge variants, the design of the box itself is a big improvement over the previous TiVo Bolt. Instead of having an arched enclosure, the Edge is a flat plastic slab with a ledge that runs around the front and sides. The result is a better thermal design that runs a lot quieter. With the Bolt, I could hear it whirring from the other side of my office, but the Edge becomes inaudible from just a foot or two away.

The port arrangement around back has barely changed despite the new look, with a coaxial input, optical audio output, HDMI, a pair of USB ports, ethernet, and a remote finder button that plays a tone on the TiVo remote. The old eSATA port for storage expansion is gone, but WD stopped selling its sole compatible hard drive years ago anyway. Unfortunately, the USB ports still don’t support external hard drives, so they don’t serve much purpose beyond charging your phone.

Compared to the Bolt, the TiVo Edge has a faster processor and more memory (4GB instead of 3GB), but those upgrades don’t translate to a major performance boost. You’ll still notice slight loading delays as you move through menus, and the interface still animates at a choppy 30 frames per second rather than the smoother frame rates you’ll find on modern streaming boxes.

Still, the Edge now supports Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos, though I was unable to get the former to work on my Vizio M50-E1 TV from 2017. Unless I disabled HDR entirely, loading Netflix would make the screen become overly dim or unbearably pink. TiVo says this a bug related to my TV being an early HDR set, but I’ve never experienced this issue with myriad other 4K HDR streaming boxes.

As for TiVo’s remote, it remains aggressively chunky with too many extraneous buttons (TiVo’s recommendations don’t even utilize the thumbs-up and -down buttons anymore), but the TiVo Edge for Antenna remote has one major improvement this time around: It’s backlit, so the keys light up when you press them. Strangely, TiVo is sticking cable customers with the non-backlit version for now.

A world-class DVR, with one big caveat

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that people can be picky about DVR behavior, and that’s especially true of TiVo users. There’s even a contingent of users who’ve avoided upgrading to TiVo’s most recent operating system version because they don’t like the changes therein. (I’ve found the upgrade to be mostly positive.)

So it was a bit surprising when, a couple of months ago, TiVo started stuffing preroll ads into users’ DVR recordings. These ads have not turned up on my review unit, and unofficially, you may be able to disable them with a call to customer service. Still, stomping on a sacrosanct element of the DVR experience is either a tone-deaf decision or a sign that current customers don’t matter in the grand scheme of TiVo’s business.