TiVo Bolt OTA Test: For potential cord cutter with excellent antenna reception

Despite the plethora of services and devices designed to meet your occasional surveillance needs, the veteran TiVo has not yet been completely evicted. In recent years, the company has been striving to modernize by offering its DVR recorders features such as voice commands and access to third-party streaming applications.

Now, TiVo is tackling a specific group of rope cutters – those who have not yet made that commitment but want to get in the water without cables. The company's new $ 249 TiVo Bolt OTA box orients the cable card slot so that it can only receive antenna-based channels. The company believes that some users who have not yet opted for a cord cutter could be ready to take the plunge if some channels remain available to them at the beginning.

Bolt OTA allows users to connect an antenna and stream content from services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. As a person who still pays for cable but would like to leave this life someday, I was intrigued by OTA Bolt. I spent about two weeks testing the device and, although it does include a number of features that I have never had access to on other decoders, I do not have I'm not convinced that this is the best option for most professional cord cutters.

Design and configuration

Bolt OTA takes the shape of existing TiVo devices, a curved rectangle that takes up more space on your dresser or TV than most other decoders. It's a beautiful box, however, with a glossy black finish and a single LED on the front edge. The back edge contains all of its connectivity options: the power port, a port for additional E-SATA storage, two USB-A ports, an Ethernet port, an HDMI port, an input port. standard audio output, an optical digital audio port and the antenna connector. The box also has 1 TB of internal storage for DVR content, and can play 4K and HDR content.

I did not already have an antenna, so I bought an HDTV model for about $ 25. You can find antennas at prices ranging from $ 10 to $ 80, making it an affordable addition to your TV if you do not have a cable company or if you do not want to pay for extra cable boxes in different rooms. your house.

The configuration of Bolt OTA requires little time: simply connect the device to your TV using the supplied HDMI cable and connect your antenna to the device via a coaxial cable. Then you just turn on the TV and follow the instructions on the screen. The longest part is to wait for TiVo to activate the box service and retrieve all available local channels via the antenna.

As soon as I plugged in the OTA Bolt, I noticed how noisy it was. The box emits a constant hum or buzz that you can not hear during a show, but you can certainly hear it if the room is silent and you are within ten feet of the box. It was not loud enough to keep me awake at night, but it provided a subtle background noise during the day when the room was almost always unoccupied.

The OTA Bolt comes with the Vox remote that accompanies the latest Bolt housings. Compared to remote controls for Roku and Apple TV devices, TiVo's remote control is huge and looks more like a cable TV remote control than you'll get when you set up the service. Its design did not bother me, but it was very different from the minimalist rectangular accessories that I have used to using with other decoders. In addition to the voice commands (which we will talk about later), I liked the numbered buttons on the remote as they could be given a shortcut to open a particular application such as YouTube or Netflix.

The TiVo service explained

Bolt OTA is more than just a box, because it's a TiVo device. Unlike other set top boxes, most TiVo devices require you to pay a monthly or one-time fee for the service of the company. Since Bolt OTA is limited in that it can not take a cable card, TiVo has lowered the price of its service for Bolt OTA users by $ 6.99 per month (instead of $ 14.99 per month) . Users may also choose to pay a one-time fee of $ 249 to receive TiVo services during the lifetime of Bolt OTA that they have purchased, which also cost $ 249. Here's what TiVo service gives you:

• DVR and OnePass service
• Transcoding service that allows you to watch recorded programs with the OTA Bolt box on up to two other mobile devices.
• Voice search
• SkipMode, which skips entire commercial breaks
• The TiVo recommendation engine that suggests shows based on the history of your watch and your favorites
• Smart Home Capabilities with Alexa
• Regularly updated program guides for your region
• Software updates

Interface and applications

The latest version of the TiVo interface is not inspired, but it is quite easy to find sources of content. From live TV, press the round TiVo button at the top of the remote control to access the main menu. This is where the content lives, including My Shows, What to Watch, Search and Apps. My Shows and What to Watch includes suggested and preferred content from live TV channels and streaming services. What To Watch relies heavily on television programs, so it's a place to go if you want to check what's going on right now.

TiVo extracts suggested content from TV programs, but that does not mean that you will have access to all the shows on the What to Watch tab. Some of my suggested programs broadcast channels that my antenna could not capture. TiVo recognized the channel number, the network name and the programmed show, but setting this channel brought me to a black screen.

This quickly took the form of one of my biggest problems with the TiVo Bolt OTA – the device does not easily isolate the channels that your antenna can pick up. While the device recognized about 120 channels in my area, I had to go through all of them to see which ones actually worked on my TV screen.