TiVo has added storage and eliminated monthly subscription service fees for the Roamio OTA, an HD-DVR wth OTT capabilities targeted at cord-cutters that also crosses swords with Channel Master’s subscription-less OTA-OTT DVR combo.

TiVo new Roamio OTA, which goes on sale on May 2 at TiVo.com, BestBuy.com, Amazon.com and some Best Buy brick and mortar stores, will feature a 1 terabyte hard drive and sell for $399.99, which covers lifetime access to the underlying TiVo service.  It's also integrated with OTT apps from partners such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and YouTube.

After unveiling a “limited edition” of the Roamio OTA in the fall of 2014, TiVo went national with the product in January 2015. That version sold for $49.99, came equipped with a 500 Gigabyte hard drive (but with no CableCARD slot), and required users to pay $14.99 per month for the TiVo service.

The new model will also sport four tuners as well as some relatively new TiVo features such as the controversial SkipMode as well as QuickMode – elements that were originally offered on the 4K-capable TiVo Bolt but were recently extended to its Roamio product family.

The Roamio OTA is also compatible with the TiVo Mini (for multi-room set-ups) as well as TiVo Stream, the company’s Slingbox-like place-shifting device.

Removing the monthly subscription fee will put the Roamio OTA on better completive footing with Channel Master’s DVR+,  which in January added Sling TV, Dish Network’s OTT-TV streaming platform, to its app mix, and sells its comparable 1 TB model for $399.

TiVo’s new OTA offering also emerges amid reports that Dish Network corporate cousins Sling Media and EchoStar are nearing the launch of AirTV, a device that will purportedly also support Sling TV’s service as well as an digital OTA tuner.

TiVo, naturally, believes that it’s got a superior product for the category.

"The TiVo Roamio OTA 1TB is in a class of its own," Ira Bahr, TiVo's chief marketing and retail sales officer, said in a statement. "It delivers the unparalleled TiVo DVR experience, as well as an intuitive integration between free over-the-air HD channels and major streaming services. No other device brings everything you watch together into one single, easy-to-use interface."

Though targeted at a small but growing group of cord-cutters, the Roamio OTA could help to expand TiVo’s retail customer base. It ended its fiscal Q4 with 6.8 million subs – 5.47 million via MSO partnerships and 971,000 that are retail/“TiVo-owned,” and just announced that its aggregate subscriber base has eclipsed 7 million.

TiVo has yet to announce plans to offer an OTA/OTT-only version of the  Bolt. The current Bolt can handle OTA signals, but also comes with a CableCARD slot.

TiVo’s plan to create a service along the lines of Aereo, but “done legally and better,” as TiVo CEO and president Tom Rogers put it recently, is still murky, though the company is expected to reveal all at an event in San Jose sometime in July.

In a brief interview Wednesday, Rogers wouldn’t let the cat out of the bag, but dropped some hints suggesting that whatever TiVo does have in mind, expect it to build on what it’s started with the Roamio OTA, a new DVR model sans CableCARD slot that's targeted to cord-cutters, enabling them to combine over-the-air TV with over-the-top video and essentially create their own video service bundles.

“We haven’t been very specific about it,” Rogers acknowledged, “but it will certainly build on what we currently are doing in the OTA space, fully recognizing that there are…consumers out there that are going beyond where Aereo was when it came to recording network signals.”

Notably, TiVo acquired only Aereo’s trademarks and customer lists for about $1 million in March following a bankruptcy auction. Other parties snapped up Aereo’s patents and some of the now-defunct company’s equipment and technology. 

We’ll know more this summer, but I think that scenario makes it unlikely that we’ll see TiVo build and operate its own antenna arrays, a la Aereo, to capture OTA signals and redistribute them via the Internet.  Given Rogers’s most recent comments, I’d expect the coming product to include expansions and enhancements to the Roamio OTA, perhaps with a cloud DVR component.  

The Roamio OTA is starting off as a retail product, but Rogers also talked up how it is also being positioned to help MPVDs counter the small but growing cord-cutting threat. 

“Increasingly, we’re hearing from cable operators on this who say, ‘Hey, we need to have some way of relating to the broadband only subs that are not taking our video package…and provide us with a way to do that with a combination of a device and an interface where we as operators don’t have to bear programming costs,’” Rogers said. Cablevision Systems, which is not one of TiVo's MVPD partners, has already begun to market specialized cord-cutter packages. 

That approach, Rogers said, gives MVPDs “a nice way of allowing people to get network signals without their paying retransmission consent in a nice way for consumers to integrate whatever streaming services they want that don’t involve payment by a cable operator for programming.”

Frontier Communications is the first and only MVPD so far to announce plan to market the Roamio OTA to broadband-only subs, but expect more to join the club.  Frontier president and CEO Dan McCarthy told an investors conference last week that a trial with TiVo is underway.

“We have some interesting discussions going on with various operators on that front,” Rogers said. “I think they’re quickly concluding that it’s not a question of encouraging cord-cutting, but that there are people who are going to not want the video package but are going to want broadband. And they [the operators] want to be able to maintain as close relationship as they can.” 

More than a month after coming away with the trademarks and customer lists of Aereo for about $1 million, TiVo has begun to market its new Roamio OTA DVR model directly to the former customers of the now-defunct provider of broadband TV and cloud DVR services.

According to the ZatzNotFunny blog, TiVo is pitching those customers the four-tuner Roamio OTA DVR and a TiVo Stream (a Slingbox-like sidecar that streams live and recorded shows to mobile devices) for $19.99 per month, with a two-year commitment. TiVo is billing this as a limited-time bundle that’s scheduled to end on April 27.

TiVo isn’t commenting about its ongoing Aereo-focused campaign beyond the details presented in the initial emailed pitch, which, under the subject line of “Aereo Bankruptcy Resolution,” tells former Aereo customers that they “can once again receive [their] favorite broadcast networks and enjoy DVR capabilities – without having to be a cable or satellite subscriber.” As ZatzNotFunny points out, the Aereo home page remains unchanged.

Following an initial limited edition run on the Roamio OTA, TiVo launched the model tailored for cord-cutters on a nationwide basis in January, selling it for $49.99, plus a $14.99 monthly service fee. Outside of retail, Frontier Communications is the first MVPD that has signed up to offer the Roamio OTA to broadband subs. In addition to supporting over-the-air broadcast TV channels, the new TiVo model also mixes in over-the-top content from sources such as Netflix and Hulu Plus and includes 500 gigabytes of storage.

The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York approved the sale of certain assets of defunct online TV/cloud DVR company Aereo on March 11. TiVo nabbed Aereo’s trademarks and customer lists for about $1 million, while RPX Corp. came away with the patents for  $225,000, and Alliance Technology Solutions put up $300,000 for certain Aereo equipment.

In all, Aereo raised less than $2 million via the auction, acknowledging earlier that it was a disappointing result. Aereo filed for voluntary Chapter 11 reorganization  last November and shut down the service last June.

You can remove the “limited edition” label from TiVo’s recently introduced Roamio OTA DVR, a model that is targeted to cord-cutters and consumers who have never taken a traditional pay-TV package.

Following last fall’s debut of the model, TiVo announced Wednesday that it has rolled out the $49.99 model on a nationwide basis. Users of the broadband-connected Roamio OTA, a device that does not come with a slot for a CableCARD but does work with digital antennas and supports an array of OTT video, are also subject to a $14.99 per month service fee for the underpinning TiVo service.

The TiVo Roamio OTA is equipped with 500 Gigabytes of storage, four tuners, is compatible with the TiVo Stream video-transcoding sidecar, and also supports TiVo’s new OnePass feature.

TiVo didn’t say how many Roamio OTAs have been sold, but company CEO Tom Rogers toldMultichannel News in November that the device “seems to be selling pretty well.” The Roamio OTA is currently a retail-only product, but Rogers also said TiVo is in talks with cable operators about an MSO-optimized version that can be offered to their broadband-only customers.

"TiVo continually innovates to meet the shifting ways consumers want to access their TV content, and we recognized that sections of the market were underserved -- including those choosing OTA for TV and those looking for higher-end DVRs,” TiVo CMO Ira Bahr said, in a statement. That proved true with the demand for the TiVo Roamio OTA after our initial seeding in 400 Best Buy stores this past fall.

"While we are believers that the TiVo service with a cable subscription is the best TV experience out there, we recognize there are those without cable and satellite that have recording needs.”

Channel Master, whose subscription-free DVR+ platform also has cord-cutters in mind, announced this week that it will soon add a "LinearTV" feature that will itegrate live feeds from a variety of OTT content sources, including Bloomberg, Al-Jazzera America, WGN, and WeatherNation, among others.