Hey there.
I'm Josh Goldman, Senior Editor with CNET and this is a quick look at the TiVo Premiere Elite.
Now, what sets the Elite apart from the regular Premiere is instead of just two tuners, Elite has four allowing you with a single multi-sting cable card to record up to four programs at once while letting you view a recorded program or a streamed video from services like Netflix or Hulu Plus.
Now, some may not see the need for so many tuners but if you live in a house where several people could be recording things, it can definitely save you some headaches, plus it means you can pretty much hit record at anytime without worrying about conflicts, and with two terabytes of storage inside, you can record up to 300 hours of HD programming; probably it's biggest downside though is that it only works with digital cable and Verizon FiOS so there's no support for analog cable and over-the-air antennas, satellite or AT & T U-verse, on back you get connections for HTML in component and composite video and optical and analogue audio, plus an eSATA port for adding additional storage and USB ports for things like TiVo's, Bluetooth's, slide remote or a TiVo WiFi Dongle, that's right, the Elite even at it's $500.00 price tag doesn't have built-in wireless, what you do get is Ethernet and built-in local support for networking using your home's coax cables.
Now, the rest of the Elite is just like the regular Premiere, same excellent interface, same selection of streaming and on-demand services and music services like Pandora and Rhapsody and now the capability to stream from one Premiere unit to another on the same network, and thanks to a software update recently, the whole thing performs much better than it used to; but if it's not fast enough for you and you have an IOS or android device, there are free apps that really make using it snappy.
All in all, if you can afford it and its monthly service which starts at $20.00 a month or $500.00 for lifetime service, it is an excellent DVR.
I'm Josh Goldman and that's the TiVo Premiere Elite.
