November 10, 2011

Nation’s Capital First For RCN/TiVo Upgrade

RCN Telecom Services is offering its Washington, D.C., subscribers  a whole-home solution powered by TiVo's Premiere Q four-tuner gateway DVR for the main TV and the TiVo Preview HD set-top box for ancillary TVs.  With this deployment, RCN becomes the first operator in the country to offer TiVo's whole-home DVR, marketed as “The TiVo Whole Home Bundle from RCN.”

The operator has been offering the TiVo Premiere to its subscribers since May 2010 (for more information, click here).

Jason Nealis, senior director/Video Engineering at RCN, says customers who want the whole-home product pay $29.99/month premium; with that, they get a Premiere Q DVR and one TiVo Preview box, and each additional Preview box will cost $9.95/month. He says the Preview is more than just an ancillary box to stream video from the main DVR; it also can access the same over-the-top (OTT) applications as the main "Q" gateway. The TiVo boxes in RCN's whole-home solution are networked via Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) technology.

With the whole-home solution, RCN's linear TV lineup and video-on-demand (VOD) is delivered over QAM, but OTT applications take content over IP, leveraging RCN's DOCSIS 3.0 technology. Nealis says RCN has rolled out DOCSIS 3.0 in 90 percent of its primary service areas in Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia and Lehigh Valley, Pa.; New York City; Boston; and Chicago.

According to Nealis, the Premiere Q basically is the MSO version of TiVo's Premiere Elite box, targeted for retail, but the retail version has a bigger hard drive for more storage. The Premiere Q has a 500-gig hard drive, allowing as many as 75 hours of recorded HD programming. With its four tuners, RCN customers can record four shows while watching a fifth recorded program.