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The insane TiVo Mega costs $5,000, can record three years of TV, and looks like a rack server

The insane TiVo Mega costs $5,000, can record three years of TV, and looks like a rack server

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Who WOULDN'T want a rack-mounted TiVo with 24TB of storage?

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Running out of room on your DVR sucks, no doubt. Is it enough of a problem for you to throw $5,000 at it? For most people, the answer is no, but in case it's a real issue you need to remedy, the new TiVo Mega should alleviate all of your first-world concerns. This huge, server-sized TiVo contains a whopping 24TB of storage in a RAID 5 arrangement with hot-swappable drives. What that really means is you'll have enough space to store 26,000 hours of SD footage. As TiVo says, that works out to about three years of TV, but the devil is in the details.

Most people these days are watching and recording TV in HD, and that works out to "only" 4,000 hours — about five months. That's not nearly as sexy a number as three years, but that's still probably more than enough storage for most human beings. Either way, it'll take forever to fill this machine up, but the TiVo Mega features six tuners for recording, which should at least prevent you from running into too many conflicts between watching live TV and trying to save other programs for later.

For the inner couch potato extremist in all of us

Most people probably won't be dropping the massive TiVo Mega down next to their TVs. The rack-mounted server body is just far too big. More likely, you'll just use other TiVo Mini boxes to broadcast everything it captures to any TVs you have around the house. The TiVo Mega also will let you stream both live and recorded TV to smartphones and tablets, though it's not clear if you'll need to be on the same network at the TiVo itself. You can also control everything on the DVR with a tablet or smartphone. What remains to be see is how well TiVo's interface scales up when you're dealing with 24TB of data.

At a whopping $5,000, the TiVo Mega is clearly not for everyone — all the biggest TV fanatics will be satisfied with a setup that costs one tenth of what the TiVo Mega will retail for. However, TiVo has always been at its best when it is catering to the extreme, high-end AV enthusiasts out there. There's also a chance that this product could have some commercial applications, as well — there are likely a host of businesses out there that could use a simple solution to recording huge amount of TV footage.