So there are costs to that feature, especially in a multi-viewer household. That means on a TiVo, it comes at the expense of taking one of the tuners/streams that could be used for explicit recording - or watching on another TV. (And your use of the term "buffer" - aside from confusing a lot of DirecTV Stream users for whom "buffering" is something bad, since the term has come to mean pauses while a stream disruption resolves - really means "implicitly record in the DVR with a sliding window". I guess it could say "I will start tracking a channel if you stay on it for at least 3 minutes" or something like that and keep the last 6 channels you did that on, but that puts a fair amount on the user (to stay on a channel long enough for it to "lock") - almost as much as hitting a Record button. (And there is nothing I can find on the TiVo site that talks about such a capability - just about being able to record multiple channels at the same time.) It doesn't seem like it can just "track the last 6 channels I visited" and have that do what you want, because (assuming you channel surf) if you are on (making up channel numbers here) channel 100, which is HGTV, and you want to watch Animal Planet on channel 110, you surf through 9 other channels to get there, which would seem to mean that on the way they (passing more than 6 other channels) it would forget about HGTV rather than continue to track it. You can watch - and rewind - any channel that is explicitly recording, or switch to a channel another TV is watching and gain access to its implicit history, but a single STB has only 1 implicit history at a time.) I don't understand how TiVo can "know" which channels to track for a single user, unless the user somehow explicitly marks the channel. (U-Verse has something similar, but they are used for a combination of multiple TVs and recording. I understand the concept of multiple tuners. So you are still limited to one at a time. But when they do that, they lose the history on the channel they had been watching. A user can to switch to a channel another user (that is using a different STB on a different TV) is watching, and take advantage of that user's recorded history for that channel. U-Verse does use an on-premise "whole house" DVR (there is a specific STB that has a disk and is the DVR). But I don't see how it otherwise could automatically know what channels you were interested in - that is, without you explicitly selecting them (and effectively telling it to start recording). It is possible they could do something similar with DirecTV Stream - not requiring a pause to start the history (I believe one of their competitors does something like that). U-Verse (AT&T's closest equivalent to cable, and the other AT&T service - now a DirecTV service - that I am really familiar with) keeps up to an hour history on the channel you are watching, starting when you switch to it - but it loses that history and starts a new one when you switch channels (that is, there is only one history kept at a time). Also you can't rewind to before you started recording, but I assume on a TiVo you can't rewind to before you did something to tell the device this was a channel you were interested in being able to "keep". Switching among the channels that you are recording is currently quite inconvenient (you have to do it through the DVR library rather than through the EPG or switching channels), but it is conceivable that they could make that simpler. How on a TiVo does a user say they want to watch 6 particular channels at the same time so the TiVo device knows to record those 6 channels? If you have to explicitly select them, you can do the equivalent on DirecTV Stream by asking that those 6 (or 10 or 40) channels record - and you can watch them while they are recording. And recording using the cloud DVR is unrelated to either devices or streams - a single user can have effectively unlimited recordings at the same time, since they happen back in DirecTV's servers - not on a user device. Instead, each TV has its own streaming device that can work independently, so however many streams they allow (currently 20 within the home network) is the number of different TVs that can be supported (each requiring its own device), but a single user at a single TV (with a single device) only gets one stream. DirecTV Stream works differently - there is no "tuner" or main device. I was under the impression those devices had multiple tuner to allow multiple different TVs to watch different programs and/or to allow recording multiple different programs - not to allow a single user to have multiple shows "in flight".
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