Tivo Bolt vs Tivo Mini

Tivo Bolt from initial installation rocks, and it's rock solid!!

• Can flip through a guide, MUCH faster than direcTV Genie
• No ads in the guide!!
• Can get a season/onepass of shows within the Tivo search (not having to go between apps)
• FFW/RW search on DVR is much cleaner than DirecTV's genie
• Hooks up with wifi and existing cable, and Cable company will do whatever it takes to get the cable card (and provided tuning adapter) working at no additional costs.  
• To avoid 5 hours of having Cable installers in your house... Please insure your cable installer gives the correct MAC ID, DATA ID, and other pertinent info to his dispatch/service on the phone.  In addition, they had to put an "amplifier" on my cable coming in the house, this can easily be tested if they put another modem on the cable, to see if they can "lock signal"

Tivo Mini in theory is great!!

• Allows pretty much full access to your Tivo Bolt
• No additional monthly/lifetime service subscription for Tivo Guide
• Small device, takes up little room in the various rooms (similar to DirecTV Genie Mini) 
• You do not need to duplicate your recording lists on various TVs
• The channel list you select on the Bolt is available on the other TVs. (this is really important if you don't want to re-setup "channel lists" filtering 1900 channels - when you truly want only 190 of them)

Now for the Tivo Mini reality...

• Hooking this thing up is 100% your problem, and you are on your own to get it working.
• You will need a wired ethernet connection from your Tivo Bolt to your home wifi router.
• You heard that correct, wifi will not work with the Tivo Mini setup, even if you want to use the Coax networked environment known as "MoCA"
• Tivo Mini units will not support wifi either... OMG, they need either a wired ethernet connection, or the more preferred coaxial cable running back to a main splitter in your home, to create the "MoCA" network.
• After you feel all the wiring is done correctly... You will have provide ample time for several calls to tier1 support in far off call center, only to be instructed to reboot your home router, reboot your tivo bolt, reboot your tivo minis, unplug your tivo bolt, your tivo minis, unplug the coax from your tivo bolt, your tivo minis, repeat the guided setup on your tivo bolt, repeat the guided setup on each of the tivo minis, repeat this entire cycle multiple times.   
• This is a 2 day process, and if you don't want to impact your marriage, have a standby HD antenna you can plug into the bedroom tv, so your wife can get at least a few local channels (and of course streaming HBO/Netflix off your built in apps)
• After you get through this, and nothing else works, please ask to speak to a level2 support, who will run down your home system quickly.  From here, you'll need to know specifications on 1 or more of your splitters, and be able to confirm or deny that you have a POE filter on the cable coming into the house.