A Month with the TiVo Stream 4K
Lessons learned after a month of tinkering
Weeks ago I posted my impressions of the TiVo Stream 4K Android TV dongle after just a week of use. I have been a Chromecast user for many years and decided to upgrade my streaming experience with a dongle that promised to bring back some of the TiVo goodness I remembered from years past and combine it with Android TV. My conclusion after a week was that the TiVo Stream 4K succeeded in spite of its differences from the pure Chromecast experience.
In my first piece, I wrote that voice commands did not work in the way I had grown accustomed to when working with the Chromecast over the years. I was accustomed to being able to pause and resume content by voice command and I initially thought the TiVo Stream 4K was incapable of doing this. Ok, I was wrong. My failure was that I had not completely set up my Android TV experience by activating each of my various streaming accounts. This part of the operation is something the instructions for the TiVo Stream 4K did not go into. In addition to setting up your Google account, you have to also sign in to all of your streaming apps, such as HBO Max, Peacock, Hulu, and so forth. After painstakingly entering all of the login credentials for everything, voice control works. I can now speak to the Google Home in my bedroom and control the TiVo Stream 4K. Lesson learned, one week is not…
