This morning, great-grand-daddy DVR manufacturer TiVo announced that the company is aiming big with its next DVR, the TiVo Mega. With a release date currently scheduled for the first quarter of 2015, the Mega will come in a 10-bay, 19" rack-mount enclosure that appears to be 4U tall, judging from the PR images. The Mega's bays will be filled with hard drives in a RAID5 array, yielding 24TB of storage.

The press release doesn’t say what drive types or capacities are used, but some quick RAID math shows that if all 10 bays are populated, the Mega likely uses 3TB drives, which would give it roughly 25TB of usable space before TiVo’s software is loaded.

The Mega does everything TiVo’s flagship Roamio DVR does—it just does a lot more of it. The device has six tuners and can send content to TiVo Mini devices to send content to multiple rooms; it also comes with a lifetime subscription to TiVo’s service.

According to TiVo, 24TB of DVR space works out to about 26,000 hours of recorded SD content, or 4,000 hours of HD.

With this much capacity on hand, the TiVo Mega is encroaching a bit on SnapStream’s territory—with the obvious difference that SnapStream’s enormous DVRs are meant for TV production and other professional uses. The TiVo Mega remains a home-bound device without the ability to export or play back recorded shows outside of the TiVo ecosystem.

The price for all this capacity is pretty steep. TiVo hasn’t yet settled on a final dollar figure, but it estimates that the device will cost "approximately $5,000" when it's available in the first quarter of 2015. The fact that people with sufficient time and motivation could likely put together a system of equivalent capacity and capability for less money is beside the point; as with other high-end home theater devices like Kaleidescape’s Cinema One, the Mega is aimed at more affluent customers who are willing to pay for the convenience of a turnkey appliance rather than spending time assembling and caring for a DIY DVR.