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Last week TiVo finally released its iPad app that it had announced back in November.

The TiVo^® App for iPad is a fun and FREE new companion for your TiVo Premiere box that lets you search, browse, discover and share without ever interrupting what you’re watching.

Now you can quickly surface new content, view guides, schedule and manage recordings, get recommendations, or investigate a particular actor’s entire resume—all using intuitive, gesture-based iPad interaction. It even enables you to post comments about a specific show or movie on your Twitter or Facebook page. It’s an innovative new way of interacting with your TiVo while you’re kicking back on the couch, or on the road.

It’s pretty slick. Basically it brings the new Premiere interface to your iPad:

What’s really cool about it is that you “work” with your TiVo, managing the To Do List, setting up Season Passes, browsing the Guide, etc. all without interfering with what the Premiere is currently doing.

My wife can be watching “Modern Family” and I can set a Season Pass for “The Cape” without touching the remote and interrupting her viewing. Or I can look up what other work Ed O’Neil has done without using IMDb.

Another slick feature is the remote:

You can use the traditional buttons, like a giant universal remote, or turn on gestures which let you use finger swipes for fast-forward, rewind, instant-replay, etc. What I really like about the remote screen is the scrubber bar for the buffer. Instead of having to use FF or RW or skip-to-tick to jump around in the recording, you can just drag the scrubber to the location in the video you want to play. Neat.

I had problems getting the app to work originally as it wouldn’t detect my Premiere on the network. A lot of other people reported the same problem. Those with wireless N networks were able to get it working by switching to the 5GHz band. This prompted someone else to try turning off the iPad’s Bluetooth radio (Bluetooth uses the same 2.4GHz band as wireless G) and that fixed the problem. Hopefully TiVo will be able to address that in a future update.

Also, the app only works with the latest TiVo Premiere models, so owners of the older TiVo HD/Series3 boxes and the even older Series2 boxes are out of luck. I’d like to hope that TiVo would eventually add support for the older HD boxes, but I’m guessing that the command-set necessary to support the remote are only in the 14.x software running on the Premiere and not in the older 11.x codebase running on the Series3 platforms (the S2 boxes are still stuck on 9.x and probably not going anywhere). I’m sure the hacker community will be able to reverse-engineer some of the commands and then maybe we’ll see some cool homebrew apps as well.

At any rate, if you have a TiVo Premiere, and you have an iPad, check out TiVo’s new free app!