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TiVo, PVRs Not Making A Splash
Sudderth writes "Too expensive? Too complicated? Lack of support from the TV industry (which depends on the commercials that TiVo users fast-forward through)? Newsweek has an excellent article on why personal video recorders like TiVo and ReplayTV, which have been embraced by tech-heads, are being ignored by almost everyone else."
DVRs are also relatively complicated to set up. ?Wiring it into TV is tricky,? Bernoff says, ?and the more sophisticated the TV, the harder it is.?
:)
If the question was "why do geeks like these while Joe Sixpack isn't buying them" then it seems pretty clear (and intuitive.) The average shmo is just fine with a 15" monitor, a cassette-tape player for the car (or a cheap CD), AOL for internet connection, and a $60 VCR from Wal-Mart for recording "Friends." Why would they pay seven or eight times as much for a device that essentially replicates their VCR, albeit at a higher quality (which they don't even care about), plus, it requires a smug 15-year-old to set it up?
Seems to me like the question answers itself.
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
A VCR costs about $100 and can play the stack of tapes I have sitting next to my TV. If I want to record something I buy a six hour tape for $2 and I'm good to go.
A Tivo on the other hand costs a couple hundred dollars and can only play back what you personally recorded on it. This means that the Tivo only has utility to people who tape a fair amount of stuff of TV. That makes the big assumption of there being anything on TV worth recording at all. I watch a fair amount of television, but I've only used my VCR twice in the last year. Once was to tape Buffy while I was at a concert, and the other time was to tape some CNN footage on Sept 11.
Just my $.02 on why I'll probably never get a Tivo, no matter how many whiz-bang features get added to it.
stipe42
Computer geeks can "Do the TiVo thing anyway" without a TiVo? Technically, yes, but living in Silicon Valley as I do, I know six people (including myself) with TiVo or ReplayTV units, and not a single person who uses their computer as a poor-man's PVR.
In fact, one of my friends has two ReplayTVs, and is considering getting a third. He's also a Phoenix alumnus, the chief programmer of the Phoenix 4 BIOS. He knows more about computer hardware than almost anybody alive, and he never for a second considered using a computer to do this.
Similarly, many of us are fully capable of writing our own operating systems, or building our own cars. Very few of us have actually done so. Maybe the pre-packaged aspect has a lot of appeal to most people.
Anybody that is smart enough to set up their computer as a TiVo is also smart enough to know that the commercial boxes do a better job with less effort.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
The trouble with TiVo is that it can't be sold. What I mean is, all the features of the device and the way it changes how you watch TV, cannot be related by some spotty kid in an electronics store.
The best marketing these guys get is word of mouth from us geeks. That, and coming to our homes and seeing the way TiVo et al work in a *real* environment.
TiVo is one of those convergent technologies that most people just don't understand. DVDs have an easy analogy...'they're just like a VCR, except you don't have to rewind, and the picture's even better!' DVR's a pretty tough concept to those that aren't techoliterate. If you think that all Tivo does is "essentially replicates their VCR", you don't really get it either. Most really new innovations are misunderstood like this--after all, VCRs took, what, fifteen years to really penetrate the consumer market? (JoeSix's first impression of VCR: 'Why the hell do I need a VCR when I can just watch it on TV or go to the theater?')
... because everyone else is home watching the shows instead of at work at 9pm Thursday evening or 9am Sunday morning!
Oh, and if you want to watch the Superbowl and Fear factor with the Playmates, you can get a couple VCRs or have one of these things. ;)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My day is already full. Work, rest, hanging out with my wife, hanging out with friends. There is just not enough time in my day to actually watch all the Law and Orders, all the great stuff on my FIVE discovery channels, and other ods and ends that come on. Even if i did, It certainly isn't worth CONTINUALLY paying for or playing a damn high price for.
Also I UNDERSTAND what these things are. Quite frankly, I don't see the NEED to buy yet another PC (which is pretty much what it is) to do something that my current PC could probabally do, if someone put the time to it.
These things just aren't useful. In order to actually USE it, I would have to have no life. Which, btw, is what it's supposed to let you have.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Indeed, the vendors have not figured out how to "position" the product yet. Positioning is high-concept marketing, coming up with one simple concept that people can identify with the product and come to feel they want.
The original positioning of pausing live TV was a mistake. It was chosen, I think, because it was a feature that was simple to understand. What the public doesn't get is that real users of the boxes hardly ever pause live TV because they hardly ever watch live TV.
"Hardly ever watch live TV" isn't a great positioning either because it might actually scare people away.
They also tried "skip the stuff you don't want to see" implying commercial skipping, but tread a fine line here at annoying the networks. Since the average household watches some 7 hours of TV per day, including about 2 hours of advertising, "get back 60 hours of your life every month" might be a good positioning but it can't last because there's no free lunch, and commercial skip is a temporary free lunch.
They ended up on "TV, your way" which doesn't say a whole lot.
The answer may simply be the only way these market is word of mouth, and they do market very well by word of mouth. Every buyer is a giant fan who pushes it on his friends. But that's slow, not the huge success story people expect from new high tech.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
But that isn't really what PVR owners find dramatic about their PVR's. It isn't that it is cool to record to a hard drive.
It is that it changes how people watch tv, and until you have lived with a PVR you cannot understand the fundamental difference.
How many slashdotters have broadband? Is it just for speed, or is it because it is always on, and it changes the way that you use the internet?
But, it is very difficult to explain to people the benefit of always on internet access, and how it changes the relationship you have with internet resources. And broadband has done just about as well as PVR.
Having a PVR, means, you watch TV when you want, and you watch WHAT you want, when you want to.
It means not having to live with commercials, and that you only have to spend 22 minutes watching a 30 minute show.
But more importantly, you can ask the question, what did they say? Did you see that? Having been a PVR customer now for about a year, and being comfortable with the PVR lifestyle, I find it very irritating to watch TV any other way. Oddly, I have found that when I am in other passive viewing environments (like movies or sporting events), that I will have a similar reaction (what did they say? What was that), and have a strong desire for wanting to resee the last 10 seconds over again.
Just as AOL has access to the Internet, and it is hard to explain the difference between always on and dial-up, and VCR's provide time shifting and movies, it is hard to explain convincingly the benefits of a PVR beyond a VCR.
But I will not give mine up, either my DSL, or my PVR, because they are fundamental now to my interaction with the Internet, and my interaction with TV content.
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
s _c heaper BS.
#standard_I_am_a_geek_so_I_build_a_PC_to_do_thi
Can you build or make a PC act as a DVR? Sure.
However, no PC-DVR solution comes close to offering the sort of features or ease of use that Replay or Tivo offer - AND with a PC-DVR solution you're going to end up spending *more* money. Seriously.
Tivo + service is $450-500. You can't build a PC-DVR solution for that amount of money that will still inlclude:
* A remote
* Detailed TV schedule data
* Able to record up to 30 hours of programming
* Easy to use UI that is usable on a TV screen
* (and this is a big one) DOES NOT CRASH
I know many folks here pride themselves on being able to hack something together with the illusion of saving money...but don't forget, your *time* is worth something too. I guess if you don't value your time, building an inferior solution from scratch in 4 or 5 hours may be a good solution.
But, I'm not in college in anymore, and personally being able to take something out of the box, and have it ready to use when I turn it on is worth it.
1. Broadcasters and the majority of VCR/DVD player manufacturers hate TiVo and don't want Joe Average using it.
Broadcasters because people skip past the ads that bring in the bucks. Remember, from their point of view, programming is just filling to make sure you watch the ads they're broadcasting.
The VCR/DVD manufacturers hate it because TiVo doesn't just threaten sales of their players head to head, but also confuses the market - give Joe too many choices and he's more likely to take a wait-and-see approach, and will buy nothing rather than risk buying the wrong thing.
Without either the backing of major software providers (the broadcasters) or hardware manufacturers (the VCR/DVD crowd), TiVo is starved of publicity dollars, and that means...
2. Not many consumers know about TiVo.
I'd bet that our Joe Average is barely aware of TiVo's existence, let alone is aware of its features and benefits. And if Joe Average hasn't heard about it, he's not going to be buying it.
(Remember, Joe gets up in the morning, has breakfast, perhaps reads a paper, goes to work, comes home, has dinner and watches some TV before eventually going to bed. He doesn't read Slashdot, any IT or gadget-related magazines and he doesn't drool over the next big thing in quite the way we do.)
Besides, Joe Average doesn't shell out for hardware every day and he's just getting comfortable with his wide-screen TV and his other brand new appliance. Which merits a mention of its own...
3. DVDs are the hot item of the moment.
No technology has ever achieved such rapid market penetration as DVD. Or put another way, Joe Average and his brother either has a DVD player or is planning to get one.
And, having shelled out some serious money to buy his brand new box, Joe Average is darn well going to make good use of it.
And if he's buying the DVD back catalogue of his favourite TV show or he's creating a library of the latest blockbuster movies, he's got two fewer reasons to buy a TiVo box. Firstly, he's watching less TV (he's watching his DVDs instead) and, secondly, he doesn't need a box that will record every M.A.S.H. re-run, because he just bought a couple of series worth to play in his nice shiny new machine.
Of course, the broadcasters and studios (who in many cases are largely owned by the hardware manufacturers) love this guy. He might not be watching their ads or putting his bum on a movie seat but he's going one better - he's buying their product again but this time it's a product for which they recouped their initial investment some time ago.
Mind you, Joe doesn't mind. Now he's got his DVDs he can play them over and over again, and it won't cost him a penny. Which is more than can be said for TiVo, because...
4. TiVo is a subscription service. That means a monthly bill.
As far as Joe's concerned, he already pays enough for cable, satellite or whatever. Why does he need to spend even more on his monthly TV bill for a souped-up VCR?
In these economically uncertain times, Joe would rather have the money in the bank, thank you very much.
(Yes, I know some of you out there will have abandoned your subscriptions and will be using your TiVos without a monthly bill but if Joe gets a new box down at the store then he's committing himself for some time.)
There are, of course, many other reasons why Joe might have a TiVo but, frankly, these are reasons enough.
No one wants him to buy a TiVo, no one wants to tell him about TiVo, everyone wants to tell him about DVD and he doesn't feel comfortable about spending the money right now anyhow.
Pretty straightforward if you ask me.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The TiVO's software is the significant part. Can you tell your computer to record every Simpson's it can find? Can you tell it to record Enterprise at a higher priority? Can you tell it not to record duplicate episodes of a particular show? Can you tell it to record every show with your favorite actor? Can you tell it to record everything with "Tick" in the title so in case the cartoon is aired again you pick it up? Will it record things that are similar to other shows you watch when it has free space? Can you easily connect cable and satelite to it and have it record shows from both?
Sure your computer can do a lot of stuff, but when you buy the TiVO you're buying more than a small PC, you're buying software that kicks ass. IMHO it has one of the most intuitive UIs of just about all the software I've ever used.
I know that's what scares me off from the TiVo, and yes I know that you can buy it without it. But it's expensive without it, and they don't go out of their way to advertise that you can get it without the subscription.
PVR makers: READ MY LIPS I DON'T WANT A FREAKING SUBSCRIPTION. Shoot your marketing "genuises" who think that lock-in is the way to big $$$$ and just give me a basic unit.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Are there any guides on the web to setting up a "homebrewed Linux based recorder box"?
First, we have digital cable. That means that we can't watch many of the channels without the help of the tuner box. We'd have to dedicate one to the Tivo, in order to be able to watch one show while
recording another, which would be our major use.
Secondly, the lack of portability. If we tape a show, we can watch it in the living room if we want, or take it to the TV in the bedroom if it's something the kids shouldn't be watching. Even if we bought two Tivos, we couldn't do that -- you have to watch it in the same room it was recorded, or move the whole box around. I guess Replay 4000s could solve that problem, and more, but that's a lot of money. A second VCR is just $100 these days.
As for building my own from a PC, if I could find a TV-in board that had a digital cable tuner, I would love to build my own. But as far as I can tell, such a thing does not exist. If anyone knows differently, please e-mail me.
I don't think your point is arguementative.
But I think most people aren't really watching "TV" so much as watching shows. Even when you sit and channel surf you're tuning into the types of shows you like, whether's that Star Trek or a Friends re-run.
What a Tivo does is "surf" for you and grab the shows you like, or even shows it thinks you'll like. So when you are feeling lazy and just plop down in front of the TV you can not only channel surf, but you'll also have 20 pre-recorded shows that either you've told it you want or it thought you might like.
My Tivo records Buffy, Smallville, Angel, Southpark, Stargate SG-1, Earth Final Conflict, Andromeda, Futurama and several other shows whenever a new episode comes on. I simply told it to "record any new eposide of Buffy" and it handles all the details, the time slot, the channel and I can watch it whenever I want to plop down in front of the tube.
It don't get any lazier than that.
Tivo doesn't allow you to place your stored recordings onto a removable tape and take it with you. People like to collect stuff, and 30GB just isn't enough space to keep things permanently stored. The least they could do is put an ethernet card in the damned thing so that I could download my recordings to my PC.
This just goes to show you that people really +are+ smart... they know when their rights are being stripped from them, and they vote with their wallets to let the corps know just how much they don't like it. Microsoft will find this out Real Soon Now (TM)
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
Heh, yeah. C'mon, people. If you're too fucking stupid to look at a manual and follow step by step instructions to set your clock or set a recording time on your VCR, you don't need to be killing any more brain cells with TV...period.
The problem isn't that people don't know how, it's that they're too lazy/stupid/whiney to try and figure things our for themselves.
Maybe what Tivo needs to do is go door to door and actually show people what these things are capable of.
Perhaps not door to door[*], but I think you're on to something. I know that even my family (all of whom are dependand on their Tivos for TV viewing now) didn't get it until I showed them either.
I don't think I've explained what a Tivo does to anyone yet that hasn't said they hadn't gotten it before, and now thought that they wanted one too.
[*] I can see it now: "Good [afternoon|morning|evening] [sir|ma'am], my name is ____________ and I've got a revolutionary device here that you're going to want to buy. Give me just a few minutes of time, and access to the back of your TV so that I can hook this baby up....
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
A while back I read a study that said something like only 20% of VCR owners ever record anything, and around 10% record regularly. With this in mind, it doesn't strike me as all that surprising that a device like Tivo hasn't caught on.
I'm not saying that Tivo and UltimateTV aren't awesome, because they are. It's just that there are more people like my parents (they only record the olympics) than myself. Maybe the interest just isn't there.