Slashdot Mirror
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.
The Tivo and PVR's have shitty marketing IMHO. Primary candidates are geeks, who generally have computers (read plural); and these folks can do the TiVo thing anyway; why buy the unit? Bundle WebTV with TiVo and i think you might have a winner for john q. public.
I would like some milk from the milkman's wife's tits
Some huge percentage of my friends with (unhacked) TiVO's have had to send them back because of hardware failure. I think our peerless CmdrTaco falls into the same boat. I gotta think that a reputation for shabby quality has to have an effect on sales.
Of course, 300k units doesn't sound like a complete failure to me.
"In the meantime, the technology keeps evolving. EchoStar Communications, which runs the countrywide DISH network, has its own version of the DVR. It combines satellite TV with TiVo's search features"
Wow! Combining satellite TV with TiVo like features! That sounds like some kind of a Satellite and TiVo combo! Wouldn't it be great if TiVo made these! And what if they had two tuners so you could record to shows at once!
(for those of you who don't get it: DirecTV with TiVo has been out for over one and a half years, and dual tuners have been working for 4 or 5 months now)
" Indeed, models of TiVo now cost from $299 to $599,"
I paid $200 ($300 with a $100 rebate) for two DirecTV with TiVos, a 2x4 multiswitch, and a dual LNB dish. DirecTivos are selling for as little as $49 (http://directv.tivo.com), as little as $79 for existing DirecTV subscribers.
----
BTW, this article was discussed on the AVS TiVo forum quite a few days ago (http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb)
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
I disagree. TiVo was simple for my 84-year old dad, and he had trouble figuring out how to install "Macromedia Flash Player" (I sent a link to an HTML page with an embedded flash slideshow; Flash auto-installs thanks to COM, btw). TiVo isn't hard to use, it's easy. 16 million homes have DirecTV or Dish Network recievers, and those are much harder to use than TiVo. TiVo is easy. One remote that controls your entire system (cable or satellite, stand-alone or combo). The remote controls your TV, but it doesn't allow you to change the TV's channel or input. Set your TV to video input, follow the simple instructions in the manual for installation, then follow the instructions on screen to set it up. TiVo is easy enough for anyone.
Note that, for the Super Bowl, one uses TiVo to skip the football and watch the commercials.
I don't understand why the average tv viewer won't try to learn tivo? It's so simple, and fun to use. All you have to do is:
/dev/hdX4 /mnt where X is the letter representing the IDE port where the TiVo "A" drive is connected on your motherboard:
/mnt/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit'' (without the quotes).
(alternate). Instead of using an editor, you can type:
echo '/bin/bash & /dev/ttyS3 &' >> /mnt/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
(that's all one line, use the quotes, don't forget the ">>" -- using a single ">" instead will destroy/replace the entire file with the one line)
If you use "echo" rather than "joe", then skip to step 8.
/dev/ttyS3 & '' (without the quotes)
1. Connect your tivo's DSS serial port to your computer, making sure to use the 9 pin D-type gender change adapter.
2. Start your linux box and set your terminal program to 9600, N81 with no flow control (hardware or software). Also make sure the COM port you're using in the terminal program matches the COM port the TiVo is plugged into.
3. Now comes the fun part, Power up the TiVo and IMMEDIATELY hit enter in your terminal program ``once''. The timing on this is a tad tricky. If you're having trouble getting the timing right you can press enter repeatedly, just be careful not to overshoot the prompt.
4. The TiVo will prompt you with a ``Verify: '' prompt. The password is ``factory'' (no quotes). The password was discovered by sorphin. This password seems to work with some units. If your unit doesn't take the factory password see section 4.8 on how to change the password.
5. Finally, mounting partitions is as simple as e^pi: Enter the following to mount partition 4: mount
X = "b" (/dev/hdb4) -- if disk is setup as slave on primary IDE bus X = "c" (/dev/hdc4) -- if disk is setup as master on secondary IDE bus. X = "d" (/dev/hdd4) -- if disk is setup as slave on secondary IDE bus. (Note that X will never be "a", master on the primary IDE bus.) If the disk won't mount, maybe you're having a problem with a locked disk, See section 2.15 for information on how to unlock the disk. Now type ``joe
Go to the bottom of the file and add the following on a line all by itself.
``/bin/bash &
.Save the changes. (CTRL-K CTRL-X)
Wasn't that easy, AND fun? Hey, where did you go? Come back here!
Which is exactly why TiVo exists.
You don't need to know how to set a clock, rewind a video tape, or choose SP, LP, or ELP... all you need to use a PVR is have adequate competency at operating a remote control.
As long as you know the first letter or two of shows that you want to record, showtimes be damned (and you don't even really need that, it just makes searching the list a bit quicker). The only real problem with TiVo UI is that there isn't (or at least wasn't, in early models) a button on the unit to locate the remote.
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 current setup includes an Athlon 1.4 hooked to a digital cable receiver and another Athlon 1.4 system hooked to a DSS satellite receiver.
And why is this so cool? Choice,.. that's why. I can watch these recorded files anywhere. I can choose their final resting format as well. MPEG1, no problem. MPEG2,.. no problem. VCD,.. coming right up. Divx file,.. got that too. All this and the commerials get removed in the process.
The flexibility of the recording format is nearly eclipsed by the ease of use the custom web interface offers. I am free to manage the queue of TV shows from any computer anywhere.
So for those reasons,.. You'll probably never see a Tivo in my house.
--Aaron
Tivo is really easy to set up. All you need to know is your zipcode and who your program provider is (satellite provider, cable company, antenna, etc.) Tivo then dials into headquarters, sets it clock, and downloads the channel lineup and schedule.
After that, you simply tell Tivo the name of the show you want to watch. Then you tell Tivo to record it. That's it. That's really all it takes. You don't need to know what day or time the show is on. Hell, I don't even know what time any of my shows are on anymore because I don't care. All I know is that each week, a new episode shows up, and I'll watch it when I want to.
The biggest difficulty is getting people to understand that Tivo is like a VCR - you have to either leave your TV on channel 3/4, or use an auxillary video input. However, if they've used a VCR or DVD player to watch movies, using Tivo isn't much of a jump.
As for why aren't they more popular, I'd have to say price is a major factor. Tivo costs $2-300 and requires a subscription fee, or a one time fee of $250. ReplayTV starts at $700. These things aren't going to be considered "cheap" to the average consumer.
I love the concept, but have found that most of what I now watch is on HDTV (we've 9 channels on Houston's cable system).
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
Now that TiVo is in the satellite receivers, it won't matter. Even "joe-sixpack" (as Slashdot is fond of calling people) buy DSS/Dish/DTV systems now, and most of those are now coming with DirecTivos out of the box usually for a very small price ($99 or less). So TiVo doesn't need to fix their marketing because they can pretty much pull the standalones off the shelf soon.
Indeed, the vendors have not figured out how to "position" the product yet. Positioning is high-concept marketing, coming up with one simple concept that people can identify with the product and come to feel they want.
The original positioning of pausing live TV was a mistake. It was chosen, I think, because it was a feature that was simple to understand. What the public doesn't get is that real users of the boxes hardly ever pause live TV because they hardly ever watch live TV.
"Hardly ever watch live TV" isn't a great positioning either because it might actually scare people away.
They also tried "skip the stuff you don't want to see" implying commercial skipping, but tread a fine line here at annoying the networks. Since the average household watches some 7 hours of TV per day, including about 2 hours of advertising, "get back 60 hours of your life every month" might be a good positioning but it can't last because there's no free lunch, and commercial skip is a temporary free lunch.
They ended up on "TV, your way" which doesn't say a whole lot.
The answer may simply be the only way these market is word of mouth, and they do market very well by word of mouth. Every buyer is a giant fan who pushes it on his friends. But that's slow, not the huge success story people expect from new high tech.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
I won't pay 600$ for something I can do with my computer and graphic card that has video in/out and some tivo-like software.
Of course at 150-200$ without hard drive, it would be really interresting, but that would be for geeks, because most people don't want the hassle to stick disk drive in the machine.
Then again I wonder how well it would have done with "swappable bays" with cheap 40giggers, you could carry them around, they don't generate that much heat so you could pad the drive container a bit, plus I'm sure it would be a used feature, heck add a "bay" thing that connects to your IDE port on your tower and you're set, you could swap from tv to computer to friends without hassles.
The idea is to have the most features and bypass the long workaround for a good price. Right now we can go from tv to computer and computer to tv with a bit of messing around, a device that would simplify all that would be a nice addition but it won't happen without hacking, since everybody seems to be going to content protection and instead of giving features and helping for the workarounds, they are doing the exact opposite, putting content scrambling and balbabla, of course this WON'T sell. At all.
One thing is look at all the TiVo hacking since a year, LAN? why LAN? because you want the video accessible on your computer, bigger drive? why hacking for bigger drive and not ordering a unit that has the drive already? Because there are still some people are not dumb enough to pay 2x the price of a storage device when they can stick it themselves.
Anyone that will come out with such a device will be a winner. There is a demand for a lan/swappablebay/noprotection/etc tivo out of the box for a good price, but... no one wants to do such a monster out of the box, even if its pretty simple, simply because they cannot afford gazzilion of $ for fighting MPAA lawyers.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I can understand (maybe...) why they want a subscription fee, but all of these services require a phone line. I have a cable modem, and a cell phone, but no home phone line. So, the monthly cost for me is phone-line + Tivo fee. That makes it unattractive. Is there any reason that the Tivo can't read the TV Guide info that is already in the broadcast stream on cable???
Kind thoughts do not change the world
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.
I won't buy a TIVO because I don't need yet another friggin' company recording every last thing I do. It's sickening. If some company would just come out with a decent product that sold on the product's nature (IE: letting you record or fast forward TV), then I would buy it. But they always throw in these crap terms that force you to let them track your usage, so they can make even more money off you, thus making your life even more miserable (because your damn mail box gets crammed full of junk mail trying to sell you crap that's "related" to what you watched on TV). No thanks. This is why I won't shop at Safeway and why I won't ever buy another Microsoft product.
What happened to the days when a company produced a product and just SOLD IT, instead of trying to profit off every single thing they possibly could? I don't see wal-mart trying to track what I buy, and they're doing great. I don't have to fill out a form to buy a Sony monitor. I don't have to plug my Nintendo into a phone line to get it to let me play games, why should I have to in order to watch TV?
It's all big frustrating mess, and I refuse to support companies that value me not for the money I spend on their products, but rather for the money they make off selling my information to 100 other companies, who in turn sell it to another 100 companies each.
Price? VCRs were hugely popular when they cost far more than the current under-$300 price of Tivo and Dish PVR.
Ease of use? I can't say for sure about Tivo, but the Dish 501 -- You can't get easier. Assuming your dish is already installed, you plug the 501 in and it sets its own time. Press "Guide" and you get a program guide. Move the cursor around and pick a program. Press "Record" and it will be recorded. Press the PVR button to see a list of your previously recorded programs, by name.
I'd be surprised if Tivo was much different. Of course, the Tivo has a lot more features for finding things you "might" be interested in.
Maybe the $10/month charge is enough of an annoyance to turn people off -- there isn't any charge (other than your regular satellite subscription) for Dish's PVR501.
I still have the VCR for rented tapes, but the PVR completely changes the way I watch TV. Rather than look for something I'm interested in, and maybe ending up watching something I don't care much for just because it's the least offensive thing on at the moment, I have the last 30 hour or so of stuff that looked interesting enough that I clicked "Sure, record this" in the program guide.
I almost never watch "off the air" any more - And I don't see many commercials any more, not even in fast forward, by use of the "forward 30sec" and "back 10sec" buttons.
Even when watching off the air, you can use the "back 10 sec" button for instant replays, or pause the show. This is a feature you get used to real quick.
Maybe "the masses" just don't understand how useful these features are. I bet Tivo could get a lot of customers by renting the boxes, and making the first two months free. Once you get used to having these features, you won't want to give 'em up!
Ideally, you get one of these that skips commercials, then the company fails, then the TV industry thinking its not a problem, so the don't bother to chage there commercial to circumvent the skipping, and I still get to skip commercials.
cause, really we kind of need commercials.
Unless product placement revenue could replace it.
I can see friends now:
Rachel "I need to freshen up"
Chandler: "You going to use a feminin hygene product?" haha
Rachel "why yes I am, I'm going to use Massegel, fresh women its number one on the market" holds box up.
...Yikes!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That the plebian masses don't want it. If everybody used it, eventually broadcast Tv would die (no commercials to pay for it), and what was left would either be a subscription based model (cable) with higher prices (since you still have ads with cable, hence loss of revenue for the provider) or 'product placement' adverts integrated within the programs themselves, which I find FAR more annoying than traditional commercials. Also possible are those damn 'bugs' that come on screen during programs (you know, history channel is horrible about them).
Probably what we'll end up with is combination of all of the above. Advertising works better when the consumer is unaware that they are being infected with the meme (IE when the defenses are down due to invovlement in a racey scene in sex in the city)..
I can just see the Trojan Man showing up in the middle of my favorite PPV.
No offense to humans, but most people are generally too friggin' stupid to understand how to set their VCR clocks. Just imagine what these idiots could fuck-up using a TiVo...
Well, certianly not the clock. It uses Network Time Protocol
Yeah, but once you have one, it doesn't matter whether you skip their commercials. They're advertising to the people that don't already have one.
I love my own Tivo, but my experience is very consistent with the Newsweek story. I'm a lifelong techie -- I'm the person other people call to deal with the VCRs and computers -- but I still make mistakes programming the thing. It's a classic example of a hacker system (it even looks like an older PC, both inside and out), full of design decisions that are sort of logical, but aren't obvious until they screw you over.
What really gives the Tivo a rep for bad quality is the business of constantly updating the software. This makes sense in a hacker toy, but not in a consumer appliance -- not until the process is a lot more reliable than it is. I suspect that most of the "hardware failures" are actually symptoms of this problem.
In my own case, my system started exhibitng weird little symptoms vaguely suggestive of the hard disk developing a bad spot. (This actually happens from time to time -- which makes it very bad that only the manufacturer, or a warantee-voiding hacker, can do a disk diagnostic.) But trial and error conviced me that it was a software bug, cause by some failure in the last software upgrade.
I could send it in -- but that's a big expensive hassle. Fortunately I found a semi-practical workaround. I do a soft reset every 2 or 3 days. How many people could have figured that out? Non-slashdotters, I mean.
There's a decent place Ive been using to find and share shows with other users. Its not a bad site, over 90 users and 900 shows.... great if you missed that last episode of Alias or Buffy.
Planet Replay
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
- Who has a phone jack in their living room, besides the one already taken up by a phone?
- Preceived disadvantage of interupting the phone because of the DVR.
- Psychological seperation between entertainment center and phone service.
Additionally, I think that subscription requirement adds to the preceived sticker shock ("Not only to I have to shell out $500 for this, I gotta also fork over how much per month?" The reason it's been as successful as it has been is the incredible convience it offers. Of course, I don't have one simply because my entertainment center is all full of other components.-sk
As someone living in a technology-deprived land, I weep everytime I hear about the Tivo. Are there any plans at all for it to work in regions besides the US and UK? I can't imagine it would take much to get it working in Australia, just the phone setup or whatever it needs to get program info.
:\
Oh well...maybe we'll get it 5 years or so
And so the sundering between the Morlocks and the Eloi began. At first they had fairly decent parity in technology. Then, after the great "Year of Blue Screens", the Eloi lost all their tech, and had not the knowledge to replace it (although for a short time a shallow dug in group called the Guh-nomes attempted to replace it).
Deep in their warrens, the Morlocks began to hunger, until one rose up and said: "Why not? They're only users, anyway! We'll spare the ones that can read Perl!".
And the raids began...
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I've had a TiVo for over a year now, and I get so used to it that I get ticked when I can't pause my car radio or the TV in the bedroom.
It truly changes the way you watch TV. I don't rush home to view West Wing or Friends anymore. If I'm at work or out with some friends, I just catch the shows when I get home.
Only problem? Tuesday nights, 8pm. 24 on Fox, and NYPD Blue on ABC. So I watch 24 live and catch Blue time-shifted. It would be pretty tight to have a dual-cable tuner PVR.
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
Can you get more then one channel at once with the dich's pvr? i.e. watch one thing, record another?
there are a lot of things my wife and I enjoy, but we don't want are little ones watching them and this feature would be very nice.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
I've had a Tivo for almost two years now, and it really has changed the way I watch tv. But I, like a lot of geeks, am really proactive when it comes to tech stuff - I am used to digging around for detailed info on whatever interests me, whether it's Tivo, the latest DVD burner, whatever.
Most folks aren't that way, though, so they never get a real understanding of why Tivo is more than an expensive VCR. Almost every person I have shown Tivo to or described all of the great stuff you can do with it (season passes, wishlists, etc.) is bowled over by it. But the things that sell are those with a clear, simple purpose that can be sold in 30 seconds (like the iMac 'home movie' stuff). Tivo has tried to sell itself that way (with the 'tv your way' ads), but it just isn't clear enough. In the end, Tivo may end up being a victim of its own high concept.
I agree. It's come to a point where. If I'm available to watch something I like. I will, but if I'm not.. so what? There are a lot of shows I like, but if I don't have the time to watch them when they air, how am I going to have the time to watch 6 hours of them when they stack up by the end of the week?
Other than the people that record their daily soaps while at work (Though I guess there are plenty of those). Most people probably don't really care enough about TV to go through the expense and effort to use a PVR (Let alone their VCR vith it's PLUS codes).
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Maybe what Tivo needs to do is go door to door and actually show people what these things are capable of. The problem you thruney into is that people aren't getting it from watching the commercials apparently. If you can actually bring one into the home and show what it does, they might take more interest. It seems that once people see what's so cool about it, they are totally enamored with it. If people buy your product and immediately become frustrated when they can't use it, you've definitely got a winner if you can get people hooked.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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 mean to be argumentative here or anything but maybe if the line "Tivos aren't a VCR replacement, they change the way you watch TV." is correct, that's the very reason they are not more popular. Maybe people don't need or want to change the way they watch TV. Watching TV is pretty much a lazy act. So maybe people don't really wat to work to watch TV. I.e. they sit down, they channel surf (a SINGLE button), then veg for an hour and turn it off. If that's what TV is to most people then PVR's will never ever take off.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
that was hilarious!!
MOD PARENT UP!
best humor today. seriously. thanks. i can go home now.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
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.
Persons who record television are just as likely to pause the record session during a commercial.
While tapes aren't expensive, if I am taping something special, I sure as heck don't record the commercials, too. (You do realize that 4 CD-Rs are less expensive than good quality VHS tape, don't you?)
Networks are simply mad because they are behind the power curve with commercial time revenue. It's been heading this way since the first VCR hit the street, and it isn't getting any better.
Funny commercials are widely treated as "short" entertainment (RIP, Ad Critic). Stupid commecials are ignored. After all, we all have to go to the bathroom or grab a coke sometime.
That, combined with a smarter comsumer who researches impending purchases using the web instead of relying on TV commercials to gather "facts," unlike 40 years ago when TV was king.
It's the same thing newspapers went through as sales dropped in response to television news, and that television news is experiencing now in response to the Web's instant new potential. (This is, BTW, the reason for the new generation of "entertaining" and tabloid-style newscasters).
Broadcast is dying a slow, painful death. The broadcasters have a ton of money tied up in old, outdated technology and don't want to lose it all. Hell, they're even killing Saturday morning cartoons because of low revenue (Thanks, Congress. Stupid gits. I never minded watch lucky charms commercials.) RF is dead! Long live digital video.
So, life marches on. Keep watching for an asteroid coming soon to a planet near you!
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
... and why it took me two months to buy my second.
After first reading about Tivo I resolved to try to do the same thing with my current computer and capture card. So I spent the next two years researching and playing around with my computer.
First I started with capturing straight to MPEG-1 with WinVCR. Worked well enough but it became problematic (audio sync) when capturing very long video segments. I also noticed that I couldn't get the video quality to as good as where I wanted. Also, scheduling multiple shows tended to hang the machine up in the middle of recording. Could've kept working on my setup but I finally gave up on it.
I then tried using PowerVCR and it was fine for a while but the quality still left a little more to be desired.
In search of better capture quality I finally took the hard way out and started using AVI_IO and capture the scheduled video to MJPEG AVI files. This allows me to convert the files to either DivX or MPEG or even Real Media and the quality of the final product is as good as I want it to be.
After two years of refining my video capture approach I ended up needing to schedule more than the 10 events that I can set my satellite receiver to schedule. I considered getting an IR transceiver for my computer so that I can program it to change the channels of my satellite receiver but it dawned upon me that this is starting to get too complicated (I hit my complexity threshold here). I finally bit the bullet and got my first DirecTivo just so that I can schedule all the events I wanted.
The Tivo ended up working even better that I've ever imagined. I still capture to AVI on my computer for the shows that I want to have a long-term archive (Babylon 5 rules!) but use my Tivo to schedule this and record other shows. My Dad and brother saw it in action and were green with envy. To prevent family discord I got another one for the family room's TV. Of course, it also helped that you can start getting 35 hour DirecTivo systems for as low as $90.
My other brother ended up getting one for Christmas and I managed to talk a friend into making sure that he had PVR capability with his satellite subscription.
In short, I had to try to do it by myself for two years because of the challenge of getting it to work. After I got the first one everything just works so well that I had to buy another.
Never attribute to stupidity what can be construed as a monopoly preservation tactic.
http://www.9thtee.com/tivonet.htm
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
Well, maybe not Tivo-the-company, but the PVR idea will make it.
When the tech reaches the level that it costs $10 to include on a TV, it will be everywhere. The broadcast companies will figure out a way to make money off it, eventually.
The question, vis a vis Tivo, is whether the company is flexible/prepared enough to move when the market shifts. Are they all about hardware? They will fail. Are they all about perfecting the tech through software? They have a chance.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I bought the 30hour Tivo/direct tv combo unit for my parents about a year ago. My mom can't use a computer at all, except for solitaire, and she has no problems using Tivo. Along with soap operas, she has it setup to record every Shirley Temple movie that happens to be playing on any one of the several hundred directv channels. They really like the device, however there's no way they would've bought one for themselves. It's just one of those things that you have to use for a while to fully appreciate if you're not a techie who can see the benefits from the outset. That being said, introduce your non techie friends and family to these devices and they'll realize they can't live without them.
You're right, but it's not that people don't need or want to change the way they watch TV, it's that they don't know how much better it could be. The sort of people who sit down and channel surf for an hour are the ones who would get the most out of Tivo. Never again would they flick through 60 channels and complain about nothing being on. Tivo means that when you want to watch TV there is something for you to watch.
TV is a huge timesuck of passive eyeball cramming, detrimental to yourself, relationships with your friends & family, and your free time. I've got tons of things to do in my free time - being advertised to while sitting through the crap on the screen that passes for entertainment doesn't even register. And the ability to watch same crap at some other time and without commercials isn't much better, IMO.
Nothing sucks more than watching the average American family huddle around a glowing box in silence for 2-3 hours a weeknight instead of talking to one another, playing a game, reading, enjoying a hobby, etc. So many people miss out on so much in life doing this, and in exchange for what? Seinfeld?
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
No - you cannot. Tivo has removed this functionality.
If you're not paying the subscription fee, all you can do is pause live tv, or watch stuff that has been previously recorded. You CANNOT record anything new.
Trust me --- my Tivo subscription got screwed up last week so I experienced it first hand.
Yes, you can.
Charter Communications in some areas where they offer digital cable are doing this. I don't know if this has been rolled out yet but they've been advertising the service for a while now. Considering my cable modem has been losing its connection pretty frequently lately I don't know how good the service they're offering would be.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Apparently the Australian economy is going to pick up and lead the world in growth, funded by (sit down and secure all loose objects) US venture capitalists! You've got to love those enonomists.
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.
I was talking to two women before Christmas who were wondering what to buy their husbands. Since both men are TV_holics, I suggested a Tivo. Neither woman had heard of it so I said "It lets you pause TV...."
Two blank stares. They didn't have a clue what I meant.
So I said, "If the phone rings, you can push a button...answer the phone, talk as long as you like and come back to the TV right where you left off."
"OOOOHHH!" in two voice harmony.
Then one of them took half a second and said, "And if I tell him to do something, he can't say...'But, I'll miss what I'm watching!'"
Both men got Tivos last Christmas.
Can somebody explain why tivo's are $129 with directTv built in but $500+ on their own?
Thanks in advance,
Vanguard
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
I bought a ReplayTV for my parents for Xmas. I hooked it up, dialed into their servers, and had seriously THE MOST HORRENDOUS TIME attempting to set it up. The setup found every available spot to die, the servers were continually down or unresponsive, and I had a hell of a time even getting a phone line that was active. So I bought my parents another gift, boxed up the Replay, and took it back home to return.
When I got home I decided to give it another chance, and hooked it up in my system. After an 3 hours I was able to finally complete the setup process (I had the same problems as at my parents house, but now I was playing Dark Age of Camelot so I had time to sit around pressing the 'attempt re-connection button'). After it was set up, it worked fine for about a week.
After a week, ReplayTV decided to change my local access numbers. Fine, whatever. Except they changed them to numbers that didn't work. None of them did for a week - I tried every night, and every local number. So I was stuck with a box that just sat there with no use other than to pause TV until they decided to get their act together. I called their tech support and all I got for a response was 'yea that is a problem'. Nice fucking response. My parents would of been livid if I had somehow managed to get it working at their house and left them with an inoperable piece of hardware and no support.
Eventually the local numbers started working, and presently it seems as if everything is running smoothly, but based on my past experience I can't recommend ReplayTV to anyone. Their service just plain sucked, and if I didn't have the patience of Job (or the lazyness, take your pick), I would of returned it.
.agrippa.
It's the multiple angle pr0n flicks that sold DVD to Joe Sixpack. :P~
I bought our TiVo based on an infomercial. An infomercial. Never before, nor since, have I been tempted to buy anything I saw on an infomercial. This was so cool it overcame my huge resistance to this form of marketing.
If this is the best they can do for a marketing campaign, they need a new ad agency. Try this for a 60 second spot: just show a split screen, with the guy on the right channel surfing in the usual bored and miserable fashion, and the guy on the left picking a cool show out of his TiVo playlist of cool shows and watching it for a while... Enough said.
Everyone we've ever shown our TiVo to has wanted one. Several of them have got one. It can't be hard to sell a product like that.
TiVos have always seemed really useful to me, for a lot of the reasons mentioned on this thread. However, I've always been held back from buying one by my lack of knowledge regarding how TiVo operates in a family.
Does it assume that only one person is using it, and get really confused because I like Space Ghost and South Park, my brother likes the Golden Girls, my sister goes for the Disney Channel "original" movies, and my mom likes the nighttime dramas?
In other words, I can't sell my dad on a TiVo unless I can tell him how it would work in a family setting. Help me, Slashdot -- you're my only hope!
Everyone keeps talking about how Tivos are so much better than a VCR. But I don't want the extra feature of it going and finding shows for me to watch. I want to get a Tivo and treat it like a VCR.
Right now, I usually record shows I want to watch (using my VCR), and go back and watch them later. But video tapes eventually wear out, and I do have to rewind, etc.
So I want a Tivo where I can tell it e.g. to tape CBS every Thursday from 8-9pm (to catch Survivor), and a bunch of other shows. I don't need all the bells and whistles; I'll figure out when the shows I want to watch are on every week. But here's the catch -- I also don't want to subscribe to the monthly service, because I don't want the bells and whistles. Why should I pay them $X/month for stuff I don't care about?
Can Tivo do that? In all the discussions over the years, I've never seen anyone say that it can.
Am I right that the only success story for subscription tied to appliance business model is for cellphones? I think that is only because they reached a critical mass in added function versus price compared to it's related product (the standard telephone). The perceived gain in function and/or the current price point of PVR compared to VCR is not yet enough to sway the public. Perhaps with the arrival of Moxi this wil change.
It seems obvious to me that there are two reasons that Tivo hasn't been "embraced"
1. It's hard to understand the advantages over a VCR. This doesn't mean there aren't any or that their impossible for normal people to use, it's just a hard sell. Nearly everyone already has multiple VCRs.
2. THE BIG ONE -- The absence of a removable media (like tape on a VCR) is a BIG minus. VCR's are essentially used for 3 things, time-shifting shows, "copying" shows/movies (i.e. recording them to keep for a while or to transport), and for playing rented tapes. Tivo does the first but due to the lack of a removable media it can't do the other two. A Tivo owner can't record something and then take the recording to his friend's house and watch it. It's locked in the Tivo.
If Tivo would simply be brave enough to also include a CDR/W drive that would make this thing a 100% feature-for-feature VCR replacement, wide adoption would be much less painful. A combo Tivo/DVD player is what is needed to actually *replace* a VCR in full functionality, but they don't sell these.
The phone connection has got to go. The program guide info has to be broadcast somehow. There's no technical obstacle to doing that, but broadcasters will grumble. Maybe the trick is for the PVR companies to put schedule info in the vertical interval of every commercial they run for their products.
Nope... One channel. This is sometimes a pain.
However, the disk is fast enough to keep up with reading and writing a program simultaneously, so you can still "watch one thing and record another" if the "one thing" is something you recorded previously.
I'm told some of the Tivo systems have two tuners, and Dish is supposedly coming out with a system "real soon now" which will have dual tuners. Then you can (I assume) record two things while watching a third that you recorded previously.
I know that's not what you wanted to hear :), but I've done extensive research and never heard anyone mention this. However, if you really want to be sure, ask your question at the premier TiVo forum:
TiVo Community Forum> DIRECTV Receiver with TiVo
Sig goes here
And of course, Newsweek wouldn't happen to be a mainstream, massmarket, consumerist mouthpiece or anything, would it?
No...
We could certainly expect **objective** journalism from Newsweek.
heh..
Right..
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?