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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.
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.
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
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.
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?')
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.
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
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.
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
I won't buy a TIVO because I don't need yet another friggin' company recording every last thing I do. It's sickening.
They don't record every last thing I do. They don't know where I sit on my couch, or if my kittens like to curl up next to me or on the back of the sofa. It doesn't record what I eat when I watch TV, how many lights I have on, or if my hair is pulled back or loose.
It keeps track of what I watch, sure...But I opted out of them actually acquiring the data from my box. The packet sniffer I ran during a daily call actually told me that it wasn't sending them my viewing habits once I opted out. Although, it was kind of nice for them to know that I liked MST3K and Babylon 5...And hopefully they would have used it to have Scifi keep them on the air.
So...I'm wondering what you're complaining about.
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.
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
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.
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
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
Finally, you often are required to subscribe to the satellite service for a year for the better deals on DirectTiVo's.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
Basically, TiVo looks at how you rate certain shows, from a score of -4 to 4. Based on what types of shows you rate highest it will record similar shows it "thinks" you would like. So if you watch Space Ghost and South Park and *rate* them high, it would probably go out and record some more adultish cartoons like some stuff on cartoon network, simpsons, and the family guy. Not all perhaps, but I listed a couple to give you a general idea. Note, that I emphasize rate. The smart feature is based upon the ratings you give not the shows you choose to record.
I do not think that it correlates the different categories you rate highly. So if you watch Space Ghost, and your brother watches "I Love Lucy" and you both rate them highly, it would probably just go out and record some more shows of both categories, not necessarily trying to find some Space Ghost/I Love Lucy hybrid (scary thought). Hope this helps.
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.