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TiVo Service Cost Rising

Posted by timothy on from the now-how-much-would-you-pay dept.

evil_one writes: "Shortly after the article on ReplayTV mods, comes this story about TiVo cost increases." A 30% increase in the cost of TiVo service will probably affect a lot of readers -- and might just make the hassle of a homebrewed PVR a little more attractive. Of course, TiVo service is what makes a TiVo more attractive than a plain recorder anyhow.

21 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Service? by groman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What is TiVo service anyhow? Is there anything specific in the service that you can't code into a homebrewed version?

  2. Distrubted? by Peridriga · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Couldn't one create a distributed PC client that would compile the TV listings from around the world (Maybe leeching content off of TVGuide.com).

    Change the dial-up information to your dial-up account (if anyone still has one of those... and if you don't $9.95 for NetZero is still cheaper than TiVO or ReplayTV's subscription costs).

    Just the added note... Could you imagine a beauwolf cluster of TiVO's?

    1. Re:Distrubted? by dimator · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Couldn't one create a distributed PC client that would compile the TV listings from around the world (Maybe leeching content off of TVGuide.com).

      Even more interesting than that idea is that you don't need to chew on HTML to get the listings. See XMLTV.

      Now that I have some free time on my hands, I think I'm going to start that home PVR project based on XMLTV. You don't need to sacrifice useability either, as there is code out there for on-screen menuing. Nice.

      --
      python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
  3. Guess what else people will do? by fcrick · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Seems like this should spure a rise in the hacked TiVo market...I've seen it done. You can get free Tivo and DirectTV for life with a little technical know-how and some extra components. Copy-protection going right out the window with DirectTV/TiVo comin in for free...

    --
    Your signatures belong to me.
    1. Re:Guess what else people will do? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      some of us LIKE screwing over large corporations. The DTV hacking community is going strong, despite efforts to spite us. Guess what? DTV is still doing pretty well. As far as lining the CEOs pockets with boatloads of cash, the hacking community has a 'code of ethics' so to speak. This code relates directly to the most common problem that the hacking community faces: blacklisting.

      The smartcard with proprietary ASIC that sits in the DSS reciever has a CAM/ZKT, which is basically a unique identifier for that card. You can get the card's memory, commonly referred to as 'BIN' off the internet. That BIN contains a ZKT and CAM. Obviously, if you can get it on the net, so can the boys at DTV. This specific identifier will then most likely become 'blacklisted' and cause the DTV reciever to say 'call ext 745 for subscription information', which means the card is no longer valid. Personally, I have kept a subscription to DTV up, so that my BIN on my card is valid. If i were to let it lapse, I'd be screwed.

      The primary reason the boys at DTV send down countermeasures is to combat dealers; dealers being people who sell the neccessary software/hardware combination to facilitate signal theft. DTV doesn't give a flying crap (as history has shown) about the small time person who has enough of a brain to construct an ISO7816 programmer and mess with the card/emulate the card.

      So take your high and mighty attitude elsewhere, as long as the company thrives, and there are people who have enough soldering skills or electronics knowledge to construct the necessary hardware, there will always be signal theft. Its just the way it is.

      Oh, and on another front... what about the canadians? Should they be screwed out of watching american TV just because their dumbass government says they wont license US broadcasters signals in canada? I'll bet a large portion of slashdot's readers like TechTV (channel 354)... Until THIS YEAR, the canadian geeks had no other way to get TechTV other than to pirate DTV.

      Another legimate reason to fiddle with your subscription is to obtain local channels. If I lived way out in the boondocks, and a big metal antenna still wont get me my locals very well, but i can get them. DTV's agreements say that if you can get them with an antenna, you may not have them on your DTV. but with a little fiddling, this is easily solved.

      My opinion happens to be that if you keep a subscription to the service, you aren't do that much of a diservice to DTV. If you aren't smart enough to be able to maintain the setup yourself, you shouldn't be doing it anyway. Keep it under your hat, and enjoy.

    2. Re:Guess what else people will do? by IronChef · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This is the most common argument given by satellite pirates. $50/mo. for over three-hundred channels is not going to break the average consumer, especially those with enough money to be investing in satellite hacking equipment.

      I do not want to get into the piracy argument, but I do want to point out that sat hacking gear is not expensive: you can start hacking echostar for less than $50, assuming you have a computer to maintain the gadget with... so you can't fairly say that $50/month is comparable to the cost of the hacker gear. It's not, it's a hell of a lot more. There is a substantial savings for pirates. (though in the case of Echostar maintaining a minimal sub makes things easier.)

    3. Re:Guess what else people will do? by Jay+Mirioashi · · Score: 1, Interesting
      Now mind you, I have no great desire to have more channels whether or not I could get them for free. It is insulting, sitting in front of that box, being fed a steady stream of well, whatever someone else decides they want me to see.

      That said, on a common sense level it seems absolutely absurd that if a signal is being broadcast to my house, that I should not be able to do whatever I choose with it. I do not believe that anyone, upon considering the nature of this, can have a reasonable expectation that their signal will not be used without their explicit acknowledgement.

      If I throw naked pictures of myself (humour me) onto all the lawns in my neighborhood, then it would be absurd to think that I could have a reasonable expectation that people would not look at them, or not do whatever they wished with them.

      Yes, I quite fully realize that the grouns for laws allowing this are largely economic. Though the resource is abundant, the laws create an artificial scarcity. However, I think that it is a blow at basic human dignity to say that I can not recieve and do whatever I wish with that signal. Yes, I will accept on economic grounds that I should not sell completed equipment whose sole purpose is to "pirate" a signal. However, because I am a human being, and because I truly do have private property, I should be able to, for my own personal (or family) use, create a device to recieve and decode that signal.

      Yet of course, I would rather choke myself to death with a handful of tacks than bring that crap into my home.

  4. Lifetime subs just got cheaper, though... by ncc74656 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...for a limited time, the cost of a lifetime subscription has dropped from $250 to $200. Maybe they're trying to get people to switch to lifetime service. It potentially means less money for TiVo in the long run, but a shot in the arm right now.

    --
    20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
    1. Re:Lifetime subs just got cheaper, though... by Spire · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The TiVo software has a feature called the Season Pass Manager, which is basically conflict management. It's a screen with a list of all your Season Passes that lets move shows up or down in priority. Shows that have higher priority will always take precedence over shows that have lower priority when they're both on at the same time.

      Season Passes have other features as well, such as the 28-day rule and "keep at most".

      The 28-day rule ensures that the same episode of a show (or in the case of movies, the same movie) will never be recorded twice in 28 days. This is useful for programs that shown multiple times a day.

      "Keep at most" forces the TiVo recorder to never have more than N episodes of a certain show recorded. For example, you may have a Season Pass to the daily 7:00 news, but if you're gone for several days, you don't want several days worth of old news backed up on your recorder. So you set that season pass to "Keep at most 1". That way, only the latest episode of the Season Pass will occupy space on your recorder.

      --
      begin 644 .sig22&%I;"P@9F5L;&]W(&=E96 LA`end
  5. what are we gonna do about it? tivo needs the $... by jaredcat · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I've been a Tivo subscriber for a while... I was pretty pissed when I received an email from TiVo about the rate increase, but its not like there is anything I can do about it. So why piss and moan?

    There are basically two options available for me as a TiVo subscriber: $9.95/month (now $12.95/month), or $199 (or $249 off-season) for a lifetime subscription, which is the lifetime of the TiVo, not the subscriber. So of course, it only makes sense to get the month-to-month subscription, as who can predict if they will still have the same TiVo box 15-19 months from now?

    Also, TiVo is BLEEDING money. They have never had a profitible quarter-- losing between $50 MILLION and $34 MILLION net for every quarter that they have posted so far. According to their published #'s, without some serious additional financing, TiVo will be out of cash in a year. I can't really blame them for increasing their service fees...

  6. They have to pay for the new bugs^H^H^H^Hfeatures by micsaund · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "It's a reflection of the cost to deliver the service on an ongoing basis," a TiVo spokeswoman told Reuters. "We have delivered multiple upgrades and new features, and haven't raised prices."

    Recently, I've had my trusty TiVo reboot twice while recording shows, give me VERY noticable compression glitches, and a slew of other lesser bugs. All of these problems seem to have happened after the 2.5.x upgrade.

    Hell, yeah, TiVo needs 30% more of my money -- they've given me at least 30% more bugs!!!

    Anyway, I've been an avid TiVo fan and I evangelize the service to all of my friends and family, but now, it's getting too expensive for most people to "risk" trying it. That was always the biggest obstacle to getting anyone to try a TiVo: "Well, you mean I have to drop $300 on the machine AND pay $10/month to use it??? No way... the free TV guide in the newspaper and my old VCR work just fine!"

    As for myself, I think I'll just look into the RePlay boxes (or whatever they're called) since at least I'll get some updated hardware for the monthly cost...

    --
    Pinball, arcade video, tech and more: www.micsaund.com
  7. lifetime service by PhuCknuT · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Am I the only one here who bought lifetime service? When I got it, people thought i was crazy for paying for it when tivo could go out of businiess any day now. That was 2 years ago, and the lifetime has already paid for itself (in terms of monthly fees), and I've still got the same tivo (although now with 200 hours, a network card, and a memory upgrade). The service is absolutely worth it.

  8. Re:Any good resources rolling your own? by d2ksla · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hmm, kinda. The parts are there, but no-one has put them together in a neat package yet. That's probably since Linux video software has really taken off in just the last 6 months.

    There's mplayer which is a great player for any video-format out there. It can even play DVD's, although it doesn't have menu support like Ogle. It can also rip DVD:s to MPEG-4 (a.k.a DivX) using a couple of different encoders. Xvid is my favorite open-source MPEG-4 encoder, it's also got good reviews on Doom9 (good place for DivX info!).

    For the TV-in recording part you can use a $50 WinTV card and the Video4Linux drivers. On top of that you need an audio-video capture application that can use encoders such as Xvid and Lame to encode to MPEG-4 (video) and MP3 (audio). I use NVrec. If you try the NVrec suite, use the DIVX4rec app (with the Xvid library instead of divx4linux which isn't maintained anymore). On my P-III 500MHz I can compress 29.97 Hz (NTSC) 320x240 in real-time to 800 kbit/s (video) + 80 kbit/s (audio). It takes about 5 hours to make a one-pass encoding of a DVD, so with a faster CPU it's probably possible to do real-time de-interlacing and encoding of 640x480 video.

    A drawback is that NVrec is a command-line app for recording, I'm working on a patch for real-time preview on Matrox G400 TV-out. Or if you have a fast enough computer you might be able to run mplayer on the file as it is being recorded. This would allow for Tivo-like pause and resume. It might be a problem with AVI files from NVrec though since I don't think they're streamable.

    Now, to put all of this together you need some kind of control application. That's not really that hard to write compared to all the other pieces (mplayer, xvid, nvrec). I've been working on one for the last couple of months, and have an alpha version that is usuable. It only supports the Matrox G400 for TV-out, and is a little crude, but it works good enough that I have it hooked up to my TV for everyday use. It's controllable by a remote control (see Lirc), using a very simple text-menu system to view tv, play avi/mpeg/mp3/dvd, record tv-in and rip DVD's. I'm getting ready to put it up on Sourceforge as Freevo within the next couple of weeks.

    The application is written in Python which is great for stuff like this. Once the basic stuff is done, it might be cool to make a plugin architecture where you could interface to other stuff. For instance, with OSD (on screen display), it is easy to add things like new mail notification while you're watching TV. Or new Slashdot headlines, ICQ chat notif, phone caller ID interface, www control, etc. And, of course, an interface to some kind of tv-guide.

    I haven't really found any other complete applications like this. Not that I've looked that hard, I'm always looking for an excuse to write software. mplayer might end up with all these feaures eventually, it is improving at an incredible rate at the moment.

    --

    Freevo - Linux Multimedia Jukebox
  9. Want homebrew PVR, like DirecTiVo's lossless rec. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Well, I have four TiVos of various styles and subscription plans, but as it would happen, none of the standalones are on monthly. So it doesn't affect me at this point.

    However, I would really like an open-source homebrew PVR. For many reasons.

    But I'm also in love with the DirecTiVo's ability to record the DirecTV bitstream directly. Because DirecTV will never allow homebrew PVRs to do this, I'm a little sad.

    And that's that. :)

  10. Software TiVo replacement by lga · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I can't afford a TiVo myself, although I would love one. I do have a software solution on a PC however.

    I use Showshifter from http://www.showshifter.com to watch, record and pause tv. Add Digiguide from http://www.digiguide.co.uk to this, and you now have the option to click on a program and choose "record in showshifter". Using an ATI all-in-wonder 128 card I can output the whole lot to my TV, and showshifter can use my remote control. Showshifter can also play back DVD's, CD's and MP3's, although it does need some improvement.

    The cost of this? Five pounds per year for digiguide. The main drawback is that this software is only available under windows, but I do most of my work on other computers running linux and irix, so it's not too big a problem.

    All in all I get slightly more functionality than a TiVo, but at a cost of being more complicated and having far more wires. I also hate to think of the total cost including the PC, but I already had that. I think what I really want is not a TiVo, but a PC in a low profile black case that can sit on top of my video. Armed with showshifter and digiguide ported to linux, I would end up with a far more functional box. I think I have just given myself a project to work on, haven't I.....

    Steve.

    --
    A latent existence
  11. Re:30% so what. by Mike+McCune · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Also, if you think the service is too expensive, don't use it. The manual recording option works just like a regular VCR and no service is required. I found this out last month when my credit card expired and someone in the billing department screwed up. I had to manually enter the date, time and channel for a few weeks. It is not as convient as the "season pass manager" but if you are too cheap to pay for the service at least you have the option to do it yourself.

    --

    In a world that is Free and Open, who needs Windows and Gates?

  12. for us poor students... by supernova87a · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You know, no one is *forcing* you to get the service.

    I bought a 20 hour Tivo in December, upgraded it to 80 hours on my own, and have been using it without service since then. I still think it's great!

    Sure, service would be nice, I would get to see the program names and scroll through tv guides, but I'm still happy without it. TIvo records the same programs for me every day (I set it manually to repeat), and it does perfectly well for me.

    Maybe when I start making some more money, I'll justify paying another monthy fee to some company, but not now. I'm already fed up with those cable, telephone, etc. companies.

  13. Re:Piracy, my ass! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Iknow you're just being a troll-boy, but fsck you!

    There is nothing wrong with recording TV for your own use. Look up the Betamax decision, dumb ass.

  14. Re:Old proprietary data and new management by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    If you were able to use TiVo for a few weeks you would not assert that "most TV isn't worth seeing" - although it is true that "most" TV is not worth seeing, that misses the point that you are still missing the good stuff - the small minority of TV that is worth seeing.

    The point is that TiVo allows you to see the really good TV shows that you never get a chance to watch because it is never on when you are around, or because its time keeps changing, or because you were never aware it even existed.

    If you had a TiVo you would be able to justify TV watching, because you would actually be watching the good stuff - only the things you really like (of which there is a lot more on TV than you realize).

    Instead, your kind prefers to sneer and make elitist comments about how there is nothing good on TV anyway, and how you could really homebrew your own DVR "if you really wanted to". Yeah, right. This is just a combination of bullshit and sour grapes.

  15. Re: Lifetime subs by Scryber · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I got my Tivo last April. Based on the cost of monthly subscription versus lifetime membership at that time, I decided that a lifetime membership was the best course. Basically, I would have to use/own the Tivo for 20 months for that investment to be worthwhile.

    Well I've totally fallen in love with Tivo, and now have only 9 months left for the membership to have paid for itself. Will I still be using it then? I don't doubt it for a second. Tivo isn't going anywhere, not with their partnership with Sony, plus the pending merger of DirecTV and EchoStar.

    Is it wise to get a lifetime subscription today? I think that even today that would be a good deal, as it safeguards you against further price increases, but YMMV. Do the math and determine if you think you will be using the device for at least two years--usually a good bet with most devices.

    BTW, even if Tivo were to fold, it would not mean we would all have useless Tivo boxes. On the Tivo forums one of the Tivo techs has made it clear that in the event of Tivo's demise, he will personally provide the backdoor code to "free" the Tivo from the subscription services. Presumably this means the Tivo would function just as it does today but without any further software updates.

  16. something new? by Alien+Being · · Score: 2, Interesting

    About 5 this morning, i was surfing the tv and came across a channel that seemed to be trasferring tivo information.

    The screen had vertical black bars on the left. The right was divided vertically into 2 frames which were filled with black and white square, surely a binary stream. Between the data frames, was a band with a text message something like "this channel is part of the tivo service".

    Has anyone else seen this? Is it an alternative to dialup? Does using it eliminate the need to transmit anything back to tivo? Is it free?