Inside the Cult of TiVo

StudMuffin writes: "A group of TiVo enthusiasts from over at the TiVo Community Forum recently got together. About 100 people showed up to roast weenies and swap TiVo hacks and screen names. This is just plain cool, if you ask me. TiVo rocks. Of interest, however, was the representation of the TiVo company and the fact that they didn't fight to stop hacking their product. Does this relationship between hi-tech companies and hackers act as a model of how this relationship can work? TiVo even seems tolerant of really hardcore hacks as discussed on /. in the past."

Comments

TiVo won't stop hacking . . .

[vegetablespork]

. . . until it costs them some money or they get DMCA'd. They have been playing it cool so far, but that'll turn on a dime once the money starts leaving.

Re:TiVo won't stop hacking . . .

[WNight]

It doesn't take much to be tolerant of something that doesn't bother you in the slightest... (It's easy to support free speech when you like it, but much harder when you disagree strongly with it.)

I'd be a lot more impressed in TiVo accepted listings hacks and such and simply tried to compete on ease of use and features.

I don't think they should have any right to dictate what people do with their product, even if they don't like it.

They also burned a few bridges by lying about the ability to use a TiVo (the old ones claimed this on the box) without the service. They forced an upgrade on everyone and it basically made the boxes without service unusable. Rather than rolling out an immediate fix for their "mistake" they promised to roll it into the next release, a few months away. Their "helpful net representative" then flamed a few people for being useless deadbeats for being unwilling to pay a measly $10 (what are you, on welfare?!?) when they were unhappy at his suggested fix - buy service.

(I'm quite well off, with two incomes and no kids, and I spend a lot on tech, but I wouldn't want to be trapped into anything that I have to pay a monthly fee for if I could avoid it. I don't consider myself cheap, I just don't want to be over a barrel when the only provider of a service decides to suddenly jack up the price.)

They show some enlightened self interest, but no real care for the customers. (Not much different than many other companies.)

Honey is better than vinegar

[jobugeek]

Maybe Tivo realizes that endless fighting against geeks isn't in their best interest and who knows, someone may come up with features they hadn't thought of. Cheap R&D indeed.

Tivo has been extremely generous...

[Latent IT]

Not only does Tivo have a model relationship with hackers, but this is despite the fact that hackers do sometimes cost them money. How? I'll explain:

It's not that the people who hack (finally, proper usage of the word) their Tivo to get more space are competing with any upgrade plan of Tivo's, because they don't have one. But what happens frequently is this - when you're upgrading the disks, if you're smart, you make a backup. The upgrade then goes successfully, and you've swapped out 30 hours of space on a single drive, to say, 120 hours of space on two drives. Then a software upgrade comes along, of which Tivo has had several. Then one of your disks may fail, programs start skipping, or the Tivo starts freezing. So you go back to backup.

You have to download the software again.

I'm sure I'll get flamed to hell and back, but Tivo has a deal with UUnet (though they may have gone out of business, or bought?) to provide local POP's for Tivo's to dial into. Tivo then pays for the time you use. Program data is tiny. Software updates, (over mostly 33.6) is a long time, and costs them money. But to my experience, and yeah, this happened to me, they've been nothing but agreeable, and I had to download 2.5 actually 3 times - once for the actual upgrade, once for the situation above, and uh... the third time because I screwed up, I admit it. I even called tech support, because my machine didn't want to upgrade the third time, and they actually re-flagged me for download, and told me to get it right this time. =)

Stealing? Oh, really?

[Black Aardvark House]

TiVo allows one to steal content by skipping ads

So you're implying I steal television airtime if I go take a bathroom constitutional or head off to the fridge for a snack? I hardly think it's stealing, just a convenience that TiVo users enjoy by skipping ads.

And what about channel surfing?

Also consider that there are more ads on TV now than ever before, and a lot of ads on cable channels that I've already paid for every month!

I pay for my TV in other ways. I don't think is "stealing".

Very much a model of how it should be done.

[pauldy]

The amount of people out there who have the technical know how to hack these things to a point of costing Tivo money is very very small in proportion to the amount of people who own the product. Given this why would they focus their energies on suppressing these hacks when they could focus on improving and selling more of their products.

If Dish Network spent money like this instead of on stings, lobbying and developing ecms don't you think they would have a better service to show for it. By that I mean from a consumer point of view and not an investors.

Hackers are salesman

[samjam]

Hackers are not only unpaid support guys for friends and relations, they are also salesmen.

Let the hackers do what they want (and they can't really be stopped, can they), and more will buy the tivo and preach tivo-ism to the untechnical masses who will never hack to the full degree, most will give up after a month and just use it normally.

Sam

Don't forget

[Greenrider]

I know we would all like to think of Tivo as a wonderful utopian mother company that babies all of its little hacker children, but please keep in mind that reaching out to the hacker community is a shrewd business decision, not a form of altruism.

Consider for a moment the fact that hackers are almost always early adopters, who spread the gospel of technology to their less tech-literate friends. If you read Slashdot and/or hack Tivos, chances are you've got a couple of friends who think of you as their tech guru, and who come to you when they're deciding to purchase a computer, a new DVD player, or...oh, I don't know...a PVR unit.

The simple fact is that reaching out to hackers is simply Tivo's way of ensuring positive word-of-mouth from the people who are in the best position to dispense it. This is not a bad thing, but it's not particularly a great thing either - it's just smart business.

Client Side not that bad

[sqlzealot]

I once felt the same way, but after some thought I think the client side PVR model is actually a good one.

1) Broadcast Transmission
Client PVRs rely on broadcast transmission to "download" shows. This means that hundreds of users can be recieving the same show on a local loop and it will cost no additional bandwidth. For server side PVRs to work, they would have to have enough bandwidth at each server to handle all attached users. This would be costly.

2) Infrastructure
To setup server side PVRs you would need to keep adding servers as your subscriber base increases. Not to mention that not every cable user has internet access on their line. This may cost even cost more than just buying a client side Tivo for each user. Tivo is losing money as is. There is no way they could have got the capital to support their user base if they had to maintain all the servers that would be required for server side PVRs.

3) Reliability
While you are right that hard drive failures would piss off consumers, hard drive failures are relatively rare. I suggest that server side PVRs would have even MORE problems than client side. Look at your average web site, which seems to crash everytime its linked to some certain web logs. And if server PVR crashes, then possibly hundreds of users would be pissed off at once, instead of just one.

Server side PVRs have many advantages in the long run, but the short run costs keep them prohibitive for the moment. A good solution may be to combine the advantages of client and server side PVRs. For instance keep the same Tivo functionality, but add the ability to (slowly) download a requested show from a server somewhere. You request it on Monday and get it Tuesday night or something. The new ReplayTV P2P show sharing might be a good model for this.

sigless

Re:I love my Tivo but

[jlower]

It's not 'forced recording'. If you're watching something else or have scheduled something else to record at that time, the TiVo content will not be recorded.

Besides, it uses a reserved portion of the disk so it's not like you're losing space for your recordings.

Personally, since I never look through the showcases and other cruft in the TiVo Central menu, I never even know what (or if) it recorded on its own.

Re:A Question to any TiVo users?

[Darkstar9969]

My 60 year old mother uses my old series 1 standalone (I upgraded and hacked my new DirecTiVo to 108 hours of record time) My mother is a very intelligent person BUT she is a technological idiot! If it has electricity running through it she has issues using it.

That being said I hooked up the TiVo for her and gave her a quick tour of what the TiVo button does, how to play recorded shows and how to add Season Passes and left her to ask questions as she ran into problems. Ya know what? She DIDN'T! All I hear now is how happy she is that she can watch her Lifetime shows, network "chick" shows, and whatever else she wants and I don't have to answer questions like "will Providence fit on this VHS tape" ever again.

God Bless TiVo!!!

Just my $.02