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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."
Tivo has stopped hacking in the past. Any hack that gets lets you use outside channel data is stopped by Tivo. Also, I believe they tried to stop a hack that allowed you to extract the mpeg video from a tivo.
Other than those examples though, Tivo has been extremely tolerant of hacks.
On the site:
"The installation is not that hard, and it has been wife tested..."
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. =)
According to Tiger, who wrote the MFS Tools application that is used to add/expand drives, most of his handouts for the new version went to TiVo employees and engineers.
Speaking of MFS Tools 2.0, you can do all sorts of nifty adds and expansions with it - including adding and expanding the A Drive on Series2 units.
More on MFS Tools 2.0 here.
TiVo was pretty vocal about not supporting the hack that allowed you to extract video from the TiVo. They asked Dave Bott, the guy that runs tivocommunity.com, not to allow talk about it. The new Series 2 TiVos have been changed so that you can't make hacks (like TiVoweb, telnet access and FTP) that are persistant across reboots.
They are miles above most companies, but they still are not 100% hacker friendly.
tk
Maybe the people at Tivo still get it that crossing your paying customers will cost you your paying customers, so they do not harass the hackers. Besides, If I buy a Tivo, it's my personal property. I have the right to use it as I see fit, no matter what the MPAA or television networks say. By the way, If I share my recordings of free broadcast TV how is that stealing?
How ya like dat?
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.
As any regularly hacking TiVo owner will tell you, the company is not merely tolerant of people who hack their product, but supportive. The latest version of the TiVo software includes built-in support for the 3rd party network adapters (TiVoNET and TurboNet). It's this kind of technical interaction that gives me hope not just for hacking, but for development of open source solutions.
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.
Tivo doesn't make money off the hardware. (In fact, the hardware is made by Phillips and Sony, and I think I saw once that TiVo actually PAYS Phillips and Sony a small subsidy per box.)
TiVo's revenue stream is from their *service* - I have a friend that works for them, and he basically says that their attitude is that it's anything goes for hackers, in fact they secretly cheer them on.
BUT, that's as long as the hackers don't go near their revenue stream. Try to screw with their channel guide service/etc., and they will most definately NOT be supporting it. (I think someone basically said that TiVo went to some lengths to shut down people who did such things.)
Hackers upgrading mean:
a) TiVo doesn't have to pay the small subsidy on new boxes.
b) If the hacker installs a network card, it means they stop using the TiVo dialup system for updates.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Err.. that hasn't happened. They (and we) have discouraged such hacks, but Tivo's taken no real action to stop them from occuring.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Now that the technology has been debugged and the business case proved, why the hell can't we buy these things here?
Yes, I know Andrew Tridgell hacked one to make it work, but surely we don't have to go to that kind of effort to make it work . . .
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Have no fear, a VHS Cult Gathering for us 'old school' hackers is bound to be scheduled.
Efren Belizario
headspeak.com
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
"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
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.
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.)
First, I love my Tivo. It's great for recording the boob tube.
However...
A friend of mine, after hearing a bunch of us talk about nice the Tivo was, bought one of the new "Series 2" machines. He wasn't sure he was going to keep it, so he didn't subscribe. After the "trial period" ran out, he can no longer record manually (time and channel, without the guide).
It appears from various comments around the 'net that the "Series 2" machines cannot be used as manual recorders. Now, using a Tivo as a manual PVR kinda defeats the purpose of the thing (IMHO), but the older units can be used manually (i.e., without a subscription) and people may think this is still possible with the newer units.
Yes, I understand that their business model is to get the money from the subscriptions. I'm just pointing out something I had not heard about (that manual recording without a subscription is no longer possible). I was a bit surprised to learn this, in fact.
Milalwi
Jesus, not again...
2) The Privacy Foundation's report on Tivo points out that
a) Your Tivo serial number is sent multiple times during each phone call and there is no way to guarantee data is truly treated anonymously except to trust Tivo.
Except by looking at the method which it uses to send the data and having intelligence enough to figure out that it's sending the serial-containing logs to a different place at a different time, and leaving no way to correlate the serial with the anonymous part of the data. Someone needs to tell "the privacy foundation" that you don't need an expensive box with modem trickery to spy on a connection, you just need a knowledge of how the system works. They've gone out of their way to stick to *exactly* what their privacy policy says, and all you need is a knowledge of Linux and TCL to see that.
b) Tivo's definition of "personal" information is significantly more narrow than the average privacy policy reader would assume, and so guarantees about your "personal" information are hollow.
Personal info, as defined by Tivo, is basically anything that can be tied back to you or to your box individually. Seems airtight to me.
c) Tivo suggests that the viewing information is never transmitted. In fact, all of the constituent pieces of the personal viewing information are transmitted to TiVo's computers.
Huh? Tivo explictly states that anonymous viewing information is transmitted. Read it, specifically section 2.3:
d) TiVo should disclose that their customer-identified diagnostic log can indicate when the TiVo remote control was in use.
The customer identified diagnostic log cannot indicate when the remote control was in use. The Privacy Foundation misinterpreted the meaning of several of the diagnotic messages because they simply looked at the log and not what the hell the unit was actually doing.
I agree, it's important to fight for your privacy. But it's equally important to pick your battles and not fight against the companies that explicit state what data they collect, how they use it, and then stick by that. Tivo has been incredible in that respect. They do it right, and if every company was as forthcoming as they have been about this sort of thing, then there'd be a lot less privacy battles to fight.
3) Anyone heard of Replay TV here?
Yeah, and we all hope they win. But frankly, they have an inferior product. They added nice whizbang features like ethernet (although Tivo Series 2 will have ethernet support too), show sharing, auto commercial skip, and a (somewhat lame) web control, which we geeks love, but they failed to fix the most important problems like: more intelligent scheduling, priorities that make sense, ability to see what the unit will do in the future and adjust it, etc... All the things that make a PVR better than a VCR. Adding neat features is easy. Making a unit work exceedingly well at one thing is more difficult. Tivo works better than Replay for the purpose of timeshifting programs. Replay works better than Tivo for the purpose of geek type stuff. And Replay, while they fight the good fight, are really pushing themselves into an uncertain future by doing so. Ever thought about "what if they lose", which they most probably will?
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.