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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.