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Slate Predicts The End Of TiVo
wiredog writes "Slate has an article about why TiVo (the company, not the idea) is destined to fail. It suffers from the same first mover disadvantage that did in the Newton and the Amiga."
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just because somethings first, doesn't mean it's got to fail...
hmm, i wonder what the commercial applications of this are? n.7.
It's an article from Slate (a Microsoft publication) saying TiVo's dead. (Microsoft had DVR plans for XBox, last I heard.)
:^)
Whatever... I'll still buy a TiVo once I can afford it. And sit it down next to that Amiga500 I've always wanted to get.
I wonder if the author is being objective, it's hosted on MSN anyway.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Hopefully there will be offsprings of secondary meta-Tivos. Or you could always turn your computer or PS2 into a tivo.
Jonahweb.com has stuff.
Just like the Ford Motor Company ...oh wait
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
I certainly hope not. I think TiVo is great.
A site owned by a wannabe PVR maker, bashing the most successful PVR in history. Shocker!
Tivo is dead! What's next? Broadband? Linux! Say it ain't so Billy!
It doesn't matter for me, though, I have my VCR programmed to record Mother Angelica every day.
A. Rightmann
Tivo claimed to be doomed by an online magazine that is owned by a rival manufacturer (Microsoft)? What a suprise!
Does the author (writing at the behest of the Microsoft entity Slate) expect that while Tivo will fail, UltimateTV (another Microsoft entity and Tivo competitor) will succeed?
People have started saying, "I'll just TiVo the show." The name TiVo is directy connected to it's function. Right now, I don't know any other company that does what they do. When I go to a Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. looking for a device to digitally record TV show, I'm going to go look for "TiVo".
Here is the sum of that article. DVD-R >> TIVO Didn't we all know that already?
I suspect that those same families still have their clocks flashing 12:00AM and do little more than read email on their P4 2GHz computers.
You're always going to have people who simply aren't going to make use of technology due to phobia.
However, the opposite side to their figures is that 70% of the people given TiVos ARE using it.
And I honestly can say that once you teach someone initially how to navigate through the menus, having the TiVo automatically catch your favorite shows whenever they're on, despite most schedule changes, is far easier than the hassles of putting in new tapes all the time and manually programming a change in a particular week's showtime.
If TiVo goes down, there's still more advanced eyeTV for Mac OS X!
http://www.elgato.com/eyeTV/index.html
Does anyone know a low cost way (stand alone) to record tv shows thru a direct tv dish?
.. I signed up for the yearly subscription thinking that I probably wouldn't use it for more than a year so why pay 200 bucks for a lifetime membership.
Well, over two years later and I'm still loving my Tivo. I use it more than any other AV component I own and I couldn't imagine not having it.
The devotee will even use TiVo as a verb
You can't buy that kinda of brand name recognition. ie q-tip, xerox
And compared with a VCR or DVD player, a TiVo is difficult to set up and maintain
Difficult to setup is accurate, but I'm not sure what is hard to maintain. All you have to do is watch TV shows and click on delete if you don't like them. Hit Thumbs up to stuff you like and thumbs down to stuff you don't. Not generalizing women, but my wife, who isn't that computer saavy has already learned how to bump her Season Passes over mine. I don't think it's difficult at all.
If TiVo does fall by the wayside, it will leave behind a throng of adoring fans
*sniff*
Live web cams
The Amiga failed in the marketplace not because they were the first mover, as the article suggests, but because the management at Commodore was hopelessly inept and corrupt. Instead of spending money marketing the Amiga and creating markets for them, they instead blew hundreds of millions of dollars on executive perks like private jets and company yaghts, not to mention obscene bonuses and stock option deals. It's failing had far more to do with Enron-style executive hubris than it ever did with market forces.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Well we were looking at buying an amiga(years and years ago) for control software development and playing games etc.... But opted for a PC and built a ISA DAC/ACD card out of a kit instead.
I can honestly say that I never looked back, I won't buy an X-Box or PS2 because, I have a PC. I won't be buying a Tivio, I'd rather by equivilent hardware and put it into my PC.
I use my PC to play DVD's, Music, Watch TV, Play games (though not so much now adays) unless someone comes up with a serious contender to the PC that's what I'm sticking with.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
that a company that sinks millions into R&D can't profit as quickly as a company that just has to look at what you did, what parts are prohibitively expensive, and copy the product without them.
This is exactly why the USPTO should be gotten rid of altogether. If we didn't have them, these new devices could be even closer to the original, and cheaper. After all, screw the original inventor, the consumer is who needs to benefit.
I just received a notice that DirecTV will be taking over the TiVo service for my unit. They also mentioned that the graphics will change on the interface, but none of the functionality. Does anyone know more about this?
Also to get a cheap DirecTV/TiVo unit, hit www.americansatellite.com and if you are a new subscriber they have the Phillips unit for $150. I bought mine about 7 months ago at $99. This included the unit, the dish and two installation kits.
"Tivo is doomed for failure! And remember, when it dies, you won't be able to use it anymore."
"Hmmm, then, " says thoughtful consumer, "I had better put off that Tivo purchase then."
"NEW FROM MICROSOFT: The X-Home Media Workstation, with PVR and X-Box compatibility!"
"Wow! Microsoft, eh? Why, sign me up!"
yeah.. I see the point of the article. But my TiVo has cheat codes and that is why I love it.
Select-Play-Select-30-Select == god mode!
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
I don't think the Commodore 64/Amiga analogy is quite accurate. Somewhat of a slam (apologies), but the Commodore 64 was a very successful product, even by the article's own numbers. 22,000,000 units sold, versus 500,000 TiVos. While Amiga failed on the heel of a successful product, you can't say "Look! TiVo's going to fail! They're trying to make a followup to a successful product! Look at the Commodore 64!"
Okay, I agree a bit in that the TiVo is difficult to extoll the virtues of (in a small number of words), perhaps in the same way as an Amiga. We (consumers) don't have the vocabulary to describe what TiVo does, and that really really has hurt TiVo. Most people just don't get their mind completely wrapped around the product. "Oh. That's the thing that pauses live TV?" "Yeah. Isn't that some kind of television set?"
Perhaps TiVo is more Jack Tramiel than Commodore/Amiga. Jack though that word-of-mouth would carry him through. So much for the Atari home computer division! TiVo needs to educate people on its product.
About the difficult of install? I'd think the learning curve for America Online would be as difficult as a TiVo. But that's its greatest blessing and its greatest bane. It is a very different device.
Probably the best into line I can say when describing a TiVo is the effect: "It completely changes the way you view television at home, and for the better."
Really, in reading this article, I really don't see how they go about providing their title, that it is destined for the trash heap of history. While that might be true, they don't get into any real fact. Just neat stories.
If TiVo (the company) closed down, the "500,000" users (as this article claims) will have a useless appliance..... UNLESS they hack it. Getting the program guide through the Internet would become the acceptable method of usage for TiVo (whereas right now it's a taboo idea only whispered in the dark corners of TiVo hacking message boards), and old TiVo's would sell on eBay for more than what they sell today in the store.
Why doesn't anyone ever say frothy pish?
1. Get it right.
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
Read the fucking article and when your little troll eyes get to:
The other 20 percent? Gaming consoles like Xbox 2 and the next generation of Sony PlayStations will likely include DVR technology
You'll understand why this isn't a plug for MS, but an unbiased article on a site that just happens to be owned by MS. Believe me, I'm sure that if MS was censoring articles on Slate, you would never see mention of PS, who right now is MS's biggest competitor in the gaming console wars.
Live web cams
Don't forget that Tivo, unliek it's rival Replay TV, charges a subscription fee for it's program guide...
Isn't Slate owned by MSN? Isn't MSN part of Micro$oft? Doesn't Micro$oft have a stake in ReplayTV or UltimateTV or some other TiVo-like device?
Yeah...nothing like using your monopoly power to wage a WoF (War of FUD).
blog |
How was the Amiga "not a success?" Sure, it's not around and popular today, like PCs, but then again, neither are Apple IIs, Commodore 64s, Atari 8-bits, Atari STs, etc. It's called progress.
With TiVo, we're talking about a VERY simple concept. To the end user, all it does is record and play back (and all that other good stuff). It's not something you have to go out and buy software for, and hope that the latest and greatest Laser printer will work for it.
Comparing TiVo to (un)successful computer platforms is like apples to oranges.
Also, I didn't really understand this part:
Joe Six-Pack, however, was stumped. VCRs and video-game machines had just recently made a splash in the mass market.
Umm... "Recently" as in "8 years before?" (The Amiga 1000 came out in 1985. The Atari VCS (aka 2600) came out in 1977.)
This, too:
he Amiga, which featured such revolutionary perks as a full-color screen (a big plus in the age of green-and-black Apple IIc monitors) and stereo sound.
Let's see - we what else had full-color screens? Atari 400/800 (1979), Commodore 64 (1982), and hey! Apple II! (You just needed the right monitor, I believe.)
Apple II's came out in 1977 and was still in production through 1993.
I can nitpick further, but I actually have something productive to do... somewhere... (checking pockets) No, not there...
My Tivo subscription price just dropped from 9.99/month to 4.99/month. Is this a sign that Tivo realizes things are not looking good and thus they are trying to keep existing customers and lure new customers with reduced fees?
The problem is, there IS no solution equivalent to a PC that matches Tivo's functionality. (At least not yet).
I too use my PC as a complete TV/DVD/music/gaming system, but intelligent PVR is still not mature on that platform. If I want Tivo functionality today, I have to go out and buy a Tivo (or a ReplayTV, or...)
The examples they give would be the same for any PVR, not just TiVo, this includes ReplayTV and XBox2. And a TiVo is really not that hard to use. My mom that has a hard time with email can use my TiVo with no problem. They'll be more scared of a DVD-R because they won't want to waste a blank DVD (yes, even if it's rewritable).
Free Mac Mini
I will most assuredly DIE if my TiVo programming info stops flowing.
Sorry GameBoy, but the Atari Lynx, Sega GameGear, Sega Nomad and TurboGrafix16 are throwing you into the ash heap of history.
Oh wait!
when i see it.. nice try Microsoft.. how come they can predict the end of Tivo.. yet never saw the end of webTV, ultimateTV, and possibly the ?Xbox?.. Let's believe them for a second.. All Tivo has to do is roll out a less expensive unit ($150-$200 price range) and keep up with the times (how about an hdtv-compatible tivo in the coming years).. I think there's a good possibility that Tivo's will be around for a while..
At least for Amiga...
Amiga was a great machine - it was one of a kind back then: true multi tasking, had the most colors compared to others (ok, not against SGI or higher end machines), best sound, and as many magazines wrote "A dream machine" but Commodore mistake was the price. The price was $1200 for 256K Amiga 1000 (not including monitor). As soon as Atari start shipping the Atari ST, the price went down seriously (to something like $700) and it sold quite a lot, and in europe it sold neck to neck compared to Atari ST (which costed about $500)..
The biggest problem of Amiga wasn't the hardware - it was the management which was full of crap, never listened to their customers and never worked with the Amiga community, decisions were wrong all the way - until the company went bankrupcy and died.
I hardly think that TiVo management is the same as it was on Commodore, so I cannot think Slate can compare the 2...
I predict the end of Slate before the end of Tivo.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Then, vapor-ware not withstanding, how is it that the greatly anticipated V4 of the Amiga OS is being released in just a couple of months?
Ahh... the uninformed. It's too bad that people without the background knowledge will read crap like this and take everything in it as the gospel.
There are no recurring fees if you buy the lifetime membership for $250 (which implies that you'll use it 2 years or longer to break even)
God Fucking Damnit
Your comparison to the Ford Motor company only serves to show how upstarts can take over a market someone else pioneered. When Ford started selling cars there were plenty of cars on the market. Ford was not a pioneer, but came later and improved the methods (noteably the assembly line) of the pioneers.
Actually, every OTHER source I have ever seen has agreed that the death of the Amiga was Commodore's poor marketing. (IBM had the same abysmal failure with OS/2). I can't speak on the Newton, because I don't know enough about them to make a coherent statement. But, I don't think TiVo is having marketing issues like Amiga did.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
you can get the box w/ a lifetime subscription for $250 more.
It's a lot up front, and I think they offer monthly for the sake of people who would rather buy a $400 box than a $650 one.
But as a happy TiVo subscriber, let me tell you this:
I would play twice the current $13/month for the TiVo service. It really is worth it!
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
End of Tivo and rise of UltimateTV? Give me a break.
This article is pure FUD from Microsoft, who are a competetor of Tivo ("UltimateTV"). They point out that Tivo will fail because it's hard to use? Hell, Rosie O'Donnel uses the damn thing! My friend has one, and his parents know how to use it! I think the remote is very intuitive, and well designed.
We aren't giving people credit here. We act as if they can't do anything. That's the problem with us (the USA), were too much of a low-context society. In Japan, they would expect you to know how to setup a computer or program Tivo, because they set everyone on a higher threshold automatically. In the US, everyone thinks everyone are idiots! In some cases, that is true... but it's annoying when people try to explain things to me as if I'm an idiot.
What do they think is "next generation"? If you've seen Microsoft's website you'll notice they're trying to get you to watch TV on your computer and have Windows take over your TV. Um, no thanks. I like my TV and computer seperate. Why the hell would I want to watch TV on some crappy small LCD monitor when I can watch it on a specially designed [for TV] HDTV? Tivo works great because it layers over the TV, but doesn't take it over.
Strangely enough, the founder and many of the key players and designers of (Tivo competitor) Replay TV came from Amiga companies.
I think Replay is doing a much better job than Tivo of giving the customers what they want. Replay is not so beholden to the content providers, thus can provide cutting (some would say bleeding) edge technologies in it's units. These "unique to Replay TV" features started with 30 second commercial skip buttons on the early units and have progressed to the current features of IP addressable show sharing and automatic commercial removal. It's really fantastic stuff that I fear Tivo's partners will never allow into their boxes.
But I suppose by the Salon authors argument Replay dooms themselves all the more by producing even greater cutting edge technologies.
The reason the Newton was cancelled was so Apple could focus on getting OS X going. Apple needed OS X to build its future on. Once the OS X transition is over (end of this year, according to Jobs), Apple will be free to expand again.
The Newton is still being used by people, and has a loyal following. Its excellent handwriting recognition lives on in Jaguar's Inkwell. I believe a new Amiga computer should be coming out soon, if it hasn't already. Neither product is really dead; they live on in the hearts of those who love them.
"His return is near..." Godzilla 2000 trailer
G Countdown: 20 days (www.godzillaoncube.com)
Slate made a pretty big mistake in their analysis of why TiVo is going to fail. They mostly chalk it up to that "first mover" disadvantage that kills good products.
... which is now dead.
Only, TiVo wasn't the first mover. Panasonic was with the Showstopper
Some of the other tidbits are accurate, such as TiVo's difficulty in explaining what a "PVR" is, but that would be true of ANY device in the market. However, they really aren't trying to compare it to a VCR. The ads have always touted features VCRs just don't have, like the "Trick Play" features that come with having a Live TV "buffer".
There's also one other thing that they neglect to mention (probably because it didn't fit in the author's view), when they mention that other machines will have DVR capabilities too.
TiVo SERVICE is what makes the PVR so popular with TiVo customers. The hardware is all fine and dandy, but it's that software that is easy to use, and the features in it that make it special. TiVo's "Season Passes" can follow programs around when they switch time slots on the same channel. No other competitior can do that, and it's a godsend!
Regardless, TiVo is doing a lot of things right. They MAY go under, but it won't be for any other reason than the mass market just not being ready for it yet.
WTF?
Seriously, mine went from $10 to $13. I was actually pretty pissed about that w/ the better hardware offerings from sonicblue.
This is not too surprising. Who would want to pay for services you can mimic with the software suite for the ATI All-in-Wonder cards? Not only that, but I could even burn them to a Video CD for playback on my favorite DVD player.
Well, the article is about as insightful as a "first-post" troll but I absolutely loved the BestBuy TiVo ad at the end.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
Or wait - maybe the funniest part is that this article is on Microsoft real estate - Microsoft who watched UltimateTV die. And isn't there something in the pipes for XBox in this respect?
Schnapple
1. New company introduces a great geek gadget idea
2. It only appeals to geeks, since the concept & product isn't refined yet
3. Big Companies see the good idea and have the $$$ to market it appropriately, and make it more user-friendly
4. By this time, there are many such products on the market, more refined w/cheaper price tags
5. The more technically savvy Younger Generation appreciates it, and buys it
This phenomenon is quite interesting. In regards to TiVo, it's sad that they have to be the guinea pigs, but it'll benefit consumers in the long run.
I just hope that the current TiVo owners don't get hosed because the company goes under.
( Especially the lifetime subscription holders)
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
Just because some first movers didn't last, doesn't mean all first movers don't last. Just because some second movers make it, doesn't mean all second movers will make it. It seems like this oversimplification ignores how a business operates and adjusts to changing competitive landscapes.
Give serendipity a chance.
Kind of funny for Slate, which is itself a failure, to be calling TiVo one.
Kind of like slashdot zealots with their "sell support" business model predicting MS's demise.
Did anyone else get this for the bottom-of-page ad?
-----
Advertisement
TiVo Series2 Digital Video Recorder with 60-Hour
$349.99
BestBuy.com
Free Shipping @ BestBuy.com
-----
Placing an ad for TiVo on an article about TiVo is good advertising. Placing an ad for TiVo on an article about TiVo's downfall, not so much.
Honestly, I think their number one reason for failure will be the price of their product, and their insistence on pushing loads of services with it.
I know a lot of people who have been interested in it, but can't justify the price. I myself would really enjoy one because my work schedule makes it very difficult for me to catch shows. However, I don't like being forced to buy into a bunch of other stuff just to buy the product, and for what it does, I can't justify the price in my mind.
It's really just an example of consumer preference dictating the market... clearly the product is not placed in a position where the public needs it.
People who don't have a TiVo belong to at least one of these 3 groups:
* Can't afford it
* Don't know what it is
* Don't watch TV.
I believe the second group is by far the largest. To support TiVo, educate everybody you know about it. Hey, it's Linux based, it's really cool, and they actually perform - GASP, SHOCK! - usability testing.
The article says the Newton died because Apple released it before "ironing out the kinks."
The difference with TiVo is that a TiVo WORKS and does its job well. There are few minor new features I wish my TiVos had (the ability to erase part of a saved show - erase from here, erase to here) but I've rarely had it fail to work a the job it's designed to do.
Why do I have the trepidation that if some other DVR wins the market, like if Echostart kills off the the DirectTiVo in the DirecTV merger, it'll be another case where "the choice of the market" can't do what the original could. "Coming soon! The ability to specify the recording of shows with your favorite actor or director! (like TiVo Wishlists).
Also the article bashing TiVo has a Best Buy ad on the bottom of the page touting the Series 2 TiVo. Nice touch.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
From what I understand, DirecTV purchased/licensed the TiVo technology and now directly provides service to customers. (Or something close to that.) They decided to lower the price. It makes sense, in a way... DirecTV + TiVo = Excellent Combo. That, and their competitors are marrying DVRS with DSS (or other) receivers.
What a load of FUD. What's his solution? Buy nothing? Use a VCR as a poor solution? Wait until 2005 when cable companies will supposedly rule the market with integrated PVR/cable box systems?
//e or a Apple //gs? Last time I checked, there wasn't a very big user base for those, either. Too bad he didn't pine on Betamax, the laserdisc, minidisc, or any of the other technologies many people still consider superior to their peers and still use today.
No matter what happens, I have had plenty of use from my TiVo and I can't imagine watching TV without it. I think I have watched live TV twice since I purchased my unit many moons ago.
Come on, Koerner, it's called technology. I had a C= 64, and an Amiga 1000. I used the heck out of them. Early adopter? What was I supposed to do, buy nothing? Or an Apple
We're tech savvy people. We will pay for good technology. We don't wait around for generations of a product to come out, since we know a better one is always going to come out. Technology goes stale. It's part of the game. I don't care if someone wants to hide in the corner, afraid to buy technology because they think like this guy. I'll be sitting there, with my latest geek toy, enjoying it until it's time for an upgrade.
I say let it die then. Anything that inconsequential that becomes that important is just plain bad for society.
I don't want a one device does it all solution, I just want the ability to interconnect them all. :(
I want the means to pipe the media to the inteface of my choice at the time of my choice, but I don't want a machine dedicated to controlling my multi-media hub. Hell I don't even want the internet to be required, which is why I just use my tivo and do not have a subscription.
My ati 9700pro does similar functions but not as well as the dedicated device and it takes over the machine
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
That's why you have 2CPU's?
But seriously,
2 64Bit CPU's
128bit PCI
2 Serial ATA channels
Enough ram to hold The Simpsons
MPEG encoder card
USB2
etc....
Which is probably what I'm looking at getting MID 2003.
And yes I do ocasionally write software that needs that kind of power (matrix inversions &co).
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
We have a DirecTivo combo box on our television with two inputs from the satelite, enabling view-one-record-another capability. It works great. As an added bonus, DirecTV just dropped the monthly fee from $10/mo to $5/mo for the Tivo service (which all comes on one bill).
I just can't get over the fact that they dropped my monthly fee without my having to request or otherwise prod them. It's that kind of thing that creates customer loyalty, to both Tivo and DirecTV.
Giddy Up.I have a DirecTivo. It's been reliable for more than a year, I have upgraded the harddrive (for $90 and a few hours labor) to give myself 110 hours of recording time (instead of 35), and they recently LOWERED the monthly fee.
:)
I have personally turned three people on to TiVo. All three now own DirecTivos. All three want me to upgrade their hard drives. All three were thrilled when the prices went down.
If they fail, it won't be due to bad pricing, bad service or poor quality, as far as I'm concerned. This is the second time that I've heard the "TiVo is dead" alarm (the first was about a year ago, when Microsoft was pushing UltimateTV) -- and it didn't die then.
I'm not worried.
While I'm certain that dedicated Tivo Slashdotters will jump all over the story, I wanted to focus on the premise that simply because it is first, it will fail. First movers suffer from the idea not being complete. Newton's handwriting recognition was dismal, making it impossible to rely on. Sure it was first, defined the category and created a model for others to improve upon, but it stunk. Tivo is really well thought out. It doesn't crash, it has a simple intuitive interface, and it is fun to use. They take an incedibly complicated concept and reduce it to a remote control driven interface. Mircosoft crashed and burned with their ultimateTV mis-adventure trying to copy Tivo. Tivo has some real first mover challenges since the concept is truly different. The authors disucssion about Recordable DVDs misses the point of Tivo's real value. Tivo makes it incredibly easy to record a bunch of shows and get to them. Anything with a removable medium means that you need to put the medium in to record. Tivo eliminates that. If I don't get to one of the 5 instances of Cheers that Tivo recorded for me, it prioritizes and overwrites. First movers have the challange of balancing the desire to be first to market with the need to get the product right. Tivo's product is right on.
"When a British media consultancy recently distributed some TiVos, 30 percent of the recipient households "never really got to grips with them"--or, in other words, they preferred to let the pricey boxes gather dust rather than waste another second figuring out the labyrinthine menus."
Now, what they didn't include in the article: "30 percent of the recipient households "did not own a television"-or, in other words, they didn't have anything to use the TiVo with."
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
Tivo did have some pretty evil marketing tactics - like updating software without users permission and removing features. Thats the sort of thing that makes me not want to buy a companies product. The media corporations dont want PVR's to be able to skip adverts, and record some premium content, so they would love to have them all chipped. Hopefully people will either build their own PVR or buy dodgy ones made in china etc that didnt have any restrictions (like DVD players). Although this is unlikely to happen. Whats most likely is that cable/digital/satelite providers will also provide PVRs built into their decoder boxes (well they already do) but make sure that they have control of what you can and cant record and do (they already do that too) with all these PVRs being given away free with subscriptions, they will saturate the market and we will all be stuck with peices of shit that dont do what we want.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Comet are doing Tivos for £150 on their web site now. £350 for a tivo and lifetime sub is pretty reasonable I reckon.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
They mentioned laziness getting in the way of the introduction of a new and useful technology. Getting used to a Tivo or any PVR device and /adapting/ to the way it wants you to watch TV can be unsettling and outright difficult at first. After about two weeks, I /almost/ have it down. You have to let go of old ways and habits to properly use the device and it isn't easy.
For example, last Saturday morning, I realized after a while that I was waiting on starting the day (signified by the morning shower) because I was waiting for something on TV. Then I realized the Replay was there and knew I could take the shower. And even with that adjustment I didn't even think about pause. I treated it like a VCR.
Other things have happened over the two weeks so far, from poor picture quality and artifacting at first, to the painful realization that schedules are brought down from local cable, so when I wanted to tape "Firefly", my local station hadn't updated their listings and instead I got "John Doe". I was annoyed, but dealt with it. The less nerdy user though would probably be pretty peeved.
Anyway, while the Slate painted a poor picture of Tivo, I think they'll do well. Yes, it's an innovation that might not be completely ironed out yet, but it's got such a cult following already that it'll be hard to completely unseat. Besides, last I checked, Amiga users were some of the most rabid and devoted to their platform users this side of Linux. "Apathy is the spice of life."
"If the good lord had intended us to walk, he wouldn't have invented roller skates." -Willy Wonka
You'll understand why this isn't a plug for MS, but an unbiased article on a site that just happens to be owned by MS.
And when you grow up and stop assuming everyone who is even mildly critical of your employer^H^H^H^H^H^H favorite software vendor isn't necessarilly a troll, perhaps you'll be able to ponder larger pictures and marketing strategies that go beyond a particlar brand item v. another to encompass an attempt at taking over an entire market v. another.
Hint: Microsoft's push toward DRM and Palladium has a lot more to gain by taking over the TiVo market than it does by taking over the playstation market. Why? Tivo is based upon open, non-DRM hardware and an open, GPLed operating system, while playstation is itself a proprietary player and, while it is a competitor, it does not stand in the way of Microsoft's DRM and Palladium strategies, despite having a GNU/Linux kit available for hobbiests. TiVo, on the other hand, as a widely adopted PVR that does use standard PC parts and a free operating system, does represent not only a potential barrier to Microsoft's DRM-and-Palladium-Ueber-Alles strategy, it has two other factors which the PS lacks:
1) Potentially a much larger marketplace than PS (nearly every household has a VCR, while many fewer have game consoles of any kind)
2) A legitimate competitor to whome consumers will flock if given a choice between that and a DRM/Palladium crippled alternative.
Many informed people believe the X-Box may well be a Palladium trial balloon and a test bed for emerging Microsoft DRM technology. If true, its use and penetration of the game console market is incidental compared to those qualities and the value they represent to Microsoft, and in that light it becomes clear that TiVo is a much more potent threat to Microsoft's plans than the playstation is likely to ever become. In which case, throwing a bone to the PS in an attempt to appear "neutral" (which is hardly likely of a Microsoft publication, any more than Linux Weekly is neutral when it posts a link to a pro-Linux article. Even more telling, this article was written by a Microsoft author, not merely linked to by a Microsoft site) costs them nothing in the persuit of their larger strategy.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Amiga is dead? *plugs ears* lalalala I can't hear you
slashdot!=valid HTML
Doncha just hate to see good sound products have to struggle slowly up the market acceptance curve while various cruddy products get to be a lot more ubiquitous than they deserve? I do.
I own 2 TiVo's that I've upgraded so combined they hold about one third of terabyte of disk space. I love `em. My wife loves `em. I didn't mind shelling out the $500 for 2 lifetime subscriptions. I find the interface simple and intuitive. There are only minor inconveniences, like the plus and minus few minute automatic buffers on the ends of shows colliding in an non-intelligent way when shows on the same channel and type (eg, marathon sessions of back to back episodes).
I think you find astounding satisfaction with TiVo's from their owners.
At the same time, people outside the geek community are generally unaware of the entire concept of digital PVR and have never heard of a TiVo.
Word of mouth advertising is precious, but slow. It will be really interesting to see if TiVo gets enough growth in its customer base to bring it into profitability or (more likely) to where it gets bought out by some M&A hungry firm and the techy founders can retire wealthy and stop worrying about important but boring business issues. They desperately lack a big general advertising push. OTOH, one of the big selling points, speeding through commercials at 20x or 60x seems like it might raise a few eyebrows in the same advertising community!
I'm curious if TiVo's growth rate is increasing, whether there is any acceleration in TiVo's market.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You heard me. Canada may not be as big a market as the USA, but it also takes a smaller amount of advertising and such to launch a product, and if it takes off in canada, then there will be many articles that are different from the one on slate that are pro-tivo, which help it sell. Also canada tends to be a country that enjoys neato gadgets.
how long has tivo been released in the USA and not canada? long enough to not be successful.
I am sorry, but this is nothing but Microsoft's attempt at getting Tivo's market share. The people at Tivo are innovative and open to people modding their product.
I am the proud owner of a TIVO 2 and look forward to the continued success of Tivo
Man, I wish there were a way to comment on the random quotes at the bottom of the page. Today's is really ignorant:
"vuja de: The feeling that you've *never*, *ever* been in this situation before. "
Ummm, actually that's called "jamais vu", and it is a real thing that can happen to people.
This is all similar to broadband. For example, when suggesting that my mom dump dialup in favor of broadband (since it became available in her area), she said "I don't need it, and I don't know how to use it -- it'll just be a worthless expense".
I ended up convincing her to get it, and now she loves it and completely sees the value in it.
Now she complains about how busy she is and how she can't watch her favorite shows anymore. I told her about the TiVo, and she said the same thing as she did about broadband..
People just don't see the value in something like this until they actually use it.
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler
For the first year I had it, I really loved my Tivo. Lately though, I've realized the service just isn't growing like it could. My AudioStation, for example, originally shipped as a simple network MP3 player. Now it has a web interface, a programmers API and the ability to play many other formats. Tivo has the ability to do the same things, but instead, it's upgrades only add a few features that you really have to look for. Even with the new hardware (series 2) you get a couple of usb ports and a little more drive space.
- What about HDTV support?
- What about multiple TVs (If I buy another Tivo, I have to move to the room that recorded the show to watch it)?
- What about interfacing with my cable box so I don't have to build an 'IR Tent'?
- What about dual tuners on the more expensive models?
They could do so much with this technology... but they don't. I think if you ask around, most people who love Tivo aren't really in love with the brand as much as the PVR technology in general. If someone else comes up with the features, users will move on.Comment removed based on user account deletion
I want a tivo that act's exaclty like my VCR.. something I can set the time on from the remote, set what channel and time to record and for an added neato but not required... to label it.
that's it.... no requirement for it to dial home or talk to the master server. TiVo is great, but if I dont want to subscribe to the service then I should have the ability to operate it... COMPLETELY! so Tivo... update the software so I can set the clock myself and I'll buy one.
Until the product is able to be permanently seperated from the company I wont touch it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well?
Is it possible to get one of these and have it work with commercial skipping and saving shows (recording starting at a time you choose) and not pay the $12.50/mth fee? It doesn't seem worth it to pay for show listings and to have them follow my tv watching habits. Actually all I want is the tv pausing feature, is there anything that just does that?
> The Amiga suffered from an identity
> crisis that the company never solved. Was
> it a gaming machine? People were happy
> enough with their Ataris. A music synthesizer?
The amiga was hugely popular in Europe and Australia. I should know, I grew up in Australia and spent a lot of time with people using these in Europe.
The amiga didn't take off in the US for a variety of reasons, probably largely marketing related.
Last year TiVo spent almost nothing on advertising, and it's interesting why:
It turns out that MS was pumping millions into Ultimate TV advertising, and enthused customers were flocking to Circuit City and Good Guys, only to be told that they'd have to also get a satellite dish and service, regardless of what they already had.
Seeing their frustration, salespeople show them the TiVo, which works with whatever service they already have. Every dollar spent by Microsoft generated more TiVo revenue than UTV revenue...
Kevin Fox
IANAL, but isn't Microsoft engaging in illegal monopolistic activity when they enter a market (PVR's ) outside of their traditional business (software) with a product that is sold at or below cost? The idea is that a cash-rich company like MS could corner almost any market they choose by absorbing losses, crushing the competition, then holding customers hostage once the competition is gone. The Xbox is another example of this behavior, except that Sony and Nintendo appear just as willing to accept losses on their game systems and recoup the profits in software (game) sales.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
I have happily used my Series 1 Sony-branded TiVo for the past two years, and have generated extra $ for them by wowing friends who just had to have one too. And not just folks who dream in binary.
This article seems to predicate TiVo's demise on the assumption that their products will stagnate. On the contrary, I think they've been playing a smart game, and I expect them to continue to do so. Remember ReplayTV? They were crushed under an avalanche of lawsuits. TiVo intentionally omitted the controversial features (automatic commercial skip, video export) and sidestepped the avalanche. I have little doubt that when the time is right, they'll be offering DVD burning for long-term archiving.
Salon writes that consumers won't be convinced to replace their existing VCRs with TiVos. That is very short-sighted. The only convincing people need to buy TiVo, in my experience is to watch a program or two on it. You can just about watch the puddle of drool forming. What better marketing is there than word-of-mouth? And TiVo doesn't replace my VCR--it archives recordings from my TiVo now. To suggest, as this article did, that the lazy American consumer is going to start swapping recordable DVDs to record programs instead of using the couch-potato friendly, unattended TiVo solution is laughable. The argument that TiVo is too difficult to set up and maintain has been used before on PCs, and it's true, but that hasn't stopped PCs from peppering about half of US households.
You can pry my TiVo remote out of my cold, dead fingers! Uh-oh, I'm starting to sound like those Amiga guys...
/. peeve #274: The word is neither "walla" nor "whala", it's voila. Phonics is a tool of the devil.
Slate, a Microsoft magazine, says Tivo (a personal video recorder) will fail. Then they say that the X-box (a Microsoft toy) will rule the pvr world. Then, at the bottom of their site, have a kickback link for a Tivo at BestBuy. Now that's what I call journalism.
The middle mind speaks!
The article states :
The company is pursuing partnerships with cable and satellite providers that hope to incorporate DVR technology into their hardware. People prefer getting one fat bill from their cable company to sending a monthly check to some DVR company in Silicon Valley.
In fact they already have some of these in place. Directv (as of my last statement) has taken over operation of DirectTV- Tivo (and lowered the monthly rate). I see this as a win-win for me. If Tivo continues to operate, I get to enjoy upgrades as they become available, and if they fail, I still presumably have DirectTv to provide me with the program listings, and at a paltry 5.00/month I'll be a customer for life.
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
They're not interested in producing their own box. They might be interested in a product badged with their own brand though. No reason that shouldn't actually be a Tivo.
Note that Tivo is really the subscription service. The boxes themselves are made by Sony, Thompson, Phillips etc.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
This phenomenon is well-documented in Clayton Christensen's book The Innovator's Dilemma. It's an interesting read.
LinuxWorld Tried to save it, but the value of va software stocks are still falling and falling. With the dow jones now nearly 7000, we can see that linux is entirely responsible for this.
When we attack iraq the stock market will crash below 5000, and VA software will be giving away its shares for free!
The point isn't that PVR will fail -- just that the long term prognistics for this company aren't good.
I bought a PVR card for a pc. It sucks, the software is no good. But the card was $50. There's no reason why the software couldn't be good -- it just isn't. There are 3rd party apps that tie into tv listings just like TiVo does.
TiVo is nice, and they make it work, but you pay an awful lot for the storage space. TiVo is vulnerable to pressure from the big media companies, too, in a way that other solutions won't be. And I have to say that it's very nice to be able to record to Divx files that can be saved or shared.
What bullshit. Commodore 64 as a market example? Apple beat Commmodore to the market for the first Personal Computers, although there are probably technicalities for various others, but Apple was the big first PC, then Commodore one-upped them, then IBM.
But increasing processor performance won't kill TiVo or open the door. Better hard disk space is a commodity advantage to TiVo and its competitors
Commodity PCs will kill TiVo. Slate, leave this to Salon for mass-market nontechie tech articles.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
I particularly liked the ad for a tivo i got at the bottom of a page predicting tivo's demise.
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
Name recognition is not everything ... and if the name is valuable, someone with a better business model can always buy it.
It wasn't long ago people were piling obscene
amounts of moneys on start ups because they might be the next microsoft. Now this joker (and I've heard it elsewhere lately) is saying that start ups are bad because they don't have the wisdom to compete in the big bad marketplace. Did all companies just spring forth from one big meta-company called Adam and Eve LLC while all of the start ups have failed?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OK, maybe I'm a little biased. I was a happy TiVo owner for almost a year -- until the modem broked. TiVo only offered a 60 or 90 day warranty, so I would have had to send them the box, wait a few weeks, and pay them at least $99 to repair it.
So I bought an Ultimate TV. Since MSFT was shutting down the division, you could get them for $99 including the dish and installation.
Plus, with the UltimateTV, I can record 2 shows at once, in original quality(including Dolby Digital).
The reason I say it should die is their service policy. The failing modem is an extremely common problem with the units (just read any TiVo board), and they fail to recognize it.
TiVo has a far superior and faster interface. Their service releases give great new and timesaving features, and they listen to user feedback and do usability. If it weren't for their lousy service, I would be their biggest advocate.
It's it's most basic ability. You're missing 90% of it's functionality if you don't subscribe to the schedule service. Since the sub is only £200 for the lifetime of the box, it's hardly a big deal.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Guys, it's Slate... I guess their corporate master's bum still burns from the failure of *their own* commercial PVR system...
Don't I recall seeing several PVR's that use branded Tivo's (Tivo inside).
I though Tivo was selling licenses to their software and architecture- which is something Amiga and Apple never did.
There is a lot to be said in the statement that no one wants an all-in-one box on their TV. I don't care if the PS2 or Xbox record videos- they don't look like the components I like to stack next to the TV. All-in-one boxes simply don't sell well because people a- don't want to pay for it all at once and b- perceive quality in specialized components.
ReplayTV's latest units (the 4000 and 4500 series) take care of this. You connect them all to your home Ethernet and you can watch shows in the bedroom that you recorded in the living room. They even have enough CPU now to be streaming one show while you record another.
Replay has also added other features that TIVO doesn't have, like web-based scheduling without compromising the security of your home network, photo viewing and sending shows across the net.
Sorry to be such a blatant shill, but I've owned a ReplayTV for about 3 years now, and I think they're great. In many ways I think they are much nicer than TIVO. (I don't own stock in SonicBlue or even know anyone who works for them).
In the UK, that's £200. I don't know what it is in the US.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Where are all of TiVo's competitors? I don't see them. TiVo is the only company that offers what they offer in so far as I've seen.
They have a good name associated in the public's mind with excellence. Anyone who owns a TiVo will tell you its great. They also have excellent customer relations; refusing to cave in to he MPAA's demands and standing up for their customer's right to skip commercials endeared them to their customers.
I don't see TiVo failing anytime soon. Yes, they haven't made a profit...yet. Being realistic, its only a matter of time before such devices begin to become common-place. They'll be sold with TV's standard and in computers. And as that starts to hapen, TiVo will be the one who's products will be used for it. Why TiVo as opposed to MS' products? Because TiVo has a name associated with excellence, and a good reputation.
There is no such thing as first-comers disadvantage. Quite the opposite, there's a finder's reward for the company that comes up with an innovative and original idea or product. Eidos sold 30-million copies of Tomb Raider games (from their introduction till today) off of such a finder's reward, because no one else had a product which even compared.
There is, however, such a thing as a startup disadvantage, because you have nothing to fall back on and have to claw your way up from the bottom. TiVo may be an upstart, but they have a viable business model which will rake in plenty of money soon enough.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
...that Sony or DirecTv would buy TiVo before it goes under. Sony could easily prop it up and any patents and intellectual property would be valuable to an electronics maker like Sony.
Side (but relevant) note, I just got a notice from DirecTv saying they are now "responsible" for my TiVo service, not TiVo. I have a lifetime with TiVo for my "Direct Tivo" reciever and I was wondering if this was the beginnings of a shift in TiVo to outsource managment of services to the vendors who resell their stuff to reduce the cost of doing biz for them (TiVo). Could be...
-s
Sure, you can cobble together enough hardware and make a digital video recorder but then you've got a cobbled together hunk of hardware.
The TiVo is in a nice form factor, very living room friendly. The interface is both simple and efficient, something that most PC DVR programs have yet to crack. And it's a dedicated machine, it doesn't drop frames, it doesn't cut sound, it just works.
A computer is very versatile but that flexibility has its own costs, ease of use being one of the biggest.
IANAL, but isn't Microsoft engaging in illegal monopolistic activity when they enter a market (PVR's ) outside of their traditional business (software) with a product that is sold at or below cost? The idea is that a cash-rich company like MS could corner almost any market they choose by absorbing losses, crushing the competition, then holding customers hostage once the competition is gone. The Xbox is another example of this behavior, except that Sony and Nintendo appear just as willing to accept losses on their game systems and recoup the profits in software (game) sales.
IANAL either, but no, they're not. Leveraging a monopoly in another market is illegal. Using cash from a monopoly to shore up your product in another market is not.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
I would have a TiVo, except that I flat out REFUSE to subscribe to anything. I dont even like that I cant own an internet connection, I just deal with it. I would have gotten a replay, but they were like $700.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I just learned that Microsoft is deep inside the DVR/PVR market! Help, they are everyware! Someone needs to stop them! Help! Help! Help!
/me jumps out of the wagon
Inflammatory words, but do you think that TiVo could die because it is big media's whore? Because they aren't going to engage in commercial skip, they are never going to be first-movers in providing features that their media masters may frown on. Instead, they'll wait to after other manufacturers have gone through the pain to prove something legal, and then, maybe, jump on it.
Right now, TiVo is my friend. But I wonder in the future if the best they'll provide is a digital black box to lock my media inside.
Whenever my 2 year old gets ahold of the peanut-shaped TiVo remote control, she has no problem navigating the menu to watch her beloved "puppy" (child shows). She can't even talk yet, but is able to effectively use the TiVo!
Needless to say, I hope the author of the article is wrong.
Check your facts, man. Replay is alive and kicking at SonicBlue and in fact just released a new crop of players (the 4500 series).
The funniest thing about this is TiVo wasn't even first. ReplayTV was first with a DVR to market, long before TiVo. And yes, I am a TiVo owner.... long live TiVo!
It's easy to take a look at the disadvantages or the odds of something and paint a grim picture. I think the moon landing is a good example. After factoring in all the problems with going to the moon (radiation, fuel, impact with small objects, equipment failure, all the math that had to be correct, etc) the odds of safely landing a man on the moon were worse than 1:1000. Yet, somehow, gee, we did it.
I don't really understand why humans overweigh negatives. Bizarre rationalizations show up. "I dunno... If I take this new job that pays me 20% more, I may have to drive further to work." I'm not immune to this. I don't like my job, yet I won't quit because "Id miss my friends."
With that said, I don't find this article very interesting. They're using the "History always repeats itself" method of persuasion. They're omitting other examples like.. oh... Nintendo. McDonald's. Even Walmart, at least in a sense.
Oh well.
Currently TiVO Does offer Dual Tuners, but only in the Direct TV models. The problem with building a dual tuner SA (Stand alone) TiVO is, processor speed (Encoding and Decoding each stream, a DTiVO only has to decode what you are watching, it just copies the DTV mpeg stream), and the more difficult, how are you going to control both inputs to two identical cable boxes? IR Blasters won't work, the only way they can really do it would be to intergrate into the cable box, but since Cable companies aren't universal in their formats, you are kinda screwed. Also, they do make a Hack for controling your cable box using a serial connection (if your cable box controls it).
I love my TiVO (I own 3 of them), and will never watch live TV Again (Except sports). TiVO has really and honestly changed my viewing habits, and the habits of 3 other people I convinced.
That was true of the Series 1 boxes, but TiVo is self-producing (or at least self-branding) some of the Series 2 ones.
Or am I mis-interpreting things? Let me know - I'd like to know if I should buy one or not. Thanks!
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
Anyone notice the Tivo add for Best Buy at the end of the article? "This product really sucks and is going to die soon. Anyone want to buy one? I guess that's what happens when you let computers determine what ads to place where....
I just saw an ad for one of the 2nd-gen DVD TV recorders, and saw that one (Phillips?) would save 40-hours onto a hard drive, and you could burn the rest off to DVD. $700, IIRC. Anyone have one of these?
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
I just installed a DirecTiVo system, replacing my cable TV system. I'm move the current TiVo box to my vacation home.
TiVo is so elegant: easy to use - in fact trivial. With the satellite system it's a no-brainer natural.
I wnt it for radio also.
When my TiVo was down for a week while I was upgrading it (120G drive and tivoweb!), my roomate and his girlfriend would hound me daily asking when the TiVo would work again...
TiVo will fail because most people cannot understand what it it.
Most people fail to understand that what they see on the TV screen does not control what their VCR records.
Most people do not understand that when they dial the phone, a bunch of computers are digitizing their voice and routing it around, converting back to sound, and playing to the person they called.
Most people do not understand why the refridgerator gets cold inside.
Most people do not understand that modern "Analog" clocks are also digital.
Most people have no idea how a thermus knows when to stay hot and when to stay cold.
Most people in places where snow is uncommon do not understand that it makes the roads slick.
Most people pay for expensive water when it is free at water fountains everywhere.
Most people do not understand that the Coke in the can costs less then the can itself.
Most people don't understand what is wrong with Microsoft software.
Most people don't understand the difference between a surge protector and an outlet strip.
Most people (in the USA) don't vote.
Most people don't understand that silica is not edible.
Most people don't understand that they should not touch hot surfaces.
Most people don't understand that coffee is served hot, unless the word "iced" appears in front of it.
Most people don't understand the game of chess.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
They already need to sell 10 games per console sold to break a profit. Who the hell has bought 10 games for ANY console? I own nearly every console out there and the average amount of games ive bought for each is right around 6.. except for the NES, where I owned nearly 30.
Cost me $149 with professional installation then less than cable monthly.
How can you beat that for value?
Couldn't live without Tivo now.
As for TiVo, they just didn't and don't have any particularly distinguished technology. DVRs had been around in research labs and as prototypes for a decade before TiVo came out. TiVo was simply the first to market at the point when disks and processors became cheap enough. DVRs are a technologically simple commodity consumer item, and that implies very tiny profit margins that only the large manufacturers can survive on. TiVo's attempts to generate revenue by selling subscriptions didn't help either: consumers know that program schedules already effectively free and that paying $12/month (or whatever it is) is way too expensive.
Jeez louise, people.
I can make my own TIVO using Linux, a bt848 style video capture card, and any number of video capture drivers/software available in Linux. Build a snazzy web based front end to schedule your recordings, and off you go!
The only advantage Tivo has is it skips advertisements (or so I hear).
Never discount the power of do-it-yourself.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Here's an excerpt describing the Markle grant: "This Fellows program is designed to support the next generation of public intellectuals who foster fresh ideas and contribute to the national and international dialogue on these issues."
The end of TiVo is worthy of national and international dialogue?
Whatever.
Microsoft? Someone? They're going to build it. Here's my picture of it.
The most elemental function is that of a DVR. It wraps a user interface around the whole home television experience. And once you control the user interface... (points over to The Book of Microsoft)
Now, people have a computer that, for the first time, is running 24x7 and they don't shut it off. They don't turn their DVRs off when they are done watching television. It is always on. All television commands (record this, channel up, etc) are received by the DVR, and then forwarded to other devices (DSS receiver) as needed.
Now, this DVR has a broadband input. How can we sell software and services? Answer: Game Console.
A game console you know has to have enough computing power (or at least graphics processing) to be pretty advanced. Add a decent hard drive. Know what the next step is?
Games-on-demand. Think Yahoo! Games on Demand. I actually tried this service, and I liked it. For $15 (I cancelled immediately after subscribing so I'd just have 30 days server), I am able to play 15 games up to a month.
How does it work? It downloads a good bulk of the game onto my local hard drive. Then, my hard drive works like a cacheing filesystem in front of an NFS filesystem. That is, the game runs off of the local hard drive cache, and anything not in the local cache is downloaded from the central server and placed in my local cache. For all my game knows, it is running off of the CD or a real filesystem on a real hard drive.
This means more revenue because now you don't have to trouble with the distribution of software over the shelves. Microsoft (or X company) is going to take off where the music industry has failed... online software distribution or rental, and for a nice profit.
You might add in some tangents. Video on demand is somewhat interesting. There could be a good market there... if done correctly. Various lifestyle 'services' (local weather maps available at the touch of a few buttons).
Of course, remember that this is all in a very friendly menu system of a video computing device... not a personal computer. It is wrapped up with a bow on top for the masses who want to play a game or watch tv, but not have to manage or figure out a personal computer.
So, I'll argue that TiVo could be at a disadvantage being a first mover. It has pioneered the DVR space. The DVR space is the very KEY to getting people to put an operating system on their television set. The problem is that TiVo doesn't have the muscle to fully leverage that position. (And why Microsoft competes in that territory.)
Yes, I was aware of this development, but I didn't want to stray too far in my post. I suppose I should have been more specific than "crushed"--outside of geekdom, Replay/SonicBlue has far less mindshare and marketshare than TiVo. I was aware of Replay when I was making my initial purchase, but especially with Sony making their own branded units, I liked TiVo's chances of survival better than Replay's. Without a surviving entitity to conveniently obtain program listings, DVRs become a lot less useful. This seems to point to a first-mover _advantage_. I like to see competition, but I couldn't justify betting on the loose cannon. These new players are nice units though!
/. peeve #274: The word is neither "walla" nor "whala", it's voila. Phonics is a tool of the devil.
Huh?
How would they ban VCRsfor instance? There must be millions of them in the US. That's just a media executives pipe dream. Wouldn't worry about it.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I bought my parents a Directv/Tivo combo unit last christmas, and they fall into the "could never do without it" category now.
I'll be getting a Tivo as soon as the Series 2 unix are out for DirecTV -- and they will be soon. You can already pre-order the Hughes model at many Circuit City stores for around $189 with a $50 rebate for new subscribers.
DirecTV and Tivo have a good thing going apparently. DirecTV will handle all the Tivo billing, and if you purchase DirecTV's best "premium choice"
Yes, the biggest difference between Tivo and Replay seems to have been marketing. Tivo has always done a far better job of it.
I bought the lifetime subscription for $199 on sale and folks, its worth every penny. People, if you don't have a Tivo, you CANNOT understand what all the fuss is about. Trust us. Get one. It Is Worth It. The lame ads about pausing live TV are stupid. TiVo is about sitting down once to program the thing - takes an hour pushing buttons on a simple menu - and then (1) you come home to things you want to watch (2) that you can watch whenever you want to (3) without commercials or (4) without worrying about setting up the programming for next week's stuff. This is FUN. TiVo mentally changes what you think about how to watch TV. You have to be nuts to channel surf or watch commercials after using a Tivo for just one week. Even my WIFE is sold on the TiVo. Just get one, you'll see!!!
Why does Tivo have to be such a big company? Why can they (or someone else) not be a success with a user base of around 500,000? -- Where are all their costs? Why can't companies scale nowdays? Why do companies need HUGE market numbers to show a profit? I guess the same could be said for the death of the "mom and pop" and mid-sized ISP's -- everyone that is not the size of a fortune 500 company can't compete? Where is this economy going that only the big dogs can run in the park. Hell -- inderectlly this even relates to "companies" like Eazel that require 30+ million just to produce a file browser? -- Whats up with that?
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
"Whore?" My words were inflammatory? Geez.
I see a lot of speculation here, and I remain unconvinced. I see it as a strength that TiVo knows how to be more diplomatic with the powerful media companies. We've seen them buy legislation--witness the DMCA.
I can still fast-forward commercials very effectively. And as long as I have a video-out, I'll archive anything I want for my personal use. If this becomes technically infeasible or illegal with future iterations of TiVo hardware, I'm not buying. We all get to vote with our wallets, and occassionally with a ballot.
/. peeve #274: The word is neither "walla" nor "whala", it's voila. Phonics is a tool of the devil.
The author of the article is saying, as far as I can tell, that TiVo as a company will fail because their hardware is in the market too soon. The author has failed to understand some basics of the TiVo business model.
First, licensing is not something that may save TiVo, it is one of the main focuses of their business. With partnerships with Sony, AT&T and DirecTV, and the technology in use in America, Asia and Europe, TiVo is well positioned to benefit from the continued rollout of this technology, not suffer from competition.
TiVo doesn't really make and sell the hardware, so they are not like the hardware based companies (Apple, Commodore) they are compared to in the article. Yes, they do subsidize the stand alone units, but standalone units (and competing standalone units like XBOX) are destined for the garbage heap. Integrating the technology into set top boxes (satellite/cable) and letting the service providers subsidize/support the equipment is the model that will succeed. This completely invalidates the authors arguments of complicated setup and being hard to sell in a retail establishment.
TiVo plays nicely with content providers. TiVo has gone out of their way to try to stay on the good side of the studio's IP lawyers. The clearest example is that it takes some intelligence to turn on 30-second skip; it is not enabled by default from the factory.
TiVo actively pursues other revenue sources. TiVo is using its service to deliver targeted advertising (Best Buy, Lexus).
Now, I am not saying that TiVo as a company will succeed in its current form (my crystal ball is at the cleaners), but if it fails it is not going to be because of some mythical disadvantage from being in the market first.
*BSD is.
sulli
RTFJ.
The people that find a Tivo "difficult to setup and maintain" are complete morons that must scrape their knuckles on the ground while they walk.
Ad hominem insults such as the one you just made are sometimes insulting to the disabled. Not all people who walk on their knuckles are complete morons. Some people are just born without legs.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've been trying to do this for the past few months (I already have DirecTV service), but it seems that the first generation ones are out of production. I don't want to pay $400 to get a refurbished one, and the leading model, made by Philips, won't get the version 2 facelift: Philips is getting out of consumer electronics.
I don't even care about the watch-two-things part: most TV is on when I'm not around, and I would love to be able to pause sports and zip through commercials. I've thought about plain TiVo in addition to my DirecTV service, but that's higher fees, double-dip compression, and I really want the integration into the single unit.
In short, the quest for a reasonably priced, new DirecTiVo unit for someone who already has DTV service is on hold until the next generation comes out, and I have no idea when that will be. Bah!
If you're concerned about them "following your tv watching habits" (it's anonymously aggregated data), you can opt out of it at no extra charge or anything...
You can buy a lifetime subscription for $250 (life of the TiVo, not your life) if that's the only issue. It does make it a bit expensive, but still cheaper than replay I think...
Ain't that the truth. My wife is much the same way, and she loves our TiVo. So much so, in fact, that *SHE* encouraged *ME* to undertake a hard drive upgrade. Which, incidentally, was rediculously easy. I sure hope TiVo doesn't die, I've got stock. I don't see how it can, everybody I know who I've convinced to get one loves it. Heck, you know you're an addict when you find yourself trying to pause and rewind real life. Their biggest problem is lack of public understanding on why they need one.
I don't see any future for a TiVo or similar as a separate unit, to be honest. It seems to make sense to integrate the TiVo like device and the set top box for your cable/satellite/digital terrestrial service into one machine. For one thing, I don't see the point of receiving separate program information from TiVo when a digital television service is already sending an electronic program guide. For another, there is a certain amount of redundancy in the hardware (MPEG-2 decoding etc) and money can be saved by building one box only. For a third thing, a common user interface for the STB and the PVR is surely a good thing. (Hopefully this can be DVB-MHP based, and common to all networks, too). Finally, your cable or satellite provider already has a billing system with which to charge you a monthly fee, and money can be saved by getting rid of the duplication. (It may be easier to persuade people to pay a few dollars extra for "deluxe" satellite service that includes a PVR than to get them to pay money to a different company too).
BSkyB in the UK already does this. I suspect other providers do too.
Michael.
I just got digital cable with the PVR capability. Time Warner is using the Explorer 8000 from Scientific Atlanta.
I had wanted a Tivo but had never got around to buying one. I had been hoping to see the functionality get integrated into the cable box.
From what I hear, the Tivo software is definitely better. The Explorer 8000 has some quirks. You can set it up to record all episodes of something from the interactive guide. At the end of watching the episode, you get asked if you want to delete the show. You do (since you watched it) and it deletes the scheduled recordings of the other episodes! Definitely not intuitive!
It does not have the thumbs up/down or some of the other nice Tivo features.
The advantages are:
1. The digital cable box rental is $5.95 per month. This is the same as regular digital cable boxes.
2. The PVR service is $10 per month (a little cheaper than Tivo).
3. There is no $299+ outlay for the box. If it dies, Time Warner replaces it. Yes, you would lose what you had taped.
4. No need to phone or ethernet hookup. The Guide is pulled in over the already attached cable connection.
While I am sure Tivo is better in many ways, I am happy with my digital cable box with PVR functionality.
I just got digital cable with the PVR capability. Time Warner is using the Explorer 8000 from Scientific Atlanta. I had wanted a Tivo but had never got around to buying one. I had been hoping to see the functionality get integrated into the cable box. When they came out in my area, I ordered one.
From what I hear, the Tivo software is definitely better. The Explorer 8000 has some quirks. You can set it up to record all episodes of something from the interactive guide. At the end of watching the episode, you get asked if you want to delete the show. You do (since you watched it) and it deletes the scheduled recordings of the other episodes! Definitely not intuitive!
It does not have the thumbs up/down or some of the other nice Tivo features.
The advantages are:
1. The digital cable box rental is $5.95 per month. This is the same as regular digital cable boxes.
2. The PVR service is $10 per month (a little cheaper than Tivo).
3. There is no $299+ outlay for the box. If it dies, Time Warner replaces it. Yes, you would lose what you had taped.
4. No need to phone or ethernet hookup. The Guide is pulled in over the already attached cable connection.
While I am sure Tivo is better in many ways, I am happy with my digital cable box with PVR functionality.
From the article: how does a Best Buy salesman explain the difference in 25 words or less, especially with inexpensive DVD recorders about to the hit the market?
1) You'll the capacity for ninetyeight *hours* of programming at medium quality once you drop in an extra seventy dollar hardrive.
2) You'll never have to remeber to swap another tape in your VCR. Ever.
3) Seasons Pass.
I'm sure you kind folks can think up your own.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
Honestly, I don't think that is correct. Bell telephone wasn't the first phone company? After all, the phone was invented by him, was it not?
Anyway, I don't think I have been educated in telephone history enough to *definitely* say that, but to me it makes sense, considering that the phone system became so large. Remember a time when all of the US was under one corporate system? A one united Bell umbrella... one that they had to be chopped into "baby bells" to maintain competetiveness.
I just don't think that the comparison is correct. But then again, at one time there were over 200 motorcycle manufacturers in the USA.
Please shed some light on this one.
I can see things moving in the service, hosted direction. Rather than buy a box that wll be obsolete in 6-12 months, I'd much rather subscribe to a service. I pay $20/mo to the cable company or whoever and they store all the shows I want on their side and send them over to me on demand. This wouldn't even need that much storage since they only need to store each show one.
The real issues are bandwidth and legal. While legally a single person can record most OTA stuff for private, personal use, I doubt a company could do that and serve up shows for anyone. And just looking at replay tv sharing it takes like 4 hours for a 30 minute show to download, but as bandwidth to the home become faster and more ubiquitous... watch out!
It really would be your own personal tv channel. Simply pay the networks for what you do watch, maybe they'll even get rid of the commercials.
Same goes for software. I'd much rather subscribe to get the the latest and greatest versions of any software I want automatically available on my desktop. I'm still a little wary of getting rid of my PC's, but that'll probably happen to some extent too as the home pc becomes "a service"
When you pry it from my cold, dead hands
You have absolutely no idea of how a Tivo works.
The Tivo knows when everything is on. I just tell it I want a season pass to Farscape. *It* schedules the recording of the whole series. I thumbs up some music shows, it starts recording them and other music shows as suggestions.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
This is not a troll.
Why PAT for PVR functionality when you can do it for free, without any restrictions imposed upon your use?
Jeez.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I'm just about to upgrade mine as well. I'm looking about for some quiet 120Gb drives.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Hence the reason I bought a DirecTivo (DirecTV reveiver and Tivo in one box which pulls schedule over sat and has a single common interface).
Greg Whalin
greg@whalin.com
This is just one example of how Microsoft is trying to stomp out the premier competitor to it's own XBox, the Amiga, by calling it a failure before the battle is over.
Hey xbox - you may have a 1000 times bigger HD than my Amiga, but at least I've got a PCMCIA II slot to upgrade with!!!!! I just need to start writing those drivers for it.....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The TurboExpress, which was a portable version of NEC's TG16.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The first Amiga version was overpriced compared to the competition, specifically the Atart 520ST, which was around $500-$1000 cheaper for the computer, drive, an extra 256KB memory, and monitor-and I think Atari even threw in a printer for free. Hard to justify an Amiga when you can get something similar for alot less.
I remember reading an article in RUN Magazine (or was it Compute!?) about a year after the Amiga came out and the author lamblasted Commodore for not lowering the price. Commodore's reasoning was something like "It's a business computer. IBM makes business computers and they don't lower prices so neither should we." and "IBM doesn't advertise the PC and ppl but it so ppl will buy the Amiga even if we don't advertise because it is more advanced than any other computer"
They finally did lower prices when the Amiga 500 came out and it sold better but Commodore really mis-marketed the Amiga in the beginning.
I use mine to wade through all the junk on the 20 odd channels I get.
It finds all the good stuff and records it for me...
Automatically...
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I've had TiVo for almost three years, and it's crazy to compare it to a VCR. They are nothing alike, the quantitative difference between what they can do is so great that it becomes qualitative.
With TiVo, TV is no longer a time-oriented medium. You don't watch shows when they're on, you watch them when you want to. The only way time matters is that a new show is only available on or after a certain time. It's more like a webcast, or a magazine-type site like The Onion. You're not required to sit there in front of your computer at 6 AM Monday every week to watch the new update of The Onion. You can watch it any time you want, it's just that you know a new one is available on a regular basis. All of TV is that way once you have TiVo.
Of course TiVo isn't the only way to get this. You can use Replay, or Microsoft's new box, or with a lot more effort you can set up a computer to do it. Any of these will give you those improvements.
But whatever you do, don't make the mistake of thinking it's a VCR. It's not, it's a device that turns TV into something that's more like a subset of the web, in that you have instant access to many, many hours of content, whatever has been updated since you viewed it last.
When they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. (Actually, they'll have to pry *4* Tivos from my cold, dead fingers).
I have DirecTV and got the dish, 2 receivers (one regular & one with 30 hrs recording), along with installation free. Now all I pay for is programming. I wasn't aware of monthly charges for equipment....
"Many informed people believe the X-Box may well be a Palladium trial balloon and a test bed for emerging Microsoft DRM technology. "
/bots like to repeat over and over and over again.
And many people who can add one and one to make two realize that the video game industry is a great cash cow that anyone can get into. Whether you're a third or first party developer, you too can ching-ching-ring in the yearly Gift-mas shopping seasons in ways that pro-business-tax-break 3-year buying cycles won't.
If that's not enough to clarify their already fairly-clear motives, here's a simplified business model for you:
1) Create a console that's hard to make unlicenced 3rd party games for.
2) Rake in the dough from 3rd-party developers while making a profit on the consoles after a (short) loss leader period used to drive early adoption and valuable market share.
3) PROFIT!
Nintendo did it, Sony did it, Sega did it, Microsoft wants to do it. Why? They already publish PC games, but the console market is BIGGER than the PC market by a fair bit. If they can rake money in by publishing various titles on their Xbox, as well as rake money in from everyone else who publishes titles for their Xbox (rather than the smaller cut they get if they jush published their MS games for Sony or Nintendo), they'll do it. The reason they can do it is because they're big enough to push through the loss-leader time period (larger for them than most because of the design of the console) to get to the sweet, rich money part. Sega only stopped being a first-party developer because they couldn't bankroll the next-gen console they were working on after the Dreamcast (as well as Dreamcast licence fees drying up).
Palladium and DRM might have some resemblance to the technology used in the Xbox because Microsoft wanted to make extra-double sure that people wouldn't write unlicenced (and thus, no $$ for Microsoft) games for their Xbox platform even though it was built on PC-hardware roots. Get it? Use-limiting technology looks similar. In this case, though, it's not some grand plot by the Beast at Redmond which most
Wether MS is going to do something like jam the Xbox and some PVR software together to make some unholy alliance of crap has yet to be seen. Chances are they'll maybe come out with YetAnotherDongle that you can buy separately (after all, a PVR for console price + dongle price may be cheaper than a TiVo + subscription yet), since they don't seem too keen on forcing people to buy features in their console they might not use (DVD playback) just yet.
And that also assumes that MS is going to come out with another console in some years time. Since the sweet spot for most consoles is about 3-4 years after release (in terms of gross profits), expect to see this resovled in 2006 when they'll annouce real plans about a potential succesor (if they make one).
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
First you love it, then you come to depend on it.
I've got a friend who discovered the reason why half-a-dozen channels are now running "Law And Order" re-runs. It's simply so he can record and watch every single episode in it's 10+ years on his TiVo.
He makes a big deal of it when I'm over and I actually switch over to live TV , even sports :) And a few weeks back when his TiVo's hard disk crashed, it felt like a funeral.
I guess I just don't understand. I don't watch much TV, and I still think of commercials as being the perfect time to grab a snack. I have a VCR. I never use it. I think the same would go for a TiVo.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
They used an Open Source OS, but they have done everything to make this invisible and unimportant. The hackers would love to be able to hack this box to add things like this, or a NIC, Ogg jukebox/server and all sorts of other nifty things. If they make great hardware for these applications, they won't lose to competitors, but it needs to be priced pretty aggressively.
In a lot of ways it is too late to switch to this model because they have already sunk a fortune into a losing business model, but it might also save their company if they do it right. Their name recognition is probably way above RedHat in the general population. That's worth a lot even if you give the software to competitors (with GPL). DirectTV would probably still pay them just to use the name in the right situation. I might even get DirectTV service if they did this. I already use their DSL service (started as a Telocity customer, and still use an antenna for TV).
Actually they have looked into it, and have produced atleast one prototype. The Series 2 unit aka "3-chip" is the platform that at some point will support HiDef. The Series 2 TiVo has a PCI bus; and they have specifically stated that they will allow other VARs to drop other devices (eg, HiDef) on to the PCI bus.
da w00t. mtfnpy?
... no matter how great you think a Tivo is, that doesn't mean it is going to be commerically viable in the long term. See Betamax, Newtown, Commodore, the Edsel, etc etc. Just because they were the first to market, doesn't mean they'll be able to survive edgy analysts, worrisome investors, and a fickle public.
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
You say "simply read those listings". The Tivo can't assume that every channel provides schedule info. Some don't at all. The ones which do don't use the same listing format, they use different page numbers, the listings don't provide actor, director, description, category etc etc information.
Tivo works with digital terrestrial TV, cable TV, satellite TV as well as normal analog terrestrial TV. I suggest you go away and look at the complexity of what a Tivo actually does, then try to replicate it using videotext supplied information.
I paid the lifetime sub, I consider it part of the price of the box, £350 instead of £150. It's easily worth the extra £200.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
You gotta figure a Series 1 TIVO wont last that long before being upgraded into something better.
Hustle it down to Bestbuy and snag the best one they have. When you're handing over the cash, be sure to sign up for their warranty. I think for my $250 Tivo it was something like 45$.If it comes with a rebate forget about cashing it in.
Fast forward two years in the future when the new model comes out. Just by accident, something just awful happens to your current Tivo, destroying it in a very subtle way.
Walk to your nearest Best Buy and you'll be handed your $250 back, minus $45 for the warrenty.
You just rented a Tivo for two years for $45. Isn't capitalism great?
I've never understood anyone not accepting Best Buy's warrenty. Obviously noone uses it for it's intended purpose.
I can't agree any less.
When I heard about the Tivo I thought, "oh kewl, too bad it's too expensive."
When my ex-roommate got one, I was like, "Wow."
The joy of a Tivo has to be exprienced to understand. The progress from VCR to Tivo is like from the command-line to GUI, or from audio cassette to MP3 player.
BTW I'm speaking of Tivo only because it has better usability than anyone else. I didn't try ReplayTV but Ultimate TV was a total pain in the ass to use.
They market to people who watch a lot of TV - when I think the perfect TiVo customer is the person who has very little time to watch TV - so that when you can sit down you can watch something you want, and not "uhh... it's 9:15, I guess I'll sit though half of 'Everyone Loves Raymond'..."
/. So much for my credibility...
Make the most of your valuable time. That's what it's all about.
Of course I am blabbing about how little time I have while I am here typing my drivel on
All I have to say is thank you. Not too many people here understand the fact that when things really enroach upon people's desires, the people revolt. There will always be a napster clone that works, and there will always be a way to record TV shows. People consider these things indispensable; legal or not.
"It's even worse if you're locked into a proprietary operating system." -http://www.wehavethewayout.com/scale.asp?rew=0
You've never used a Tivo... Obviously...
The reason your software sucked was cos you paid $50 for the solution.
Quality costs money and a $50 card and some software don't come close to a Tivo. Can your PC control your cable/satellite/DigitalTV set top box to switch it on and change channel? Does your PC have a remote?
One of the first mods made to Tivos which are modified is to replace the existing drive with a couple of 120Gb IDE drives. Tivo can also archive shows to VCR or DVDR if you want.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
(http://www.hdtvpub.com/local/index.cfm),
I was hoping for at least something that had High Definition or 16:9 format support. Instead, the only new features I could derive from all of their ads is that the new tivo had usb ports... Who needs that?!
Sorry no Account here.
TIVO just reduced monthly prices from $9.95 for $4.95 effective Nov 1st. Also the Lifetime option is gone. The way I understand it is DirectPC bought them out.
Bah...who needs Tivo or Replay when you can get your hands on a Microsoft Ultimate TV system for Direct TV (Bought mine for $85 brand new from Radio Shack and dun pay any fees) ;)
The Newton failed becuase it sucked, not because it was first. :)
The handwriting recognition was incredibly bad.
The handwriting recognition was basically unusable. I know, I have one of the original models. From what I hear people say online, the later models were much better. I guess they just couldn't recover their image after nelson made fun of them on The Simpsons
A friend of mine has a Tivo and aboslutely loves it. There's a big difference from being the first one to put out a shitty product and being to first one to put out a product that gets rave reviews from its owners.
Life is too short to proofread.
Okay. Let's talk tech here. NEvermind what's legal or not. Never mind cost (well, to a degree).
I live in Costa Rica. I want the best viewing pleasure I can get out of today's technology, without too many rediculous recurring costs.
Is it feasibly to use something like this on pirated DirecTV? What about other satellite services?
What about recording multiple channels at once.
I'd say DVD-R vs Tivo is more like CD-R vs. iPod. consider how many times I have to explain open sessions, track-at-once vs disc-at-once, CD-RW vs CD-R, yada yada yada.... I can safely assume that DVD-R would be every bit as difficult to use as a Tivo.
Glad too hear your Mom can use a Tivo without problems. Could she program the VCR? I think it's a common myth that using a Tivo is as difficult as programming the VCR.
The real problem in Commodore wasnt the amiga or lack of knowing where to put it in the market(well sort of), or their 8 bit machine madness, rather it was their absolutly stupid management team that insisted that it must produce PC's regardless of how well everything else is doing...
.... then again maybe it was all a consipracy to make us ignore our chicken lip blues.
And guess what? Their amiga range was their profit maker (well more of c64 in the 80's then the switch to amiga late 80's early 90's), but management, as said before, poored money into the sand chasing the alusive pc market with crappy pcsn hwich never turned a profit...
Well thats what I was told by an Amiga format article
The management team lead by (I forget his exact name) was being investgated at time of time when filing for chapter 11 for dodgy activities (mohommand someone i think the guys name was [ okay that narrows it down to hmm people with a backgroun religion in islam])
I used to hate TV. But when I had a roommate who had a Tivo, it made me watch TV. I then realized that I hate TV because everytime I sit down to watch TV it's all just infomercials and crappy TV shows. howvere there are many quality shows I loved (like Law and Order, Simpsons, the Daily Show, South Park, etc.). it's a dream to have all your favorite programs at your fingertips all the time . So many times I'd be watch my very own Simpsons marathon at 4am. I went from watching 1-2 hrs a week with live TV to 5-6 hrs a day with Tivo.
I think the author made a few mistakes on his article.
1. It is not true that being first on a new market usually leads to failure (the author seems to imply that). Exactly the opposite, history has shown once and again that being first is most of the time to your advantage, and most of the time leads to success. Is this the case with TiVo? Judge by yourself
2. The author of the article gave a bad example with the Amiga. What killed the Amiga was not the industry or the users or the competition, it was Commodore itself. It had the most awful marketing department in the world (and this is an understatement).
3. The newton's failure was not being first, but being over-engineered to an excessive cost (the author does imply something to this respect). The market was not prepared for such an expensive and large unit at that time.
It was mentioned briefly in passing in a couple of other posts, but it bears re-emphasizing as a point in itself. TiVo is a verb! And not just in geek-speak -- it's in wide usage! You see it on talk-shows. Guests on Leno talk about "tivoing" their favorite shows. You can't buy that kind of publicity!
Nobody ever talked about "amigaing" that document (or video clip). Nobody ever said, "let me newton that appointment".
Of course, this doesn't mean that Tivo is guaranteed to succeed, but it does mean that they're going to have to seriously stumble in order to fail. Their success or failure, long term, depends on themselves, which is a pretty nice spot for a startup to be sitting in.
just that the long term prognistics for this company aren't good
They just raised $25 million, and their quarter ending July 31, 2002 shows an operating loss of $1.1 million down from $35.6 million. So I'm not an expert in finance, but the chances they'll be around in 2 years from now, seem pretty good.
There are 3rd party apps that tie into tv listings just like TiVo does [...] TiVo is nice, and they make it work.
The whole difference is there. Nothing is free, and having relevant and accessible information about the upcoming shows and being able to record them with an easy to use remote control, without having to move from your sofa, or mess around with your computer, without having to find and rewind a tape, without even having to think how the damn thing work, that's worth what tivo is charging for. It's too bad that a lot people can't afford that, and I hope the cost of hardware goes down steadily.
I invested in both the Amiga (A500 in the box right next to me) and the Newton (I use my 120 every day). Less than six months after purchasing each one of those items they went out of production. My talent even extends to automobiles - witness the VW Corrado. I loved that car, yet not 6 months from purchasing it it became a collectors item. So, since I havent yet purchased a TiVo, it wont die.
:)
Now all I have to do is purchase some Microsoft stock and see if my luck holds out.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
One reason everybody likes TiVo so much that they can't verbalize is that the skip feature prevents the commercials from interrupting the dramatic flow of a program. This makes the program you're watching seemm SO much more emotionally intense it's like watching a movie, not a TV program. And that enhancement ALONE is worth the cost of the TiVo. Without Tivo, the dramatic flow of a program is so washed out....tense buildup and turningpoint followed by shampoo automobile diaper hamburger news-at-11-teaser next-show-promo CLIMAX! Give me a break, watch that cycle a thousand times and you think TV is crap. Tivo gives it all the emotional impact back to you. I love my Tivo.
Hopefully they'll opensource it before they run out of cash, or soon after if they don't sell it off (in case they want to try to get investers back some $$)
*yawn*
wha, story? where?
[o]_O
I've owned my TIVO for 2 years. I've quit preaching about TIVO. Every so often someone asks me about TIVO and I tell them I don't watch TV any other way.
Point 1.
Many people in the video/movie industry are looking forward to the day when video on demand becomes a reality. TIVO actually produces video on demand for video streams.
But the video on demand is not exactly like what the "experts" are looking for. They expect a certain scenario to occur for the "consumer" to get his/her video. TIVO doesn't work this way.
TIVO searches the various video streams you have access to and provides video on demand
at a later time.
It's still video on demand, but not what the "experts" have envisioned.
Point 2.
I love the TIVO company for what they have given me, but their marketing department SUCKS.
Instead of pitching the "VCR on steroids" idea, they need to sell the idea of "video on demand".
There are other areas where they need to improve but I won't go into them here.
If TiVo actually does go under, I really feel that it will be a reflection of the relative lack of TV programming worth recording in the first place....
Let's face it, VCR's are dirt cheap nowdays, and the tapes have the advantage of being removeable and easy to trade with others.
Most of us only have one or two TV programs we care enough about to bother recording them, if that. For a task that small, a regular old VCR does the trick.
TiVo is very cool, but primarily, it just encourages the user to watch more TV they wouldn't have bothered watching otherwise. That's not something I'd pay hundreds of dollars for, and many others won't either.
Personally, I make a conscious effort to limit my TV watching time. It's all too easy to sit back and get passively entertained by television nonsense, and suddenly realize you've wasted hour after hour, accomplishing nothing.
Does this also explain why Slate's stock is now less than a penny a share?
I love mine, it was definitly worth the cash... I'd suggest that if you get one, pay a little extra and get a lifetime subscription. Now I just can't wait until I can afford a DVD ROM...
It's thermos, not thermus
Nothing personal, but your attitude sucks.
you all suck, and if I find one of you's suckers i'll spam the shit out of you tills you kick offs thens I'll take whats lefts and spams the shit out of that and when that POD's i'll POD the PODing fragfuck out of that till it dies. THEN once your' just a deprogramed little weeny i'll take my fist and summon the might power of Kane into and use me l33ty Kahblik powers to send you to final final final death where no power on earth(excep the one ring wich is locked in a uber secure location in any of a infinite possible demensions) can save yous . Then i'll make John Icantwrightorspeeloruseafuckingspacebarandm y fagwassittingonitbecausei'mnothingmorethantheperlo mpfercationofmentalmigatude Katz to wright yous all a horrible ulagy make use alls declare win thissucks hoze as your' religoun and join the power of the dark side even more poweerfull than the fucking force. THEn yous alls can suck my fat donky and kiss my ass after its plowed a stinky compost heap.
tagif
now go smoke a fag.
Needless to say when I came back two weeks later there were several season passes hooked up and many shows recorded. (Including some sex in the city which bothered me ;) )
If my parents could get to the point where they couldn't remember how to watch TV without it then its not hard to use or understand.....
A Tivo is basically a small linux computer with a decent sized hard drive.
How could you consider *NOT* plugging it into a surge protector???
Evolution: love it or leave it
When will these beast support recording HDTV broadcasts? I''m not gong to bother with one untii then.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
TiVo is by far the best money I've ever spent on a "want". Anyone who disagrees probably didn't have a need for it in the first place. To be able to chill in front of my tv and bring up a simpsons episode or seinfeld episode and get a good laugh *commercial free* is a real luxury. TiVo supported the 3rd party network cards with a dialing prefix after their last major software upgrade... this shows that they care, or something to that effect. I like the device, and the company. It'd be a shame to see it get "replaced" by microsoft. Yay.
Microsoft's PVR failed totally agaist TiVo for features and never turned a profit either.
Each and every Xbox is sold at a loss and still can't outsell the PS2. The foreseable future holds nothing but more losses from Xbox. How come nobody in the media remembers the Microsoft PVRs, WinCE 1, WinCE 2, or dare I say it? MSX? They poured money down that drain and the media ate it up. Problem is, consumers didn't.
PS3 and even Xbox2 are already in serious development. Xbox will never live long enough to turn a profit.
This guy is nothing but a M$ propaganda tool. It's typical for them to compare their future fantasy products to other's past and existing products.
How's this one? Don't buy XP, M$ is going out of business when I release by ZZ OS, which is 100% Windows binary compatible, but 10x as fast. Wait now, a year, maybe 3, but wait. Don't buy anybody else's products. Sound familiar?
> and the habits of 3 other people I convinced.
I've convinced plenty of my friends to like TiVo, but none to buy. And these are people that spend thousands of dollars a year on other kinds of toys, but I guess the initial cost threshold plus monthly fee is too high for most. My neighbor has a $$$ HT setup with a custom room, 65" TV and very nice sound, and every time he sees my TiVo he loves it. But he still won't get one. Why? Beats me, maybe TiVo should ask him, it might help them become profitable.
Want to watch a football but don't want to spend the nice afternoon? Record it and watch it that evening in one hour (I know it's not the same but if you want to watch pure football, it's the fastest option).
I ran across this article that shows how someone put together their own TIVO for fairly cheaply (if you don't want to drop as much money on a tivo or replayTV). Personally, I think there are more ways to cut corners on his PVR to further drop the price but it's a good attempt--especially with the software that he chose.
TiVo (even though I have TWO of them and can't live without it) will fail because there's no good way of charging for it. People pay for the television listings--it's only a matter of time before some consortium of high-end TV makers put connectors for disk-drives on TV sets and let you download the listings for free on the Internet. (It would be in the networks best interest to provide their listings in some common XML format.)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I liked Jermain better anyways
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
comparing Tivo to a VCR is like comparing a typewriter to a computer. They assist in similar functions but a Tivo goes way beyond.
Client side PVR is doomed, it offers too little too late. The future is server side PVR with offers big advantages over client side services, simpler units allow lower unit cost, much lower maintenance costs, more reliable; Server side content allows near limit-less libraries of content by comparison. Serverside allows transparent intergration with Digital Television Services & TV Email and TV-Web.
This is not pie in the sky futurology; this is it all being done in the UK by ourselves (see www.kitv.co.uk) a small regional telco. We use an IP enabled STB that is half the cost of TIVO, it requires no client side MPEG encoder or HD. This reduces the installation and maintenance costs, and significantly increases reliability. Since we encode off-line with industrial MPEG encoders, the video quality is vastly superior to TIVO, and delivered DRM clear. Since we normalised content, we can also offer a lot more choice of content, currently over 4000 hours of content on the largest Video Server Farm in the world. Consumers do not even need to flag content, they can browse the back catalogue of content, via EPG.
AIH I've repeatedly pointed out this out in the past and I usually get modded into obivion by bleating TIVO advocates, but I am right, they are wrong and time will prove it.
you can get the box w/ a lifetime subscription for $250 more.
Life time subscription!
Where have I heard that before? Oh yeh Internet Access for life, the very short life of the company not mine.
Which is why we build our own hardware, ISA hardware is easy to build.
We were running DR-DOS and has a paradise Graphics card (1MB of ram I think?) a 40MB HDD and 4MB of ram. (also GEM and AutoCad)
Games weren't too much of a priority, we still had a BBC kicking around
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I got one a few months ago. Equipment and installation was free. Of course nothing is totally free, it cost about $100 in some sort of activation fees, but it also came with the first 3 months of service at no cost ($120 value to me).
Anyway it's not as good as TIVO but it's still great. I have a TIVO rotting in my office since they messed up my account and wanted me to pay to reactivate my subscription. Yea...SURE. So now it rots.
On an aside, DISH TV with 2 receivers (1 with built in PVR) was about 20% less than my Comcast cable subscription.
Hi,
As a former tivo beta testor, you might think that i'm a bit biased..well..I am. But for good reason, tivo kicks ass!! I was a high school senor when I got my first tivo, misprised for $49 (instead of $499 haha) I think i must have had my little guardian angle with me that day because let me tell you, a tivo is a life changing experience. I remember back in the dark ages when I used to plan to watch tv("simpsons is on at 7!") YOU DO NOT NEED TO! The not only does the tivo get stuff for you (by seasons, reruns, new episodes, or whatever) but depending on what you rank shows it'll pick new ones for you!! Basically any time you want to watch something you'll have like 5 shows (probably more..) waiting.
Now I know what your thinking..But wasted, the tivo drive is so incredably tiny! Those big ones cost hundreds extra! Not so my son. Thanks to the guys at tivo being badasses they actually MAKE IT EASY to mod your tivo! Not only that, but they won't try to have you arrested(MY GOSH WHAT A NEW IDEA!!)
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/
here you go kids ^ all your info in one handy place. I moded mine to 130 gigs with extra ram ( heh..be careful too much space on the series 1 can make it a bit laggy if you have oodles of season passes like me..the series 2 fixes this with a faster processor)
Ok..Now for blatent honesty. I admit, the best part about being a tivo owner is never having to watch commercials. I haven't had to sit though some random chick talking about that not so fresh feeling at dinner in years. Fast foward is the best thing since sliced bread. Shows end up being about 20-30% shorter, so watching them serously changes timeframes. Like i can watch 2 episdoes of stargate in about an hour an a half heh..
Ok thats it! I'm telling you guys. If a poor college kid is telling you its worth it..well..it is...I'm living on just about 0 income, and if i didn't have a tivo i'd still find a way to buy one. Its that big of a deal. My computer and my tivo..Its like asking a dad to choose between his kids. Poor old computer..I'd hurt her feelings if i answered..Its worth it guys. I'm telling you!! At least go get one and return it if you don't like it hehe..(you get a month free service..)
thanks for your time
wasted
As I understand it, VCR's are analog machines and don't have the capability to receive digital signals. So if Congress passes a bill that enforces TV tuners to accept digital (HDTV) signals, that would force consumers to upgrade all of their equipment when content providers only distribute in digital. There was a /. article on this before...
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
Don't you just plug it in and wait? The connectors are perhaps a little difficult since there are so many of them, but most of the setup is automated.
american joe six pack is as thick as dog turd, all dumb c*nts.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Oh right, like you expected someone to post that cut n' paste again?
I know other Tivo supporters have written this already, but its all about convenience. Here's the lineup:
Star Trek: The Next Generation - nightly 10pm tnn,
Enterprise - wed 8pm,
Saturday Night Live - nightly a few times,
Friends - nightly a few times,
JunkYard Wars - tues 9pm,
The Man Show - once on Wed, once on Sun,
Crank yankers - once a week,
Simpsons - twice a week here and there,
Great Blunders in History - once a week,
Frasier - Twice a week, once a rerun on cable,
COMEDY CENTRAL PRESENTS - all of them.
So, if there is a super VCR out there, which can do this without me putting in a tape every 6 hours, I'd buy it.
How about this. I have only seen The Pink Panther a few times when I was much younger, so I made a wishlist for the actor: PETER SELLERS, and the Tivo will record every movie he's in thats on. So far, it Found "Shot in the Dark" and "Casino Royale" Find a VCR which can do that.
As previously mentioned, which VCR will show you who is the Guest host on SNL and if it was an older one, which music guest was on it? None.
I bought a refurbed Tivo from a place in CA mailorder for $199 (30 gig), and then installed two 120 gig hard disks in it for a total of 300 hours of view time, shorter length for quality video, but still more than 100 hours. Total cost: under $400. $12.95 a month is ok, some people buy TV guide, the newspaper, some cigarettes, I pay for Tivo. Its the simple most useful technological item I own after my PC and cellphone. What I love the most is that once you look at the description of the show Im going to watch, and Ive seen it, or dont want to watch it, poof, deleted. No rewinds, no tape changes, no labeling.
Secondly, my father is elderly and he loves certain TV shows. So, we setup his TIVO to record Law & Order, CSI, CSI:Miami, The Practice, NYPD Blue, Judging Amy. He watches them and deletes them when he's done. If he has seen them, he deletes them. No tapes to lose, no tapes to label, no forgetting what tape has what on it, and no getting out of his chair. Perfect. He's loving it.
I know there are PC programs out there which will do the Tivo function almost 100% with a TV card installed, but Im enjoying my Tivo for now, until they go down, we'll see.
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
Given the way the first three episodes of Season 2 have gone, I'm amazed anyone is still watching Enterprise. I deleted my TiVo season pass for Enterprise last week.
Besides, doesn't UPN still re-broadcast each week's Enterprise episode over the weekend? With a TiVo, it doesn't matter when you get it, so long as you get it, right? (Or with broadband. I got most of the first season of Enterprise from Usenet before I finally got tired of Ed last January.)
Visit me on the web at Permanent4.com.
Good God, by the time machine came out, there was already a robust computer community, one that was larger, and stayed larger, than the C64: it was a fruity company named Apple and the model was "Apple II".
Newtion has the same first mover disadvantages for the Pen top that Transmeda has for the CPU.
The Newtion was Apples attempt at a pentop after the consept had long been flushed out.
The PenTop industry already recognised that in order to survive a PenTop had to be small and cheap. The Newtion was big and expensive.
That was as close to success as it could ever get.
The Amiga was also no first mover.
At first the Amiga was press released as a high end home computer at a low price. Home computers were already a major market item.
This however was also near the end of the videogame dark ages. Commodore sold it as a video game console. This is as bright as selling a high tech ice maker to ludites living in the antartic.
There was such a demand for a computer like the Amiga that people were willing to do the research to discover that the Amiga was NOT the "peace of junk toy" Commodore marketted it as.
In short... Newtion: Do exactly what the experts say will doom your device and your device is doomed.
Amiga: Sell it as junk and people will think it is.
Dr Who- K9 voice
"Relevence to TiVO device.. zero"
[FYI: The actual line is "Peace of cake: Relevence to the key to time.. zero"]
The TiVO is what we want marketted correctly.
They look more like Intel to me... first on doing well and coolness factor backing them up.
The TiVO name is already a household word. It's not "I want a Digtital video recorder" but "I want a TiVO".
TiVOs gona fail like Linux and Windows already have.....
I don't actually exist.
As another poster observed, part of the motivation for the Series2 was to build a platform that could handle HDTV. TiVo has built a dual-DirectTV HDTV unit, but the main problem they have with it is that HDTV streams are so huge that they had to use something like 18 hard drives in order to give the unit something like 60 hours of record time, so right now they're waiting for the hard drive densities to catch up. The goal is to be able to achive the same capacity level with more like 3 hard drives. I've often said one of my main requirements for adopting HDTV is that my TiVo supports it.
Oh, and I'm one of those people with the completely flexible lifetime subscription. According to my wife, we're like TiVo customer #7 (she bought it the day it came out). And it's not just that the wording wasn't clear -- I have a message from TiVo explicitly stating the flexibility of the subscriptions back when they first started. That didn't stop us from buying a second lifetime subscription when we got our second unit: we were using both in tandem for a while.
-"Zow"
It seems to be popular to respond to this article with the standard "more FUD from Microsoft" line, but does anyone have any evidence to back that up? Note that for the purposes of this discussion, "Microsoft owns Slate, stupid" doesn't count as evidence, since it tells us nothing about the editorial control Microsoft has over what appears in Slate. As a regular reader of Slate, I can attest that I have yet to see any blatantly pro-Microsoft bias in the articles which appear in it. In fact, the writers and editors are usually quite scrupulous about avoiding even the appearance of bias. So, based on my reading the damn thing for a couple of years now, my conclusion is that what appears in Slate reflects the ideas and opinions of the people who work for Slate, not the people who control Microsoft.
Allow me to pre-empt any "You're a Microsoft shill" replies: no, I'm not. I think their business practices are on the whole contemptible, and that their software design sucks. But in this case, the "more Microsoft FUD" response is just a lazy way out. If you think the article was inaccurate and flawed in its conclusions, tell us why. But enough of this "Who owns Slate? LOL!" bullshit.
Actually, you bring up some good points. I currently TiVo Enterprise on the weekend, so my 2 DirecTiVo tuners can get Ed and Bernie Mac. (Ed, BTW, got tired a long time ago for me. The whole Ed-Carol thing is fucking old.)
:)
Besides, am I supposed to watch Farscape? SciFi seems to be mucking that one up for me without my wife's help! Enterprise is still much better than DS9 or Voyager, IMHO.
Let's be honest here - I mostly use my TiVo for time-shifting English Premiership matches.
Ok, fair enough.
I tried to watch Buffy a few times, due to all the hype surrounding it. It did nothing for me. I felt like it was simply a show I would have enjoyed if I was still a teenager, but now? Uh-uh... (I have no idea how old you are, but for reference, I recently turned 31.)
Friends.... I'll grant you it's funny, sometimes, but nothing "draws me to it". It's one of those shows I could handle sitting down to watch at a friend's house, if it was already on and everyone else was watching it. Would I ever bother to actually tape it? Nah....
Angel... saw 2 episodes, and didn't like it a bit. Why? Dunno, just seemed too "fake" to me, and maybe I'm a bit "tough" on any show featuring a female heroine character to start with. (After all, 99% of the time, these end up being cheezy excuses to oogle at some actress/model - and the actual plot is weak to non-existant. Think Charlie's Angels, or V.I.P., for 2 examples.)
Of the shows you mentioned, Enterprise is the one I'd be most likely to make a real attempt to watch regularly. Unfortunately, I don't get UPN on my Dish Network subscription right now. I'm stuck watching ST:TNG re-runs on TNN.
Haven't seen Firefly or John Doe yet, so it's not fair to pass judgement on those.
Why? Dunno, just seemed too "fake" to me...
;). BTW I loved Charlie's Angels for the very reason that it was obviously meant to be a show where I got to watch 3 hot women be... well hot. Sometimes mindless shows about beautiful women, endless gunfights, or whatever else are what my tired brain calls for. Sometimes I like to think.. depends on the occasion.
This is precisely why I watch TV. It's fake (aka not real
As for buffy I'll make one last attempt here 'cause of the many ppl I've met who don't understand the show or claim to not like it I eventually convert... and they support it now as rabidly as they once slammed it... so here goes. I'm 20 years old myself btw. My mom who got me into the show is 40. Her best friend who loves it too is 30. My Grandma thinks it's the greatest thing ever, but she won't tell me her age. My 16 year old sister also loves it. It's a teeny bopper show that not only makes fun of stereotypes and tenny bopper shows, it makes fun of itself pretty regularly. However there is more two it than that. Below the surface of the show is some incredible writing and an epic story that you really have to be a) smart enough or b) looking hard enough to notice. Unfortunately it IS a soap which means start at episode 1 and work your way up or you're lost and probably won't like it. I've seen forums on Buffy in the internet where a group of people all discussing a single episode might sound as if there were 3 or 4 groups of ppl who all saw a different show. That kind of demonstrates what I mean.
Anyways wether you like the show or not this has been a fun discussion.... could you tell me how to add a friend or attempt to become a friend of someone else using slashdots interface? =P