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AdAge Predicts Tivo will Fail
geddes writes "Under the obnoxious headline
More U.S. Homes have Outhouses then TiVos, Advertising Age has published an article with a few good points: 1) Tivo/ReplayTV/UltimateTV aren't making any money and their growth is declining. 2) Cable and Satellite TV services are slowly rolling out PVR on thier own boxes. So 3) PVR will become a standard feature for most television users but become as unbranded as programmable VCRs."
I don't know about others, but DirectTV is not rolling out "their own", they are partnering with... Tivo.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
TiVo HAS already sold it to DirecTV. My TiVo service is now billed as DIRECTV DVR. Advertising materials are now calling it "DirecTV Digital Video Recording service powered by TiVo" or some such nonsense. My Series I combo boxes still have TiVo logos on the front! Can't change that with a line on the billing statement. Don't know about the new Series2 satellite receiver/DVR combos, though.
Actually Dish Network has it's own home brew PVR that is fairly popular. They pretty much give away the lower-end one for free if you sign up with them. And you can get a more souped up one (dual tuner, more hard disk space) for roughly the price of a regular Tivo and it doesn't have the monthly recurring Tivo cost. The software and UI pale in comparison to the Tivo, but supposedly they have a decent market share (as far as PVRs go).
As said on here many times, though, Tivo is now licensing their software to folks like AT&T and DirecTV, so you will soon be getting a "DirecTV DVR powered by Tivo" instead of a "Tivo". It's a win-win for both sides and will most likely keep Tivo afloat.
I have one of these digital cable box where most of the tv guide features are accessible through a screen that hides the stuff you are currently watching. I always hated it. It could take me 5 minutes to find out what other concurrent shows are of interest to me or what is showing next.
With tivo series2, the menu comes up instantaneously, I find stuff really quickly, and what I'm watching is still visible behind the menu. For me that's one of the neat features that came with my tivo. In addition to all the rest.
I'm assuming Tivo doesn't own a patent on their TV recording technology
You'd be assuming very, very wrong. Not that any searching would have told you this. Nope.
These are just the three most recently granted patents. TiVo has others. Between TiVo and Replay pretty much every function and capability of a PVR is patented.
It's hard to describe, but I guess I'll give the advantages of Tivo over an analog VCR:
30 hr capacity (or more)
On screen guide with info for two weeks
Season pass (record all instances of a show, with a number of options like only new shows, etc.)
Thumbs Up/Down of shows, used to record 'extra' shows.
Notification of change in lineup (new or deleted channels, change in number of a channel, etc.)
Immediate access (no rewind)
Record and play at the same time
It's not that simple. To do what TiVo does, and do it well, they really need a large number of users to support the infrastructure. Since standalone boxes have ongoing costs associated with providing the service, a subscription model makes sense.
;-)
ReplayTV tried to just sell boxes as their model; it hasn't worked well. They had to charge $650 when TiVo was charging $400. Guess who picked up more customers faster?
Arguably, the DirecTV combo units don't really provide a service from TiVo, since they leverage the guide data already being sent over the satellite. (However, I believe this data has been enhanced for the TiVo.) On the other hand, the subscription price for the DirecTV units has been reduced to $5/month, which is the same as the "mirroring" charge to have a second receiver on your DirecTV account. Since the DirecTV receivers with TiVo have two tuners, you get the second tuner free, and pay the $5/month for TiVo service instead, so it's a wash.
If you have two combo boxes, you only pay the extra $5/month for a second receiver, not another $5/month for the TiVo service -- the "mirroring" charge covers mirroring the TiVo service as well. I have a combo box with lifetime service (which is no longer offered for combo boxes), and my $5/month mirroring charge gives my second combo box the benefit of lifetime server, as long as both remain on the same account.
Meanwhile, the price of service has increased to $13/month for standalone boxes, but that's not so unreasonable, considering that maintaining the infrastructure for all those boxes to dial in with modems is quite expensive, not even counting the cost of preparing the data and updating software.
Ultimately, if TiVo can get over a million subscribers, they should be profitable by that point. Right now, they're more than halfway to that target, and still losing money, but it was part of their business plan from day one. You'll probably see TiVo turn a profit by 2004 or 2005.
As for what shareholders think, I am a shareholder, as well as a customer, and I don't have a problem with their subscription model. Most of the subscribers will stick around indefinitely, once they've got the hardware. TiVo is very good at what they do, and it's a killer product. It's just hard to market because the true value of the product is hard to convey. TiVo's greatest asset is word-of-mouth from their enormously loyal, extremely satisfied customers. Meanwhile, I'm going to buy as much TiVo stock as I can afford while it's still cheap.
One more thing -- if buying a subscription offends you so much, why don't you just buy the box and spend the extra $250 for lifetime service? Then you don't have to pay the subscription cost, and you can treat it as if you bought it at the combined cost.
You can't get lifetime service with the DirecTV models anymore, but so what? You get a second tuner in the combo box for the same monthly cost as a second standalone DirecTV receiver would cost you, so if effect it doesn't cost anything. More importantly, the combo boxes record directly from the satellite with 100% perfect recording quality, because you watch the EXACT same stream of MPEG2 bits live as you do when you play back a recording. Better yet, it's also much more efficient in disk space usage. The combo boxes thus have better recording quality than "Best" mode on the standalones, while using similar amounts of disk space as the "Basic" mode on standalones, which is said to be roughly the quality of VHS EP (6-hour) mode. The only real downside to the combo boxes is that you can't record from other video sources, only DirecTV. But with DirecTV's improved local coverage, that may not be an issue for you.
If you already have DirecTV and only watch the satellite, the "DirecTV receiver with TiVo" combo box is a no-brainer. If you use cable, it might be worth switching to DirecTV for the advantages. If not, you can buy a standalone (with lifetime service if you don't like subscriptions).
Regardless, if you like TV, get a TiVo -- preferably the DirecTV combo version. It's worth it. You'll never watch TV the same way again, and you'll wonder how you ever lived without it. And that is why I bought the stock; very few products have such an impact. My wife hated the idea of getting a TiVo (more gadgets) and it took 3 months to convince her to let me buy it. Within a few weeks, she was no longer mad about it, and within a couple months, she was extolling the TiVo's virtues to everyone she could. She had her mind made up to hate it, and it still won her over. If TiVo can do that, they can do anything!
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but there is a limit to the amount of space you can store programs on a TiVo.
Yes... and there's a limit to how much space on a VCR tape too. Or your computer's hard drive. TiVos are upgradable (and if you don't feel comfortable doing it yourself, there are companies that will do it for you now and give you a warrantee on their work and/or the unit). We have two TiVos. They came with 30 GB HDs, and we could store about 24 hours of video on them in medium resolution. We did occasionally run into problems with space, since a couple week vacation could cause older programs to be deleted.
I upgraded both with 80G drives, giving them 110G total and roughly 100 hours of video. I have never had anything deleted before I could watch it now. I have programs that are over 6 months old on my TiVo still. My wife has stuff over a year old (or maybe we finally dumped it to tape, I don't recall). Heck, I still have 6+ pages of "Suggestions" recorded by the TiVo, which is over half the storage space.
And if I ever wanted to dump something to tape, then I can - TiVo has a "Record to VCR" feature that makes this easy. But I'd be more likely to rip the video out to my PC and store it on SVCD or something. Which you can't do very easily with a VCR.
Plus with a VCR, I can tell my friend, "Hey I missed Buffy last night, did you tape it?". Again, I could be wrong, but I don't know if TiVo offers such a feature
I can, and have, dumped stuff to tape from my TiVo for friends that missed something - even friends with a TiVo. With Replay you can just send them the episode via Internet. You can, theoretically, do the same with TiVo, but it's not officially supported or condoned.
Yes, that means you'll need a VCR too. I have to dig mine up and pray it still works when I actually need it.
While the commercial skip feature is nice, it's not so much better than the fast forward button to warrant an additional expense
Commercial skipping is really one of the lesser features of PVRs... it's hard for people to get this, but it's true. I'd be deeply annoyed if it wasn't there of course. The real feature is that a TiVo frees you from having to watch TV except when you want to. You don't have to worry about when shows are on - TiVo takes care of it. You don't have to worry about having enough tape in the VCR - the HD records more than any tape. You don't have to label tapes because TiVo has the program guide data already. Watching something live? Phone rings? No problem, hit pause. Or maybe you missed that last line - hit 6 second rewind. And everything's instant.
About the best comparison I can give you is how much better CDs are compared to tapes. Instant access, cleaner, faster, better.
Panasonic has a 40GB model with a DVD recorder that lets you record to/from the DVD and the HD with VCR-like functionality. But its $1k.
And as the Tivo zealots continually remind me, it's not the recording capabilities of Tivo that are so great, its the guide and other advanced recording options of the service that make it worthwhile.
Even without the DVD player/recorder integration, you'd think that an HDD-based recorder with VCR-type functionality wouldn't be too tough to make, although I have a hard time seeing it selling for less than $300 -- maybe closer to $500.