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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."
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.
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.