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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."
True, there will soon be as many Tivo brands as you care to name.
But people will still call them "Tivo"s.
It's like in the UK, every vacumn cleaner is usually referred to as a "hoover". Or in the US "Xerox".
You cannot buy that brand recognition. Assuming Tivo themselves don't screw up, they will have a healthy share of the PVR industry for a decade or more.
PVRs will obviously be subsumed into the TV unit itself...TiVo can only hope to save itself through a superior UI and programming service that it maybe can sell to cable providers.
Another news site has just found that more outhouses have tivos than homes!
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Except for the fact that AT&T broadband and DirectTV are already rebranding Tivo for their set top boxes. There aren't any real competitors yet aside from ReplayTV.
Ooh...but I like the list of related articles:
"Without advertising, we will damage this country"
"72.3% of Tivo viewers skip commercials"
Then again, this is like MSFT reporting that Linux is pretty much dead.
"The stock of TiVo, meanwhile, is down 95% from 2000; its star has faded on Wall Street even as it's risen on Madison Avenue"
Give me one tech stock that's near what it was in 2000. I notice the article doesn't say a thing about whether Tivo has actually made money or is making money right now. As it is, they're getting $12/month from me and I'm looking to add another Tivo soon.
-- "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" -Optimus Prime
Everything useful eventually becomes brand-less.
Take PC's , they used to be called IBM compatibles. But now they're just so DAMNED handy and ubiquitous that now nobody REALLY cares what the brand is.
The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
More Slashdot Editors and Users have Tivos than know how to write a grammatically correct sentence.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Another week, another article proclaiming the death of TiVo. Notice how it's posted by a magazine focused on advertising? Of course they want TiVo to fail, it provides the means for skipping all their boring advertisements.
Will TiVo fail? Possibly. Will it become useless? No. Due to their open architecture, people can and already have hacked the TV guide info, and if/when the day comes they go under, hackers will be able to take up the call and keep the service going.
I hope that day doesn't come, since this well designed hardware and software.
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
Despite the relatively low market penetration, I am a bit suspicious as to the motives behind this story. Doesn't AdAge have a vested interest in seeing devices such as TiVo fail? This article has a decent analysis of the financial aspect behind the subscription model, but nary a word about the impact on advertisers from the loss of revenue due to skipping commercials? Poor jornalism, this should be filed under op-ed for ad-execs and the major networks.
I loved my Amiga....
hated AOL...
I should hire out as a consultant :)
I have a DirecTivo, and love it. I couldn't imagine life without it. Recently, I got a letter from DirecTV that from now on, my DirecTivo service was going to be referred to as "DirecTV PVR" and the monthly charge was going to be cut in half.
OK. The service hasn't changed. It's still Tivo software and interface. The monthly cost is half of what it was. The only down side is it records more "Special Preview" nonsense from DirecTV. Tivo still gets paid, and DirecTV has more reason to sell this great technology. What's the problem supposed to be?
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
TiVo's problem is surely their attempt to follow a subscription-based model rather than just selling boxes. It might have been better to manufacture PVRs, sell them at a reasonable price (which is still far above what they cost to manufacture, given the price drops in components over the past few years) and when the market peters out, just retire gracefully and return the profits to shareholders.
Trying to build up a base of paying subscribers may look good on the company's accounts, but shareholders are surely not under any illusions that these subscribers are guaranteed to stay around forever. Meanwhile potential customers (like me) stay away from TiVo because we don't want to pay a subscription for something (TV listings) which is available for free anyway, and the box will become useless once TiVo goes bust or discontinues service. The idea of PVRs is bound to take off, but you can't take that to mean that any particular company will survive.
Just sell the damn things like toasters, pocket the money, and stop making them when it becomes unprofitable. That's all there is to it.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Will cable companies remove features, like the ability to skip ahead 30 which they feels gives users the ability to skip commercials? Probably. Given the choice between pleasing consumers, or pleasing advertisers and shareholders (which they're leagally bound to do!) the companies always stay with the advertisers.
... and they are everywhere.
And therein is the biggest problem in the media industry: content providers are too lazy to adapt to changes in technology, so they fight innovation to maintain the status quo.
Record companies and file sharing. Cable companies and PVRs. Et cetera.
I own a PVR (not a TiVO, but a higher-end satellite receiver with PVR built-in). It's fan-frickin-tastic. My VCR has been collecting dust for the last year and a half.
And yes, I skip msot commercials. But why do I skip them? 'Cause most of them suck.
There are commercials, however, that I do watch. And often rewind and watch again. And call my wife over to watch with me. These are the funny, intelligent, clever or bizarre commercials. Like the IKEA lamp. Like one for Tourette's syndrome. . Like the Mini and Nissan ones (just 'cause those songs are infectious).
If companies just made better commericals, I don't think people would skip them as much. They skip them because they are boring
At some point (and we've probably reached it), advertizing becomes so ubiquitous that it stops working. People tune it out. Advertisers think the solution is to put up more ads, in more places, in unexpected places. It's only going to piss people off more.
The solution is to make better ads. Why don't they realize this?
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
In the UK BSKYB have licensed the TiVo technology to make their Sky+ boxes. So TiVo are alive an well as long as BSKYB is alive and well, and seeing as BSKYB is the dominant satellite television network in the UK, I'd say that in the medium to long term, TiVo is pretty save as a company, if not a consumer unit.
Thad
When you can also write some neat front-end software for it that provides for all of the TiVo features (too many to name here), and can still bring it under $200, I'll think about it. But only if I don't have to be a sysadmin to use it. I'm a sysadmin enough at work; I want my PVR to not require an intimate knowledge of the command-line.
Oh, and don't forget to package it in a nice little black (or silver) box that fits within my entertainment center.
We won't even get into DirecTiVo here. Mmm, Dolby Digital.
A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
Maybe the magazine/author had an axe to grind but the fact is, Tivo and ReplayTV has never had a very large market penetration. In fact, I don't personally know of any one who owns either one.
I think the reason is simply price. I would love to be able to use the features of these 2 products, pause live tv, skip commericals on playback, very easy recording of tv shows. But the truth is, this type of convenience is not worth the $400, $500, $600, or more that they charge for the unit. That's in addition to the monthly fee.
For approximately the same amount of money, I can take my whole family camping every weekend thru the summer and have a lot more fun!
Also, I don't think it helped ReplayTV when their units began requiring broadband access in order to download the program guide and software updates. Most people in the country still don't have broadband access.
Enjoy your life, it's the only one you've got!
...when they pry it from my cold, dead hand.
Call me cynical, but I don't believe for a second that you can satisfy all the above requirements for a $200/box flat fee.
1) Gee, an advertising magazine saying that a product that allows skipping advertising is going to fail. There's a surprise.
2) If you don't own Tivo, you don't understand. I have a DirectTv/Tivo system. I can record two things at once, program wish lists, record something after it starts (I'm watching it, decide the wife would like it, so tell it to record the whole program). it records stuff in free space, based on what I watch, some of which I actually watch.
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.
Fuck that, I'll TiVo it and watch it in the morning.
sulli
RTFJ.