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TiVo switches off UK sales
SmackCrackAndPot writes "On the TiVo Community forum, there is an announcement that TiVo will be switching off UK sales.
This was previously reported in November at
BizTech Library.
It's probably not too surprising, after the BBC
spammed TiVo owners with a new comedy show."
What a bunch of crap. TiVo units have a certain amount of memory set aside for "enhanced content" (that means infomercials). If you don't look in the menus, you'd never know it was there, unless you happened to be watching at 4AM when it was captured. In NO way can TiVo be said to be spamming. Someone bought a paid placement. Hey, I hated it when TiVo recorded a bunch of crappy Eminem interviews, but I just didn't watch it, and I certainly didn't whine about it.
Remember TiVo makes ZERO dollars from hardware sales, they are solely supported by subscription revenues, ad placements, and selling marketing data.
Read the reply comments on that forum. Now read the same hoax going back over the last few months.
Now HAND.
The article uses the term "post-watershed" which apparently refers to programs broadcast after 9pm in the UK.
This is a page with relevant legal regulations that are implicated...
Hope that clears up any confusion.
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
In the UK, there is a huge push from sky to sell its Sky + service, which is the main competetion for Tivo here. Haven't actually tried the Tivo, but Sky + is an extremely competent package.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID= 13703
Thompson, Tivo's manufacturer is the one that pulled out - Tivo is still looking for new manufacturers.
I live in Ireland, a country of around 4 million people compared to the U.K. (our closest neighbour and fellow island just north-west of France, in Europe, about 4000k east of New York) at about 60 million. We were lucky enough to get a half-baked Sky service in Ireland for quite a while, but they never really treated us the same. For example, Tivo's were out, no service :-( They were meant to come in along with a Sky+ box (which is made by pace and which a sky rep told me just before it was being launched had "stolen the bits they needed from Tivo". BTW a quick call to sky's freephone number (yes at 3am) confirmed Sky+ STILL isn't available here and won't be til they launch the interactive services which are coming (and have been for over a year).
Now I had been thinking for a while that an open/distributed tv listings service for Ireland would be great, but that I might find little help in putting it together! But perhaps if Tivo is closing in the U.K. there might be an existing marketplace who were paying £10/month who are looking for an alternative. I can't imagine it would be the most impossible task to fool a present tv into using the free service. You'd have to reverse engineer the format used by the service, and then (to save making people solder) you'd need to deal with the fact the Tivo has a telephone connection and dials it's own number. You could establish some phone numbers to feed the demand and use a simple router to translate all dialed numbers to the new number or you could make a server to run on a PC (with a modem) that answers the calls and feeds it the data (which the server keeps up to date). There is only one response to this (and sky's attempt to take the £10/month for themselves) and that's to take the money away from them!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
In most of Europe, the broadcasting laws allow only child-friendly programming during the day, but pretty much anything (sometimes porn) at night. I assume that's what they're referring to when they say "watershed".
They're selling the consoles at or below cost
TiVo isn't selling the consoles at all. They license out the hardware to companies to produce, and it's up to the companies to make a profit, which is doable. In the past TiVo had to pay the companies to produce the systems, which is a practice they're getting out of. The hardware isn't that expensive to make anymore.
there aren't enough TiVo users to convince media companies to pay big bucks for the spots
Hrm, I'd say 500,000 active subscribers is a pretty decent captive audience. And, better yet, it's advertising that you can get exact numbers for the number of eyeballs -- at least in terms of households. TiVo knows when you watch the ads.
But, you're right... not enough advertisers. I guess that's why I nearly always have something recorded from TiVo. Currently it's Daredevil trailers. Next will be Matrix, Hulk, and other Time Warner movies (I don't recall the entire list). There may be some other stuff in between if time allows, I have no idea.
The population of TiVo users has to grow
You're right, and it is. From their last 10-Q:
Our subscriber base increased 82% over the third quarter of fiscal year 2002, from 280,000 to 510,000 subscribers due to increased consumer demand.
you get a choice. but i've found i pretty much only watch shows already recorded on the tivo (for the commerical skipping) and just let it record what ever it wants from the cable box.
now if i could just get the cat to stop chewing on the IR blaster that controls my cable box.
now with the direct tv satellite version of Tivo you can record one show and watch another, or record 2 shows (this is because it records the already compressed version of the show from satellite so it doesn't waste processor power on the encoding, saving plenty of processor for dual recording)
TiVo has the ability to record supplemental content like movie previews, behind-the-scenes footage, and "see this for more info" kind of advertising.
This content is generally accessible from a showcase section that you might browse to see what different networks are promoting, and I think they envisioned things like short broadcast ads that pop-up an on-screen TiVo icon to click for additional information. They also cycle some of this content through a listing on your main menu to promote it independently.
In the UK, the BBC purchased one of these main menu ads to record an entire episode of a new program.
Viewers in the UK were livid about 2 things. First, they felt that recording an entire program during prime time was going too far in exercising corporate control over their equipment. Secondly, they were upset that the program was adult content (post-watershed means it was rated such that it isn't suitable to air during "family hours.") that parents could not block with parental controls or delete from the main menu.
TiVo absolutely learned a lot from that incident (they had inadvertly overlooked the parental control issues) and they will approach new advertising sales opportunities very differently in the future.
Now, having said that, the real reason that they are shutting down UK sales is that the manufacturer of the TiVo box in the UK stopped making it. TiVo doesn't have the capital to invest in the UK market and have shifted to an approach of merely supporting the existing users, but nobody new. In that scenario, no need to run a sales office. Lay them off and spend the money getting new US subscribers.
Yes, it will always record your "to do" list first. I often set to record things overnight and I've never had something drop because it conflicted with a "showcase" (that's where these sit when they're not on the main menu with a little star).
In fact, it won't even change the channel on you if you happen to be watching something.
I was up the other night sleepless, flipping channels when TiVo asked if it could change the channel. I was suprised because I didn't remember setting anything up for 3:30 am on the Discovery Channel, but I let it go because I thought maybe my wife had set to record something.
So, it changed the channel (with my permission) and proceeded to start recording some previews for "Daredevil". I decided I'd rather go back to some documentary about Rhinos humping or something I was previously watching, so it let me change the channel without complaining that I was interrupting a scheduled recording or anything.
It went back and picked up the movie previews the next night, I guess because they showed up in a couple days.
I guess I was a little wary that TiVo was recording what amounts to ads at first. But I really don't mind that much now. Some of the stuff like best buy kind of turns me off, a few things like the daredevil previews I liked, and the rest I really don't even care about.
Besides, isn't there a backdoor code or something to keep TiVo from recording these?
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Tivo hasn't gone under, but for example on DirecTV it's no longer called Tivo, it's just part of your DirecTV service
Slightly wrong...
It's now called "DirecTV with TiVo". Billing is done through DTV, not TiVo, and guide updates are provided by DTV as well (which means program guide data can be different for DTiVos as compared to standalones).
DirecTV is still using the TiVo service, and paying TiVo a cut of the money.
The withdrawl of tivo from the UK is in part related to the wider mess that is UK terrestrial broadcasting, and there's a bunch of stuff going on that anyone outside the UK wouldn't be expected to know, leave now if you don't care.
There are theoretically 5 analogue terrestrial channels in the UK, and in many places only 4.
There is also no single widely available cable network either and if you do have access, it's typically a local monopoly and it's pretty expensive - typically £20-30/month for a descent package.
The Sky (satellite) service is polular but also expensive.
Several years ago a digital terrestrial service was launched and failed miserably and with much fanfare. This has recently been re-launched as entirely an entirely free-to-view service and looks set to succeed.
Now as you can see, we have a real mess of technologies here and if a company such as Tivo wants to sell a premium recorder product they've got a problem. Their marked is spread across satellite, and a multiplicity of analogue/digital terrestrial and cable formats.
What decoders do they build into their device?
1. Sky which re-transmits all of the (good) free-to-view channels have their own HD based recorder.
2. People with only terrestrial analogue are happy with VCRs
3. The cable market is fragmented technologically.
4. Digital terrestrial is a new but very small market.
So they gave up, and I don't blame them - it's a mess.
B.T.W. Pace have a digital terrestrial HD recorder which might be interesting but it was due before Christmas and there's still no sign.
Wow I'm boring.
Sky+ is most definitely NOT TiVo. Sky Subscriber Services handle the UK billing and technical support for TiVo subscribers in the UK on behalf of TiVo Inc.
British Sky Broadcasting market their own PVR called Sky+ which uses their own software developed from the codebase of the regular Sky Digibox (which is based on WinCE IIRC). Sky Subscriber Services handle the billing and technical support of this device as well, alongside a regular Sky TV subscription.
Maybe you're confused because TiVo was marketed in the UK by Sky, and TiVo used to have a "supported by Sky" flash on the main menu?
What happens when tivo records a show at 4AM, when you are watching something else?
;)
Personally I'm in bet at 4am. Call me old if you like...
Anyhow, TiVo records under two circumstances: (1) You've asked it to (2) It's decided you might like it to, based on the thumbs up and thumbs down statistics you've given it.
When TiVo is not in "live TV" mode, i.e. playing back buffered stuff from the last half hour, it will change channel whenever it feels like it -- because it knows you're not watching live TV. The assumption is that you only ever watch TV via TiVo, and this is what you should do.
When you *are* watching live TV, TiVo will not attempt to change channel in order to record category (2) programs. If a category (1) program is coming up, it will pop up a dialogue, "You asked me to record xxxx, press OK to change channel or Cancel to stay on this channel and not record it after all".
Yes, if you're piping output from your cable box around the house, this might cause problems. Not many people are.