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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's the reason for pulling the plug in the UK? Just not economically feasible?
This doesn't look good for the future of a Canadian version of the TiVo.
How's TIVO a threat to BBC anyway since there are no commercials to filter out?
I always understood that the whole point of a Tivo was not to have to watch crap in the first place. This doesn't sound a hell of a lot better than broadcast TV, complete with commercials and garbage TV.
.. also known as the loss leader, seems to be a defining practice in interactive home entertainment these days. That basically means that the company makes no money off the initial sale, but reaps high margins from subsequent purchases necessary to keep that initial device functional.
.. but that's another issue.
.. then trying to make profits by selling mandatory advertising spots to media companies. Unfortunately, there aren't enough TiVo users to convince media companies to pay big bucks for the spots.
It worked extremely well for Sony -- selling the playstation at zero (sometimes negative) margins, then making money by being the sole licenser of games (that they didn't spend money developing) for the platform.
I think the xbox is taking financially because Microsoft went out and bought a substantial number of good game development companies who haven't been able to release a seriously block-busting game
TiVo is a completely different story. They're selling the consoles at or below cost
The population of TiVo users has to grow -- and that means they need to lower the cost of their consoles. Dramatically. Even if it means reducing the functionality of the box. When TiVo costs $50, and you can buy it at Wallgreens, that's when advertising and media companies are going to sit up and thing "Holy crap, that's a huge captive audience."
That's a pretty good lather you worked yourself into, too bad it has no basis in reality. You're not paying for the enhanced content, the advertiser bears the costs, and it actually reduces the cost of your TiVo subscription in the process. If I have to be "spammed" with content I never see and it pays for part of my subscription, I'm fine with it. The big flap over "spamming" was because people got irate over the CONTENT of the show. Nobody whined about enhanced content for MONTHS, until they saw the one program they disliked, and then suddenly it's spam. Sorry, it isn't.
You don't have to watch the promo shows it records. You would actually have to navigate to the show and play it to be "forced" to watch it. On my (US) tivo, they are easily distinguishable. It doesn't take any of your recording time away. I fail to see how this is "not any better than broadcast TV."
Yes, it's something like. In the UK I think broadcasters restrict more mature content to after 9pm. I don't know whether they are laws, or just industry standards. It certainly helps parents a lot.
;)
I was shocked when I first moved to the US: the first time I watched TV there after arriving I saw Predator on the box at 10am Sunday morning. Being accustomed to the watershed, I didn't think it very appropriate, especially considering that is prime time for children.
The flip side to the watershed is that the content is often more mature, more risque, and less cut than what appears on US TV (which surprises most people as they expect the British to be particularly uptight and pridish.) It's nothing by continental European standards though
'watershed' is defined as 'turning point'...'post' = after, so it seems the marketing arm (ass?) of the BBC claims that program was past being new or in other words, widely accepted by viewers in the UK. "Everyone likes XYZ, let's use it!" - Imagine the meeting conversation where this decision was made. M.P's Flying Circus would have had an easy target with this one. "I'm a spammer and I'm ok...I spams all night and I spams all day.....
I send out spam,
I eat my lunch,
I go to the lavatory...
On Wednesday I go channel surfing
with a no-spam TiVo equipped TV."
TiVo programming, at least at that point in time, allowed content such as trailers, etc. to be loaded onto the boxes without being requested by the end user. These were apparently considered to be ok for marketing purposes, etc. In this case, the BBC took advantage and loaded an entire program to everyone's box, clearly unaware of the public's concept of spam.
I think marketing wonks worldwide have gone down to the same lab, where the brain circuits relating to victimless crime, along with sociopathic attributes common to all spammers, are fused into one synapse that fires automatically when such keywords/phrases as 'customer benefit'; 'unique opportunity'; 'sureness of prospect' and 'special offer' are used in any conversation.
The BBC had no clue that what they were doing was objectional. That's the issue for me...they have their hand on the switch, yet they are out of touch with the tastes, attitudes and wishes of their customers.
For goodness sake folks, you're suppposed to be techies, don't you understand that all TV programming is "spammed" in the sense that it's broadcast to everybody??? That makes it fairly silly to accuse the BBC of spamming. Yeah, the BBC and all TV stations have been spamming us for half a century, it's what they do.
All TVs, VCRs, and TiVos in the appropriate reception areas received the broadcast, if they were switched on and tuned to the right channel. I've never heard of anyone switching on the telly and shouting in horror, "I'm being spammed!". The TiVos also stored what they were receiving, as that's what they were designed to do with this special content. That really does make this a non-story.
Please reserve the word "spam" for individually addressed delivery systems delivering the same item to multiple recipients. Applying it to broadcast systems makes no sense at all.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
TiVo may have seemed revolutionary in the USA, but in the UK it was just one of many enhanced TV systems.
TiVo's biggest rival, Sky Plus (Sky+) did everything that TiVo did, and more, came pre-packaged with an installation engineer's visit and had the branding and backing of the UK's largest pay-TV provider, Sky (backed by Rupert Murdoch/Fox corp).
Sky already had a shedload of TV toys. For instance, I remember one of my business meetings in Texas two years ago, the CEO of this oil firm was saying something like "In the future, you'll be able to watch a football match and zoom in on individual players".
Then I glanced down at the predicted coverage map for my GPRS phone in Texas...
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
AIUI, the TiVo box works by downloading listings via a dial-up connection, and MPEG-encoding an analogue TV signal.
The thing is, they released it in the UK after digital TV was "widely" available. IMHO, most of the people that would consider buying a TiVo are likely to be people who have digital TV.
DVB has digital, in-band listings information that can be updated in real-time if the line-up changes. Additionally, with something like Sky+ or one of the yet-to-surface digital terrestrial or cable DVR boxes, you don't have to decode the MPEG to analogue and then re-encode it to MPEG before you can record it. That makes for a cheaper box, with higher quality audio/video and better compression (so more stuff can be recorded).
I'm guessing that demand for integrated DVR systems will be much higher than it ever was for TiVo.
Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
This is ridiculous. Thomson stopped manufacturing TiVos in the middle of last year. This is not news.
It has been all but impossible to buy a TiVo in the UK for the last few months. This is not news.
Equally, the idea that TiVo will pull the plug on the UK market is ridiculous.
They have 35,000 subscribers paying £10 ($15) per month, and just two employees. So... £350,000 revenues a month, two staff, a couple of servers, a few phone calls. They must have some pretty expensive offices for the UK operation not to be profitable.
My forecast: when TiVo the company (ticker: TIVO) becomes profitable in the back half of '03, then management will again turn their eyes to other markets: Canada, Australia, UK, etc.
Anyone care to bet I'm wrong?
--- My dad's political betting
What people are referring to is that if they had hacked their units by installing a larger hard drive, TiVo partitioned some of that space out for reserved space.
Since TiVo doesn't support hacked drives, they don't need to write special code to identify and protect them. Behavior of an upgraded machine was a known risk.