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ReplayTV Price Drop Bait-and-Switch
jkeyes writes "Last week on 12/17 DNNA (new parent company of Replay TV) decided to drop the Replay TV 5504 model down to $149, yet the boxes and website said that it came with three years free service. So immediately it appeared on deal sites like FatWallet with Replay telling people on the phone who called that yes all 5504 models include 3 years of service so immediately Circuit City & Amazon sold out. Then on the 12/22 DNNA released a press release annoucing the new price and claiming that the 5504 models NO LONGER have 3 years free with them and blamed the retailers for dropping the price too soon. Even though their own Customer Service Reps were saying when it first dropped that you got 3 years free. Also to add to the issue the actual devices have giant green stickers on them saying Three Years Free AND a paper inside telling you this. Replay went on to say that if you had a problem with this or your replay was deactivated to just return it to the retailer you purchased it from."
What the summary doesn't mention is that DNNA has been deactivating boxes that a) had stickers and papers that said they included service, b) were sold by retailers who assured customers they included service, c) DNNAs customer service said included service, even to people who asked about the $150 boxes, and d) often did show as having service when they were hooked up.
Then it took them a week before they put out clarifying press releases, and some stores continue to sell boxes with service-included stickers that DNNA won't likely honor. DNNA can blame the retailers all they want, but they're the ones deactivating boxes that contain their promises of included service. This as about as classic a bait-and-switch as there is.
Legally, if they sell you a box and 3 years of a subscription service, and then fail to deliver, you are entitled to, at a minimum, a refund of the cost of the box and the fair market value of three years of the service, regardless of what you actually paid for the setup. This is the benefit of your bargain. Basic contracts law.
If the business is still alive, you might even be entitled to specific performance of the contract, if there was no reasonable alternative to their service. I assume TiVO is a reasonable alternative.
(By the way, the solution to any ReplayTV problem is called Tivo. Even without dodgy deals, it's always been a better idea to get a Tivo than a ReplayTV)
That is a bit of historical revisionism. Maybe TODAY the current ReplayTV is suckeke but it wasn't always that way. The Replay 4000 units were shipping with functional ethernet almost a year before Tivo did the same. They also included automagic commercial detection and skip on playback - which works very well on "bright" shows and decently on "dark" shows (like buffy, for example). They also supported show-sharing across the interent to other R4000 owners, something Tivo (and Replay's current management) are way too big pussies to ever consider. Local network extraction of the mpeg files is also quite easy on the R4000 units and probably the R5000 too, I haven't checked. You could even do streaming playback on your PC direct from the replay with a player like videolan (vlc). Very handy for those of us with projectors on their PC's who want, for quality reasons, a full digital path to the screen.
Tivo has always had a more novice-friendly interface and they've got up on a lot, but not all, of the above features. But at the time, the R4000 was WAY ahead of the Tivo. Plus, no one has ever had to worry that their ReplayTV will think they are gay.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
...you should buy a Tivo instead. Tivo produces a reliable product running on Linux, is hacker-friendly, and respects your privacy. And with over 1 million users (as of this month), they've passed the critical "consumer acceptance" threshhold generally used as a metric in the industry to assess the success of consumer electronics.
.@.
For further discussion, legal talk, and the whole history... here's the fatwallet thread.
a tid=24&threadid=254797
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/messageview.php?c
Davak
I was at my local CC store on 12/17 and they had a sign placed on top of the ReplayTV that explained exactly what was going on, and that there may be some contradictory advertisments still in circulation because of the rapidness of the change.
Those who bought from 11/17 to 12/16 appear to be the big winners... it look like their 110% price protection claims are going to be valid.
I also have a Replay TV. I'm on my 3rd unit, as the first two went kaput and had to be RMAd. Customer service during this time was a mixed bag, some reps were great, others did not appear to be native speakers of English and I could only understand every other word they spoke.
However, now that I've got a working box I'm pretty happy with it. Never had any problem with dl'ing the channel guide. And with its "sharing" feature and client software that others have written, you can send shows off to your PC for storage (or I think even burning to VCD, though I've never tried that).
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
You had a classic bad-product experience. I didn't, but I'd still recommend TiVo over ReplayTV.
I own one of each. I recently upgraded my 4-year-old TiVo to a 120GB HD (30 hours at top quality; 145 hours at low quality) and love it again. My old HD was one of the ones with seek-timing problems, so there were hiccups in video and audio output and the menus ran really slow (I maintain it was a timing-design flaw and the drives were fine; TiVo maintained it was bad drives, but they still sold repairs using newer drives with much tighter timing specs rather than just non-bad versions of the same drives...) Anyway. I got the new drive (dirt cheap from http://www.weaknees.com) with TiVo SW preloaded, had my machine booting within 10 minutes (no, really) of cracking the case, and didn't lose a nonce of my lifetime service. Zero video or audio glitches, and menus are 5-10X faster.
The TiVo Channel guide is far easier to use for surfing.
The TiVo will step single frames both forward and backward; for no good reason, the ReplayTV will not.
ReplayTV's scheduling and playback-menu software is slightly more featurous, and allows you to listen to the currently output program (live or recorded), unlike TiVo's, which requires you to escape to a silent menu system to browse or make changes. Both have backgrounded audio and video in live-schedule surfing. Otherwise, ReplayTV's menuing is a bit more tedious and fragile feeling than TiVo's.
My ReplayTV has automatic commercial-skip, but it can be confused by non-go-to-commercial fades in the program near the commercial segments. So you lose the first or last few seconds of some scenes. For shows like that, I revert to using the "skip-forward" button that skips 30 seconds and is slightly quicker to deal with commercials than the TiVo method of triple-FF and hit the play button when you see the show return.
Tivo's play button backs up to an estimate of the end of the commercials coming out of double and triple FF modes. And it's surprising how good it is at guessing your reaction time within a second, so the triple-FF method is effective.
ReplayTV sometimes locks up completely if it gets stuck dialing home. That might have been a break-in problem, as it hasn't happened since the first couple of days I owned it.
In general, TiVo seems to be the more mature, better designed system. And now that I've fixed my HW problems, it feels like I have a brand new one. If I'd done that before getting a ReplayTV, I'd have got a second TiVo instead. Mea guinea piggus.
Oh. And the TiVo with the new HD is absolutely silent. No more disk-whirr in the living room. No fan noise. Scary "is it on" silence. The dolts at ReplayTV used a fan with a stepper motor (I think) and it sounds like they actually use it to keep the fan speed low. Dumb. Rumbles all night long. Not noticeable during the daytime, but the human ear is capable of 6-7 orders of magnitude of sensitivity increase depending on ambient noise, and if you're susceptible to insomnia, it's a stressor. I'm thinking of ripping it out and cooling the thing with a bucket of ice.
One last thing: ReplayTVs can be networked to send recorded shows from unit to unit; I understand that's supposed to be available on newer TiVos. I have no opinion of its value.
I am on my THIRD ReplayTV 5080...the first one died within a month, then the replacement died! What's worse is that it took a couple of months for ReplayTV to activate the first replacement unit...I had purchased a lifetime activation and they too forever to switch the activation over from the old unit to the new unit. Things went much smoother for the second replacement...although the fact that I've had THREE of these damn machines is pretty sad.
Once you get past that, the ReplayTV itself is FAR superior to Tivo. Automatic Commercial Skip actually works 95% of the time, and using DV Archive, I am able to download any recorded show over my home network to my mac to burn to DVD. It's just awesome. Their interface is far superior as well...I like how you can organize the shows by category...and they are not displayed by date recorded. That's one thing I HATE about the Tivo...you have to scroll around looking for shows that you recorded a while ago. With ReplayTV, you can find it instantly. Plus you have a buttont to skip 30-seconds without a hack, unlike Tivo series I...and as far as I know Series 2 machines can't do this. Actually, you can fast forward as far as you'd like by hitting a number first and the the skip button. It's little things like that that make the difference to me.
Tivo is the AOL of PVR's, imho. ReplayTV decided not to bend-over for the networks, which cost them money in legal fees...which definitely hurt them. The only thing Tivo is better at is marketing.
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
Number of sites around the web are still selling Replay's with 3 years service. My advice - buy one + if Replay don't live up to their deal take them to small claims court. You'll easily win + there are no lawyer fees. (Actually Replay won't even show up for the case so it'll take all of 30 seconds for you to get the judgement). How to collect: Invoice them with the court documents or (if you want to be really nasty) stick a collection agency on them -- it'll cost you anything up to 50% of the court award, but the satisfaction will be pure bliss. Enjoy!
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
Follow these steps and your tivo's "->|" button becomes 30 second skip:
Select
Play
Select
3
0
Select
It will at least get rid of this source of annoyance.
P.S. Tivo Rocks!
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
As for what Replay is doing with their "free" offer, it appears to violate the Federal Trade Commission Guidelines for use of the word "Free". These are quite specific.
when the purchaser is told that an article is ``Free'' to him if another article is purchased, the word ``Free'' indicates that he is paying nothing for that article and no more than the regular price for the other. Thus, a purchaser has a right to believe that the merchant will not directly and immediately recover, in whole or in part, the cost of the free merchandise or service by marking up the price of the article which must be purchased, by the substitution of inferior merchandise or service, or otherwise.
That's clear enough. It's binding on the supplier as well as the retailer; the supplier can't pass the buck here.
California also requires this: (Business and Professions Code 17509).
-
Any advertisement, including any advertisement over the
Internet, soliciting the purchase or lease of a product or service,
or any combination thereof, that requires, as a condition of sale,
the purchase or lease of a different product or service, or any
combination thereof, shall conspicuously disclose in the
advertisement the price of all those products or services.
That's clear enough.