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TiVo Will Die
Espectr0 writes "Yahoo! News has a PC Magazine-reprinted story about why they think the TiVo will die because of rising competition. From the article: 'It's always hard to write an obituary, especially when the subject is still alive. It's especially hard for me, because I love the little guy like a brother. But, alas, TiVo will die. I was one of the first reviewers to get my hands on an early TiVo box. I compared TiVo with ReplayTV, and although I really wanted to like ReplayTV, TiVo won my heart over.'"
The present "street price" of a "DirecTV DVR with TiVo Serivce" is only $99, with only a $4.95 per household DVR service fee that is waived for subscribers to DirecTV's highest programming plan and is not charged multiple times if there is more than one DirecTiVo in the same household. There is of course a one year committment required to avoid a $300 early cancelation fee, but that's standard for all new DirecTV units.
So, let's not compare apples to oranges. The standalone TiVo risks getting priced out of the market, and the HD TiVo is not yet ready for mass distribution, but the DirecTV model is flying off the shelves. The Moxi product isn't available to consumers outside of limited testing markets yet, and News Corp's yet to release a US-aimed PVR or even say they're going to do so so all that product has is speculation by pundits. When your biggest competitors are pure vaporware, I'd say your company is doing pretty good.
If you take it to a TiVO repair center, they will transfer your lifetime subscription to a new TiVo.
TiVO has a new product called TiVoToGo. It should be a Media Center killer, since it will give you the added flexibility you need without having to have yet another crashing Windows box in your house. Here's the press release: "from TiVO. I think this new product will give users what they really want, which is more flexibility for managing their content, and having a 'library' capability that doesn't fall short at the size of the TiVO box. Rich
and with some models, basic 3 day service is included
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
TiVo won't die because they have patents on the whole DVR idea.
This is one case where patents are good. TiVo, and DVRs in general, aren't really that obvious - VCRs and such aren't really prior art.
Now that everyone and their brothers are making DVRs, well, TiVo owns the IP behind all of it. They can go off and sue/license the technology to anyone, and they'll be hard to stop. Plus they learned from Apple's mistakes and filed the right kinds of patents.
There you go - patents aren't all bad.
There was no web in 1985, period. A connection capable of more than 2400bps was almost the exclusive province of leased line holders. SLIP was an informal pseudo standard that nobody would even think to write up as an RFC for another 3 years.
I think you may mean 1995, which really at that time was the first big year of things internet. Netscape version 1 was already out. This new C++ like web applet language called Java had just come out. The world you describe is what the net was like more c. 1993 than 1995.
The DirecTiVo unit is a combination DirecTV receiver and TiVo unit. You can hack it up (I dropped in a second hard drive for 104 hours recording time total), the picture quality is as good as DirecTV's feed (because it just records the pre-compressed signal that DirecTV sends down) and best of all, if you run two coax lines from your dish you can record two shows at once -- all for $9.95 a month. Oh, and you can get the unit right now from Circuit City for $99.
And people wonder why I love my TiVo...
It didn't die anymore than I died because I was so different in 1985. It grew up, just like everyone else. Beyond that, you seem to have some misinformation there.
Let's see, the Web (http) wasn't invented until 1991. While SLIP existed in 1985, the RFC wasn't written until 1988, and even then, it was something available primarily on commercial unix equipment. I think perhaps you meant gopher sites instead of finger sites (or maybe you meant finger servers, cause I've never heard of "finger sites" nor does the phrase make any sense). Even gopher didn't exist until the early 90's (maybe UMN was using it before that, but I doubt anyone else was).
As another poster pointed out, I would place this description of the Internet in the 1991-1993 time period, not 1985. Perhaps Hobbes' Internet timeline would help clear things up.
http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
One thing on the Hobbes time-line: The focus here is on the development of Internet via ARPA. well and good and this is indeed the antecendents of today's networks but, one thing missed on such, and mainly because of the focus of the researcher: There was a parallel network structure of the time: Mainframe Nets. Going back to the days of the IBM OS/360 and continuing on through the 370 series machines, mainframes were networked all over the country. Banks, Insurance companys, and your government at work, loved to share data about all us good boys and girls even back then and to do so, networkign databases was used. Several dodges were used for this that predates the OSI/ISO model and any modern protocols. One common connection was a "Channel to Channel Switch" which was direct to the BUS connection between machines. Another was the "Remote Job Entry" or RJE station. The Hobbes timeline (to site one example of the oversite here) points to 1972 as the date for the very first computer "Chat". I know for a fact that long before this, chat sessions were taking place between computer operators on mainframes. Some of these were even conducted from punch cards. iirc the command in old OS/HASP for sending a line of text to another op (limited to 80 columns, or one card) was $DMR1,'THIS IS THE TEXT OF THE MESSAGE',LOG=N which would send the message to Remote station number 1 and supress log entrys of the remark. I remember a gal who ran the Engineering Dept RJE on line 3 at the University where I worked during the early 70s: $DRMR3,'HEY SALLY! HOW ABOUT LUNCH AT THE FRONTIER RESTRAUNT?',LOG=N. For anyone interested in the networks of that time, I would actually suggest reading a novel: THE ADOLESCENCE OF P1 by Thomas J. Ryan -Highly recomended.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Actually, DirecTiVo service is $4.99.