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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.'"
Considering the partnerships that Tivo has made with DirecTV and Time Warner Cable, I don't see them going any anytime soon. Not to say never, but I believe that this announcement is a little premature.
Now, if you are talking about stand-alone Tivo units, yeah they will probably go away, but I am willing to accept that to have one component on my AV rack instead of two.
Indie music geeks have attained the level of zen ennui where they deem bands passe before the last flyer reading "2 GUITARISTS SEEK DRUMMER" is done printing at Kinko's.
Now computer geeks are achieving the same thing by declaring every new technology dead before it's even managed to hit its stride. It does not make you a geekier person, or a better one, or a smarter one, to say this crap.
Look. TiVo won't die. So the reviewer says he likes ReplayTV better and that TiVo won't dominate the market in years to come.
But that's ok.
Consider the home PVR market. By all accounts, it's a growing market. In years to come, let's say that it's a $10B market. Even with just 10% market share, that's $1B. Not chump change.
Honestly it's like saying AOL will die. Fading into obscurity, being obsolete, etc are not equivalent to dying. Last time I checked, AOL still had 24.3 million subscribers. All joking aside, let's assume 20m actually pay. That is still $400m/MONTH which is a CASH stream that I dare not to cough at.
Personally I think the death of TiVo will come when the public finds out about non-subscription encombered PVRs. =
It's not fashionable, it's profitable, and that's why the shitty, shitty, super duper ultra-shitty, PC magazines, etc. that people link to on Slashdot as if they're some actual form of legit press, love predicting stuff like crazy.
Wannabe pundits don't get ad dollars or further writing assignments by getting the facts straight and admitting they cannot see the future, they get attention by taking a few small things, extrapolating them into way farther into the future than makes any sense at all, and having people on slashdot and their sites' message boards argue about it.
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
I don't tape things anymore, I 'Tivo' them. The phrase 'to Tivo' has become pretty ubiquitous in the past few years and is synonymous with PVR recording.
With that sort of name recognition, they're not going away any time soon. They may get bought, but the name will be around for quite some time.
Moore's Law - Just because you can put an MPEG2 stream onto a hard drive without converting to analog, doesn't mean a TiVo isn't a better way to do it than a clunky piece of crap set-top box from your local spam^H^H^H^Hcable company. TiVo wins marketshare because of its UI, not because it's doing anything technologically revolutionary. Moore's law merely means that the cost of silicon will continue to drop -- but the cost of building a TiVo is about the same as the cost of building anything else. TiVo's strength - its usability - is a function of good design, not the cost of silicon.
HDTV - And next week, IPv6 to take over the world! Enough said.
Murdoch / DirecTV - Then he'll buy TiVo outright, which will also be good for TiVo. Why oust it in favor of something less useful but cheaper, when Moore's Law says both the clunky and the useful products are going to be the same price?
The article's an unwarranted slam against TiVo and only towards the end do we find the real motivation:
So that's the real reason for this poorly-thought-out slam: The author used to get serviced to orgasm from the company whenever he flashed his press credentials. But today, he gets the same customer service as the rest of us get... from every company we do business with. It's phone support. It's going to suck Deal with it.
What's next? Netcraft author denied photo-op with cute daemon-suited ch1x0rz at LinuxWorld, and writes a report that confirms FreeBSD is dying?
So, when did it become fashionable to predict the deaths of everything...?
Apparently since the 16th century.
The idea of charging $13/mo for a programming schedule will die. I forsee that there will be so much competition for DVR's and PVR's that the service fee will keep dropping down to free.
Then, they will have a simple box to type ANY phone number or IP Address (if a network interface is present) to download from, and cable/satellite providers will give you free access to a scheduling server of some sort, and there will be a standard for these schedules.
Hypocrisy is the 8th deadly sin.
I just converted a box at my house to a Media Center PC for the fun of it. It can do everything a Tivo can do, everything a regular DVD player can do, everything a regular stereo can do, and everything a WinXP Pro machine can do.
When normal people want toast, they buy a toaster. They don't take a previously-existing, alternate kitchen appliance, tear it open, and make it capable of producing toast.
The key to making a name for TiVo was impressing the geeks, as they were most likely to be the early adopters. The key to selling TiVo is to convince the regular people that it's easy-to-use, provides a valuable service, and that it's priced within reason. Seeing as every person I know who has used my TiVo for a few minutes has purchased one, geek or not, I believe it has adequately met those criteria.
I agree. Either Tivo needs to turn its product into a subscription model (i.e. you rent a box from them for 10 bucks a month, including the subscription fee), or turn it into a hardware model (buy the box, get free subscription). Otherwise, they WILL die.
The current model has got to go. Let's see, you buy the locked-down box for the full price ($150 - $300+) and then have to pay obscene amounts of money ($12 a month?) for the privilege to download the TV program schedule (which programs like MythTV do for free). I call that a ripoff, and that's why Tivo is hardly selling any standalone units.
Also, many people have digital cable and so on, and you can't really use a PVR with it unless you pay extra for multiple cable boxes (and somehow interface the cable box to the tivo). The way I see it, Tivo can survive only by licensing its stuff to cable/satellite box manufacturers. And I'm sure they would much rather do it in-house to save money. So I definitely think the article has a point.
Please don't let the attitudes of a few reviewers lead you to conclude that all computer geeks like to predict the death of computer technology.
Remember, the "Death of Apple" has been predicted for so long that it's become a standard joke, so I hardly think it counts. If nothing else. Microsoft has a vested interest in Apple staying alive. They need competitors to fend off the world's Monopoly laws, and Apple is a better competitor to have than Linux. Why? Because Apple isn't trying to take over the world and doesn't have masses of developers and users out for blood. Apple has a bottom line to worry about, and while Linux companies have to worry about money, Linux itself does not.
Computer journalists love to predict the impending death of a technology, because it gets more readers. It's more sensational to say something is dying than to say it is facing challenges from a shifting market.
The only person who speaks for me is me, and I haven't heard or read all that many people predicting the death of technology.
Besides, the articles listed today are hardly "New technology" whose death is being predicted "before it's even managed to hit its stride." Both Apple and TiVo have been around the block and had high points as well as low.
As a side note, I'd like to caution everyone against confusing being critical of a new technology with predicting it's death. Lots of new technologies are being awaited with baited breath, and others are declared DOA because they're either obvious vapor ware like the Phantom Game Consol, not mature enough to take to market just yet (Nintendo Virtual Boy) or a technology looking for a market (Remember those Smell Cards they were developing?)
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Lets face it tivo owners, the suits are turning the product into shit. Remember the dawn, great little box that you could hack, run own stream extracting ftp server, hack in OSD of caller ID, hack in remote scheduleing.. just about anything you can think of. Then the suits came out with Series 2.. ugh, no hacking (save bios hack, 2card monty), and then came Home Media Option, or as I like to call it, an over priced package of all the cool hacks we stole from the community and impleneted like shit. Fast forward to today, the hacker community is giving up on tivo, the real PVR hacks are coming out for things like MythTV, Freevo.. etc.. and Tivo has yet to pull out any new features.. wait.. the did add TVGuide ads on everything what a great day that was. Tivo will die mostly becouse the product development has been ignored. There are a few things Tivo could do to save its self. First come out with an HD tivo that supports caputre via firewire, as we are all know FCC has told cable providers they need to add firewire out by april 1, btw the few providers that already support firwire have a great side effect, no OSD from the cable box so the OSD stacking problem is SOLVED. Second slash the price of the Unit to just above costs, if it cost $400~ a unit then they have production chain problems. They should be able to get the unit cost down below $100, do direct sales of $150, but allow retail to carry it at what ever they want. Finally, bring back hacking, put the protectvie seal, add the warnings about voiding wartnee.. yada yada.. but let the community back in to hacking, thats where all the good ideas came from anyways
$20 / month? On what planet? It's only $12 or so, not $20. Besides, I got a lifetime subscription a year and a half ago, so a few more months and it will have reached the break-even point. After that, it's effectively free. Sure you can build your own, but not all of us have the time or energy. Five years ago I did, but now that I've got a disposable income, I'd much rather buy a better engineered product that just plain works.
Next time, check your facts before posting.
-jason
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
Fingering, FTP, Newsgroups, academic web sites, etc. are all still there, all still being used. In fact, I would wager that there are more newsgroup users now than in '85, it's just that it's a slightly bigger fish in a much, much bigger pond. While some pre-HTML stuff has been usurped (Slashdot.org growing from a newsgroup, for example,) the commercial web mostly grew around the old Internet, not in place of it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Nevermind "season passes", Tivo has WISHLISTs!
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Seriously. They stop because of a lack of innovation, and what is left after said innovation stops is what diehards will continue. OS/2, anybody?
This sig no verb.