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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.
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.
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.
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.