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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.'"
So, when did it become fashionable to predict the deaths of everything from consumer eletronics to companies? There's already two links on the front page to death knell articles, I can't swing a stick on a news site without clubbing a few more. Are article writers making up for bad karma they accrued during the hypehypehype days of the dotcom boom?
And why "death"? I understand exaggeration makes for good entertainment, nobody wants to read an article titled "Man goes to work, has uneventful day, returns safely home". But even though he brings up several good points.. why? Is it impossible to consider that the market might not jump as anticipated, or the company/product can adapt to a new environment?
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Tivo is painfully expensive for the actual service. They offer it for $400 for the "lifetime" of the device. If the thing dies 1 day after the warranty, you paid $33 a month for an overhyped VCR, plus the $220 to get it. I own one, and enjoy it finding me shows.. but really, what in the hell are you going to do with 40 hours of MacGyver?
Charging 20 bucks for TV listings per month. The Box is alright for say 100-200. But the service is too expensive
You can build your on PVR with spare PC parts and a TV video card (any ATI card with TV in). Go to http://freevo.sourceforge.net and get the paid TV listing technology for free.
yet...
The article assumes Tivo will never release another version/improvement or will never implement HDTV or tap into digital cable boxes "digital" stream...
I love my tivo (I'm still building my own home brew one though because it's fun )... I kinda wish I had gotten replayTV (networking features mainly), but after their boneheaded near bait and switch PR blunder I feel better not supporting them with my purchase.
*shrug* The article was right about the dangers of the cable companies offering built in PVR's into their digital cable boxes (as a matter of conveience not necessarily signal quality/degredation concerns)
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Just to keep things in perspective, this article is written by PC Magazine's editor. What, if anyone knows, is ZD's ability to see the future? Seems to me this publication a long time ago became a Microsoft ad channel.
I have no experience with Tivo, nor HDTV, nor cable. I watch TV from a Radio Shack antenna mounted on my roof. So, in TV terms I'm pretty much Fred Flintstone. At the same time, I'm not exactly sure what my incentive is to upgrade to the products that are listed as being the killers for Tivo -- and the thought of Tivo is pretty appealing to someone like me that still uses their VCR.
The article claims that "2004 is the year of HDTV". What does this mean? HDTV penetration becomes 50% of households? This doesn't seem possible with the current penetration being 1-2% (last I checked). Admittedly, Tivo has a need to change its products and strategy over the next few years, but I think the same could be said for any technology based product.
Sleep is for the Weak
I'm pretty certain it's already dead in the UK, killed by Sky+, the Sky TV combined digibox/PVR (although I think it was probably on the way out before then, partly down to high prices at launch).
The author is just trying to say that Tivo will become a commodity device like your VCR is now. PVR's soon are not going to be for the techno elite people like yourself but will be a cheap addtion to your setup boxes.
With the FCC requiring digital broadcasts in the next few year all your pvr needs is a cheap processor, HD controller, mpeg2 decoder chip, and some software. Tivo niche could be providing the software for these new set top boxes.
Got Extra Money?
one of many problems: "The next fatal problem for TiVo is high-definition TV signals. 2004 will be the year America embraces HDTV. The Super Bowl looked tremendous in HD, movies are amazing, and in May, when ESPN begins broadcasting SportsCenter in HD, the contest will be over."
OK, so HDTV has been coming Real Soon Now (tm) for, what, a decade? And this yahoo (no pun intended) thinks SportsCenter is going to propel it to the massses? In the next 8 1/2 months? No one ever said HDTV wasn't good. It's just expensive (capable TV, plus tuner, plus whatever) and supported channels are few and far between. Yet somehow, at today's prices, everyone in America is going to buy a new, big, expensive TV and related gear this year? Uh-huh.
In any case, he seems to think TiVo is unable to change. Yeah, TiVo is absolutely unflexible and will be totally unable to adapt to *any* changes in the market. They're going to stubbornly make one product and go under when there's no more demand for it. This article is such non-news I don't even know what to say about it.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Among the people I know, only a few that are my age (late 20's, early 30's)even watch TV any more. Most are like myself: we have a TV for watching DVD's and games. If there's a TV show worth watching, it'll come out on DVD. I literally haven't watched TV outside of one that's blaring in a bar or restaurant for several years. I don't miss it. My TV is usually on with a movie or game, but no crap TV or the commercials that go along with them. As far as I'm concerned, Tivo can live or die... I don't really care.
Actually I love TiVo better than anything else. It's the company's dumb business model that I think is killing them.
Why can't I buy TiVo software to run on my own hardware? My HTPC? It's linux-based, after all.
jim (author of the original article for PCMag.com
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.
First off, the article states explicitly that the author prefers TiVo to Replay and all of its alternatives.
Secondly, he states that as much as he loves TiVo, he thinks they're doomed. As much as I love TiVo, I can't bury my head in the sand and assume they won't die just because I don't want them to.
The PVR market is already changing, and TiVo needs to get ahead of the trends in order to stay competitive. Standalone boxes will most likely go away in the next 3-5 years. TVs will come equipped with PVR functionality and have built-in cable tuners, thanks to the cable card specification.
TiVo has done a brilliant job with its UI and it's light-years ahead of other manufacturers in terms of partnerships with consumer electronics manufacturers, and its deal with DirecTV is heavily driving growth in its customer base, but the future is about building PVR functionality into TVs or cable boxes, and TiVo has no cable-box partnerships and hasn't shown any signs of being able to penetrate that market.
Now, on to my criticisms of the article. Louderback assumes that the HD-capable DirecTV TiVo receiver will stay at $1000 for any length of time. He's clearly wrong on that. The price will come down quickly once DirecTV determines that HD TiVo ownership drives subscriptions to HD content. The manufacturing costs will decline as volume increases and the prices of 250GB HDs falls, which will encourage DirecTV to eventually subsidize the price of the receiver to drive sales of HD packages.
And likewise, the cable set-top box market might dry up and blow away entirely once cable card-enabled TVs start to hit the market. And TiVo will be able to sell standalone TiVos that could replace cable set-top boxes for customers who have older TVs. Yes, TiVo suffers a price disadvantage compared to the offerings of the cable companies, who are looking to "lock in" subscribers, but the advent of cable card will negate some of the lock-in advantage anyway.
At any rate, it's difficult to predict the future. I think Louderback's column was more intended as a shot across TiVo's bow than a true prediction of their death. I think he wants them to sit up and take notice of the threats that surround them so that they can devise adequate solutions to their problems, and I think he'd desperately like for them to return his calls or emails.
(Disclaimer: I am a DirecTV subscriber who is quite happy with his DirecTivo receiver.)
Moore's Law: A complete non-sequitur. Tivo's value was never in the MPEG encoder. That merely provides compatibility with analog sources. It's the software, stupid. That's where Tivo still maintains the lead. Louderback has a good point that Tivo should have pursued a deal with Echostar more aggressively, instead of waiting until it was too late and whipping out the patent hammer, but getting to that point was a long, irrelevant trip. I guess he needed to fill a few column-inches.
HDTV: Again, the hardware is not where Tivo makes the money. Ensuring sufficient storage and throughput for multiple HD streams must have cost some R&D bucks, but everything related to decoding HD is expensive right now. Yes, the HD DirecTivo costs a whopping US$1000. But there's no such thing as a cheap HD STB, unless you go rummaging on eBay. Until something forces the STB prices down in proportion to screen prices, $1000 will be what the market bears. Maybe that's why the Moxi is still vapor...
Howlin' Mad Murdoch: Finally, a good point. I don't think I'm alone in thinking that Rupert Murdoch is going to ruin what is, smart card paranoia aside, a Good Thing. DirecTivo manages to hit the sweet spot between power and usability. I'd hope that, once he gets some Tivo-knowlegable people in his organization, he'll stick with Tivo when DirecTV becomes Sky America.
This sig intentionally left blank.
I wont buy any more home electronics that require a monthly/bimontly/annual fee to operate.
I don't need TV listings, cable provides them for free. I dont need the box to pick shows for me, or judge me because my wife uses it to watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.
I just want something to usurp the VCR, with it's mangled tapes and hideos tracking knob.
Besides a home-rolled PVR, which I currently use, there are a slew of such devices on the horizon. Everyone and their uncle is making a MediaPC with PVR functionality. There'll be PVR functionality in XBox2, and likely the PS3 and GameCube Jr.
I hope Tivo dies, and I hope the industry learns from it. I want to buy a device, and be able to use it as often as I want without any further fees.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Unfortunately, the Feds will also about that time, force the makers to honor the 'drm bit'...that won't allow you to keep the show you record for too long, nor unload it to another medium, nor SKIP the commercials....
That'll take some of the fun out of my Tivo and timeshifting...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I really need to get cracking editing this stuff and burning what I want to save onto DVDs. I've even got the entire run of Max Headroom, the first time it aired.
Advice: get a fresh digital recording wherever you can find it on cable before you start converting VHS to DVD. (Having only one first-run episode on tape, I TiVo'd the run on TechTV, with redundancy.) True, there are scenes cut, they do horrific things to the credits and penultimate scene, lose the pre-credit trailers, and cut off Max's ending monologue, but you'll have the best quality video for most of the footage coming from a digital source and fill in the edits with the VHS.
I did this with the movie One Crazy Summer, pulling the Comedy Central airing with TiVo and mixing it with an old VHS version taped off HBO (just before the DVD release was announced). It was interesting to see what edits were made, both for CC and HBO. It also got me to appreciate just how bad VHS is. I don't even like VHS for use as source material for VCDs anymore.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Erm, except that the DirecTV TiVo's have dual tuners as well, capacity of up to 80 hours recording (more if you add additional hard drives), a $5/month subscription fee, more features, stable as hell, better interface, more functionality, and the DirecTV service costs less and gives you equivalent to more channels than Time Warner. At this point my DirecTV w/TiVo has not only paid for itself, but saved me hundreds of dollars vs getting stuck with Time Warner and then later suffering through two years of Scientific Atlanta using the TW customer base to QA their hardware and software.
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
The main reason TIVO is going to die is because of a total failure to innovate their product. The TIVO was absolutely awesome 2-3 years ago. I still love my TIVO but I am constantly disgusted by their failure to improve the product.
Some things that should have been implemented AGES ago:
1) The ability to store shows in folders. It would be very convenient to have all your episodes of (Insert Show Here) in a single folder.
2) The ability to sort your programs by ANYTHING other than time/date stamp. Sorting by name sure would be nice.
3) The ability to start recording LATE rather than just early. With shows that start at stupid times like 8:59 now, it would be nice to start recording 1 minute late to avoid overlap.
4) The ability to still record part of a show if there is overlap. Just because something overlaps for 5 minutes doesn't mean the later show should just be abandoned.
5) Sharing shows between multiple TiVOs.
Finally, the recent revelation that TiVO logs EVERYTHING you go: when you pause, what parts of a show you watch more than once, etc. and sells this data really hurt TiVO badly.
I didn't mind them keeping aggregate data on what shows got recorded because that helps me. If the shows I watch are considered "popular" then it is less likely they will be cancelled.
But I definitely don't like them being able to record data on when I pause, when I fast forward, what I watch more than once, etc. That is an invasion of privacy. Furthermore, I suspect this additional logging is the reason why so many TiVO owners I know report far more problems and lags when performing such operations.
The failure to innovate and the implementation of incredibly invasive logging are what will kill TiVO. Those actions make the environment RIPE for a competitor to steal customers.
-Michael
Threshold RPG