The Programmer Who Could Save Tivo

Damon Darlin from Business 2.0 writes "We just posted a story on Arthur Van Hoff, the programming legend who now works at TiVo. He was one of the Java geniuses at Sun (has almost as many patents as Bill Joy) and started Strangeberry, which Tivo bought in January. the story tells how his Strangeberry software will be given away to developers of web content. The next generation Tivos will then be able to recognize web content and direct it to the appropriate home device. This could be the stuff that saves tivo because none of the set top boxes will have this ability.

Comments

Nice Feature, but..

[Klar]

The next generation Tivos will then be able to recognize web content and direct it to the appropriate home device. This could be the stuff that saves tivo because none of the set top boxes will have this ability.

While this is a cool feature, I'm not sure if it alone will be able to save Tivo. There are so many cheaper alternatives, and I'm sure they will be able to add a similar feature in too. Personally when I'm watching TV(which I almost never have time for as of late), I don't wanna be reading stuff online, I just want to relax and watch a movie or show.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[strictfoo]

The key here is: "More features != better product"

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[garcia]

While this is a cool feature, I'm not sure if it alone will be able to save Tivo. There are so many cheaper alternatives, and I'm sure they will be able to add a similar feature in too. Personally when I'm watching TV(which I almost never have time for as of late), I don't wanna be reading stuff online, I just want to relax and watch a movie or show.

What would save Tivo would be cheaper hardware, cheaper lifetime subcriptions or no subscriptions at all, and the ability for third party add-ons (hardware or software).

You don't want to surf and watch TV at the same time but others do. Some people want a MP3/Video collection manager on their TV. Let them do it.

Enough of this "we want more, more, more, money" shit and more of "we want more, more, more, customers" shit :)

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[MarsDefenseMinister]

TiVo is $99 now. There's no reason for a geek not to have one. I paid $400 for mine, and it is worth every penny.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

you still paid too much. Replay tv is on amazon.com for 60 after rebates.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Boglin]

Some people want a MP3/Video collection manager on their TV. Let them do it.

Actually, TiVo already supports playing MP3s over the home network. As for videos, you must have different friends than I do, since I haven't really seen any clamor for that functionality.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Aardpig]

You don't want to surf and watch TV at the same time but others do. Some people want a MP3/Video collection manager on their TV. Let them do it.

I already access my videos and MP3s (actually, OGGs) via MythTV . On top of that, I check the weather, get news headlines, and play games. I can also schedule programs from halfway around the world, via the web interface.

On top of all this, MythTV is free free. I'm not sure what would ever convince me to switch to TiVO or a similarly-limited product.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[multimed]

Personally for me, just making my tv/cable box/dvr able to quickly pull up IMDB pages or info would be a killer ap. I don't want to surf persay but I'm always trying to remember an actor, director, etc. & what else I've seen them in or whatever and I either run to the computer & search IMDB or try to remember it later (and usually don't).

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[jargoone]

Of the things you list MythTV can do, the only thing I can't do on my TiVo(s) is play games (and that is if you ignore the lame tic-tac-toe that comes with JavaHMO).

On top of all this, MythTV is free free. I'm not sure what would ever convince me to switch to TiVO or a similarly-limited product.

A house? A wife? Kids? Things that take up time you can spend on hacking to get the thing to work?

I'm not saying the above do not apply to you, but they do for some.

My TiVo just works. I have three of them, and have for several years, and it's never crashed ONCE. I screw around with computers enough at work; when I want to watch TV, I just want to watch TV.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[dfj225]

I'm not so sure they necessarily meant web content as in web pages but more online resources. For example, they mention being able to pull a movie from a Netflix like website and view it whenever you please, the same could be done for other online videos or news sources. At least, this is what I hope they mean. I don't want to read any websites while watching something either. I think what really needs to happen first is for more publishers to put good content online, then devices like TiVo can make the most of it.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Aardpig]

A house? A wife? Kids? Things that take up time you can spend on hacking to get the thing to work?

Check. check. check. And sure -- I spent a while getting the system set up. But now it runs fine, and by not having to pay subscriptions, I save money that I can spend on my family. But, as you point out, YMMV.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're saying is, what would save TiVo would be if they stopped trying to make money. Which is actually the opposite of what would save them.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[garcia]

What you're saying is, what would save TiVo would be if they stopped trying to make money. Which is actually the opposite of what would save them.

There are plenty of hardware vendors that sell a product w/o the requirement of a subscription. Fine, if you want to keep paying them $13/mo, so be it, but I still think that third party software and hardware should be permitted.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[mbbac]

Geeks without cable or satellite TV probably shouldn't buy one. That's why I haven't. It's not too useful for OTA transmissions.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

> There's no reason for a geek not to have one.

Let's see...I don't watch tv. That sounds like a great reason not to have one!

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[recharged95]

Considering all computers have have this feature and can easily get DVR capability. I still prefer the BBC TVOD way of content viewing as mentioned by slashdot.

Unfortunately TVOD as well as VOD require you to think on deciding what to watch. I think that's why Tivo has a solid following: one can (by default) watch TV in a "no-brainer" way, they have the normal viewing schedule as the syndicates, and decisions are more provoked not only by what you 'want to watch', but by other social factors like what everyone else is watching, i.e. we all don't choose to watch programs by content alone. And you get the same benefits of TVOD/VOD (scheduling, etc..) to boot

"The programmer who could save Tivo..."

Hmmm, and could help [save] the Spam community as well [unfortunately]. Could my Tivo recognize Spam and forward it to my trash can?

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[OctaneZ]

well yes, $99 + $12.95 a month, or $299 for 'your models "lifetime",' the cost is equivalent to ~23 months of month-by-month service.

so, right quick we're back up to your $400.

So yes, while $99 is an easy sell as a DVR, a $99 brick is of little interest.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[ArsonSmith]

It is very useful, more so than cable I would say. OTA transmissions give you few choices and less time slots. I'd get a Tivo long before getting cable. When I first moved into my house I just had rabbit ears hooked to my tivo for the first 3 months. I would rather have Broadcast TV/Tivo than Cable TV w/o Tivo. Although Tivo + Cable is a good combination as well. I don't even bother renting movies, hurrying home for a show, or missing out on Friday night Sci-Fi to go out with friends, just pick the from the list during the week and watch them on the weekend when I have 2-3 hours to spend.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure there is! Where I live, TiVo's aren't available. However, other (digital!) TV receivers are, in the form of PCI cards.

So I have a Linux box that I can control via remote to watch TV and record programs as I want, and there is no corporation monitoring or controlling what I watch/record.

There's no way I'd trade that in for something like a TiVo, even if one were available!

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[3terrabyte]

Idiot. $400 was the price when it first came out. At least 4 years ago. That's almost what I paid. What was the price of replay TV on Amazon back then?

Oh that's right. There was no replay TV back then. In fact there was nothing else back then. When replay TV finally did come out well over a year later, I believe it retailed at $300.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[kpogoda]

I have to agree with you. With Freevo, MythTV and other free alternatives, they are going to have to do more than this. I watch television to relax, not to play. The monthly subscription service really will have to offer more for me to buy into it before I choose it over the free alternatives.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[bottlebrushtree]

I have Tivo without also having cable. It works really well. I get more TV than I should be watching in a week anyway. I have the 40 hour model, I should probably get a larger hard drive in order to keep the programs I want to make sure don't disappear if I don't make a date to watch them, but it works well for me.

One thing is that I end up watching the same amount of TV, but its all stuff I want instead of what's just on.

I get to watch all the science shows that are on PBS really early in the morning, as well as news shows that are when I am at work.

$13/month is still cheaper than the cheapest cable I can get.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Paulrothrock]

Issue: Fiancée won't let you get a TiVo because the monthly fee is "too expensive" because "we're saving for a wedding."
Solution: Get fiancée addicted to Inuyasha and then show her how TiVo will record every episode.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Paulrothrock]

The $99 flat fee isn't what's keeping me from getting a TiVo, it's the whole $13/month that's keeping me from getting a TiVo. Or, more exactly, it's the $13/montht that's keeping my fiancée from letting me get a TiVo.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[shokk]

Paid $600 total for my 20 hour TiVo two years ago:
$200 for the TiVo itself,
$100 per 80 GB hard drive (2 of them)
$200 for the lifetime subscription

Everyone forgets to factor in that subscription cost. Had I gone with the recurring monthly fee, I would have paid $110 more than the above by now. I expect to have my series 1 TiVo for at least another two years. I figure by then I will be convinced by new features to spring for a new one. Now the new TiVos are $99 each, but I would still have to get another subscription to support it, and that is what keeps me from doing it. Were that fee 1/2 of what it is now, I feel many people would trample their friends to get a TiVo in the house.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[igny]

But "(More features)&&(better product)!=0".

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[LinuxHam]

If you ever decide to drop your TiVO subscription and centralize your capture efforts and media collection, MythTV is really the way to go. I, too, have gone through the nightmare of trying to get it to work. BUT -- someone has made a working Knoppix-based Myth installer, called KnoppMyth. You boot up raw hardware (no OS needed) off this CD and it takes it from there. Basically converts any PC with a tv capture card and s-video out into a tricked out no-sub TiVO. Try it sometime. You might be impressed.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[JediTrainer]

There are those of us to whom Tivo is unavailable. For example, I live in Canada and am unable to get a Tivo. I would if I could, but they don't sell up here.

Enter MythTV. Although I haven't built one yet, it's only because I was busy getting married this summer. However, MythTV appears to have a very high spouse approval factor, in that next year I do plan on building one. And the wife is not only ok with it, she's encouraging me to just go for it.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[antdude]

Yeah, but paying for subscriptions turns me off. I want it to be like a VCR for recording with the cool pause feature for live feeds.

I have an ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder card so I don't have to pay subscription. =)

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[cayenne8]

"Fine, if you want to keep paying them $13/mo..."

Just go pay the $299 for the lifetime subscription and be done with it. I think you can get a basic Tivo for about $99 these days...

$400 these days on a piece of good entertainment equipment these days is nothing...if you can't afford to drop $400 every once in awhile...I'd say you need to be doing other things besides watching TV so as to enable you to get a better paying job.

:-)

But, seriously, this isn't an insanely overpriced product. What does an iPod cost these days? A good stereo amplifier for the home...a decent sized television with a good picture? I couldn't see paying a monthly fee for my Tivo...so I just considered the lifetime fee (I think it was like $250 when I got mine) was just a 'part of the price of the product'.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[eam]

How user friendly is MythTV? My 3 year old knows how to watch and record shows with TiVo. I think the 6 year old taught him how. The only problem I have is he's filling up the disk.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow is all I can say. You moved up to big ole 5 letter words and I see some, yes could it be, 6 characters in length!

Go back to high school and re-read what was wrote. In context, the word is 'now' in both sentences. 4 years ago, Amazon's Stock was just as astronomically high. So, what is your point?

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[eam]

The schedule info makes the difference. An employee missed a show because "it wasn't on this week". However, my TiVo recorded it. It *was* on, just not in its regular timeslot.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Aardpig]

How user friendly is MythTV? My 3 year old knows how to watch and record shows with TiVo. I think the 6 year old taught him how. The only problem I have is he's filling up the disk.

It's pretty good -- my wife learned to use it without any 'formal' instruction, just playing around. Of course, getting it set up is a different matter -- but there is good documentation for that too.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[(nil)]

OK, what about the cost of the dedicated PC? Surely you can't find a PC of the required capability for $99, or even $99+$200 for the lifetime subscription. Or am I missing something?

--(())

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Aardpig]

OK, what about the cost of the dedicated PC? Surely you can't find a PC of the required capability for $99, or even $99+$200 for the lifetime subscription. Or am I missing something?

Nope, you do need a spare PC. But it doesn't have to be particularly speccy; when I upgraded to a cheap eMachines Athlon workstation, I used my old machine as the basis for my MythTV box: 700Mhz Pentium III, 256Mb RAM, Voodoo 3 graphics card. The only outlay for me was the capture card ($150) and the 80Gb hard drive ($60 after rebate). Given that I was upgrading my computer anyway, the net cost to get my MythTV box going was therefore $210 -- not hugely cheaper than TiVO, but the box does quite a bit more than TiVO can (it acts as my home network's music server, and I also run various other services off it, since it is always up).

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Our Man In Redmond]

but I would still have to get another subscription to support it

Not if you time it right (maybe). TiVo has, at least once, offered to transfer your lifetime TiVo subscription from a Series 1 box to a Series 2 box if you buy one from them. They might do so again, although there is of course no guarantee.

But my experience is similar to yours. I bought the TiVo ($150), the lifetime subscription ($99 -- I bought it just before it went up) and a bigger hard drive ($100). That's just about what I paid for the TV I watch it on, and it serves my TV watching habits just fine. In fact my wife will probably hit me if I ever suggest that we go back to TV without TiVo.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[raianoat]

Open source software is great however; I don't think my Dad will be installing MythTV or Freevo anytime soon. The nice thing about TiVo is that it just works. Anybody who is reasonably competent can setup TiVo and have it running in a matter of minutes.

On another note, TiVo needs to be aware of what the open source community is doing. They need to look into supporting or integrating open source work into their product.

-----------------
Alex
TiVoBlog.com
RaianoFamily.com

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

While the MythTV software may be free, how much money did you spend on the hardware? Most people who build MythTV unit's aim for those mini-itx systems that are:

1. Low power consuming
2. Makes little to no noise
3. Still powerful enough to play games

Basically, we're talking about something like $600+ in hardware (unless you know something I don't). Add on the many hours it takes for you to build the thing and configure it, blah, blah, blah. But I guess you do have the pride of saying you built your own system.

This is vs. the $99 tivo price tag and $300 lifetime subscription. Plus it takes all of a few minutes to buy it and set it up. On top of that, you can add multiple units to your household for something like $6/month.

Plus, if you really want, you can hack the living daylights out of your tivo and add harddrives, networking capabilities and stream/rip/store all your stuff.

I'm a big fan of free stuff too, but Tivo's price makes it worthwhile at this point.

btw, with the Series2 tivo boxes, you can also schedule it to record from the web.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow is all I can say.

What about this part?

You moved up to big ole 5 letter words and I see some, yes could it be, 6 characters in length!

Go back to high school and re-read what was wrote. In context, the word is 'now' in both sentences. 4 years ago, Amazon's Stock was just as astronomically high. So, what is your point?

Did someone else say that part?

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Convergence sucks! DVR should be a standalone technology. If people keep insisting on adding more features to the technology, then it becomes weighted down with a bunch of features that people don't need or want. Sure there are some people out there who want to access their massive MP3 collections via a TiVo, but I imagine this feature would go unused by most owners. The problem is that most people here are computer junkies, and, for the most part, tend to want to expand the capabilities of computing devicces because their computers can do a million and one things. While computers are great for this, we shouldn't confuse every device conatining a processor and a hard drive with a PC (or Mac). If we follow trends in the marketplace, most consumer goods as they are commonly used are single-function devices. Sure your cell phone can take pictures, send email, and play games, but most cell users just use them for phone calls.

In the end, I think we create more problems than we solve by trying to make end-all be-all devices. Instead of thinking how much crap we can build into a DVR, maybe we should be thinking "How small can we make a DVR?" Wouldn't it be much cooler if your TivVo were the size of an old Gameboy, using a flash memory drive, and came built into your TV?

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Aardpig]

While the MythTV software may be free, how much money did you spend on the hardware?

If you look at my post here, you'll see I built my system for $210 -- with the proviso that I had an old computer knocking around to use at 'zero' cost, and I also had a lot of time on my hands. But all in all I still think it was a good deal; I saved a little money, learned a lot, and had fun.

Oh, and my MythTV box isn't a sexy mico-ITX; it's a midi tower with huge HD fans on it, sounding like a small vacuum cleaner. It sits in my basement, with three cables coming up (discreetly, mind you!) through the living room floor to connect it to the TV: picture, sound and IR remote. Boy it's ugly, but it works!

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious, how much electricity does that eMachines Athlon draw running 24/7?

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[mbbac]

You have to adjust your antenna in order to pick up different stations. How did your Tivo handle that?

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[mbbac]

I have to adjust my antenna in order to pick up different stations. How did your Tivo handle that? Also, do they make a Tivo that can record OTA HDTV? I have an HDTV set and get all of my programming OTA.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Moofie]

And that "maybe" is exactly why I won't buy one.

I feel like TiVo is nickel-and-diming me. I'd be willing to pay full (un-subsidized) price for the hardware, if I could get the data from a reasonably priced source. I mean, there's no cost advantage to using my broadband connection instead of dialing into their (expensive to maintain) modem bank...why can't the savings be passed on to me?

DirecTivo (or whatever they're calling it) is much closer to my price threshhold.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[iantri]

I think the reason the parent says it isn't very useful is because they may be in a situation like I am..

I live near Toronto, Ontario. No cable service where I am (service ends only 200 metres away! Bastards!), so we get our TV over-the-air and a few channels (7-8, the only ones we watch) by C-band satellite.

There is a huge number of channels on broadcast TV here (at least 26, not counting stations we receive on multiple channels), but this is because we are smack dab in the middle of several different broadcasting areas.

A rotor is required for the antenna, since the programming is split mostly between Toronto (to the west) and Buffalo (to the south-west), with some in the Rochester area (south) and Barrie (north-west). Almost all of the channels come in very clearly (better than cable), except for the REALLY distant stuff (Rochester and Barrie), but all channel come in poorly or not at all unless the antenna is tuned to the correct position.

It may be somewhat of a moot point since TiVO is not available in Canada, but if I wanted to build a MythTV box I would have a lot of trouble recording programming.

Anyone know if MythTV is extensible enough to control an IR blaster to control the rotor box?

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Moofie]

So it's worth it to you. It's not worth it to me. If TiVo wants my business, they need to give me more for less.

$300 for a couple hundred K/week of data I pull across my Internet connection? No freakin' way. Particularly when I can get the same data (not formatted for TiVo, of course) free from any number of sources.

Their hardware is crazy cheap. Their "service" is crazy expensive. I'd pay reasonable prices for both (that is, more for the hardware and less for the service).

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[brunson]

I run it on a software hacked XBox, $158 on ebay.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Belgand]

Assuming that TiVo has a larger installed user base at the time I really wonder what it might have been able to do for shows like Futurama and Family Guy that experienced a great deal of problems with fans being unable to watch due to constant, often unannounced, schedule changes.

If only it could pre-empt football games with episodes of Futurama though instead of the other way round... that would truly be a wonderful box.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[ArsonSmith]

I didn't have this problem, we had a large antenna that was on the roof of the house and picked up all stations in the area really well.

With MythTV, of witch I also use, you could have multiple tuner cards each connected to a diffrent antenna that is pre tuned for a group of stations. Then tell MythTV which stations are on which tuner card. Disadvantage would be cost and multiple antennas, advantage would be multiple feeds and ability to record multiple shows on the diffrent channel groups.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

ah, but it is not you they are after. You want to take teh time to put a Myth system together as you get the benefit of being ahead of the curve. You certainly have tweaked your setup extensively to bring out all those features.

now TiVo can go after the mainstream crowd who want that stuff but only if they can go to BestBuy and install it in an hour. Plus never have to open it up to fix/adjust something all with an easy for anybody including my kid interface.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Kurt Granroth]

The monthly fee isn't as bad as it used to be for users with multiple TiVos. I bought the lifetime subscription for my Series 1 and then transferred it to my Series 2. That one has saved me a bit of money based on how long I've had it.

However, I just bought another Series 2 TiVo ($99!) and this time I'm going with the monthly fee. That's because with two active TiVos, the monthly fee is now down to only $6.95/mo. At this rate, it would take me almost 4 years to recoup the up-front cost of the lifetime subscription.

Now if there was no multiple-TiVo discount, I would still definitely do the lifetime...

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[severoon]

What could save TiVo is if they made it easy to get video content off the device onto your home computer. Does anyone know of a cheap/free and easy way to do this? I researched it about 6 months ago and I hit upon a few leads, but I had no time to follow up on them.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[bottlebrushtree]

I ended up putting my rabit ears up on the roof of my apartment building. I basically had to find an orientation that got all of the channels I wanted "good enough". If you have to move the antenna to get all or one your stations, tivo is probably not going to work well for you with non-cable reception.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[aonaran]

Myth is only free if you don't take into account the cost of hardware.

Since you need either a dedicated Mpeg encoder/decoder or a pentium 4 to record and watch at the same time tivo is much cheaper. (bought my series 1 20Gig for $85 (incuding lifetime subscription in case I ever move to the USA where that would become useful) added an ethernet card to it for $69 and popped in an old 30Gig drive I had laying around to bring it up to about 60 hours at low quality total investment was far less than the approx $300-400 I would have had to pay for a Myth box that could do the same and it's got a nice remote control and a slicker GUI. Even if I only used the Tivo to encode my Existing VHS collection to MPEG for DVD. It's worth it.

Personally I can't see that Tivo needs saving, they still only have one real competitor (Replay)

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Our Man In Redmond]

TiVo is as much a service as it is a box. You can buy the box and dig up the data yourself, programming it to blindly tape channel 59 every Friday at 8, and then having to guess on the Now Playing list which manual recording is the one you want, or you can pay a few bucks a month to know that you're going to record Stargate SG-1 every time a new episode comes up.

Personally my time is valuable enough that I can pay someone $13 a month to help me find shows I will enjoy watching in the limited time I allocate to television watching, plus alert me to things I might enjoy watching that I wouldn't otherwise know about, plus automatically search for shows I want to see that aren't currently on the schedule (my current list includes watching for The Seven Samurai, the musical Damn Yankees! and anyone who decides to rerun Due South), plus the ability to skip through commercials . . . but of course you are the one who is competent to judge what your time is worth, and your mileage may vary.

As for DirecTiVo . . . I'd check into that before I buy, based from what I've read in this article. It might be perfect for you, or you might find that it takes 30 seconds to change channels and you get to pay extra for the TiVo data anyway. (I don't know, I don't have DirecTV and I'm happy with what I have.)

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Moofie]

So it's worth it to you, and not to me. Fine.

I resent paying $13/mo for a tiny bit of data. I won't do it.

And I won't pay the "lifetime (*of this particular device)" subscription.

You will. Good for you.

Now, if TiVo wants my business, they need to give me more for less. If they don't want my business, they need do nothing whatsoever.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[nero4wolfe]

Actually, you can argue that mythtv isn't "really" totally free...

The last I heard, to get listing in North America, you were supposed to join a research project of zap2it that would send out mandantory surveys every so often... (or go back and try to fix xmltv's web page scraper to keep up with changes...)

My preference would be to pay something each month to get listings in a fixed, reliable format.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[miracle69]

It can. Just move Futurama up to the top of your Season Pass list and it will never miss an episode.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Lord_Dweomer]

"Personally when I'm watching TV(which I almost never have time for as of late), I don't wanna be reading stuff online, I just want to relax and watch a movie or show. "

What about in the near future when most of the good watchable video will be found on internet TV stations as opposed to traditional television? This would be a great tool for aggregating that.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[droleary]

I resent paying $13/mo for a tiny bit of data. I won't do it.

Not just tiny, but often bad data. I got a TiVo 4 years ago and I'm happy with the hardware, but I ditched the service after a year. Far too many of the shows I wanted to watch seemed to come after a sporting event that was allowed to go long. Given that I can manually program the same "accuracy" for regular programs, their guide had little value for me. As a VCR replacement it really is great, but the idea of pay even $5/month just to record at the same times week after week is just too much.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[qray]

Free? What is free? I've went that route before and often find that I spend extra time to deal with the "free" stuff. It's an important point Open Source must learn. Time isn't free. And if your product costs me hours more than a commercial product, then that's a cost to me. If I can save $100 on a unit, and spend 5 hours dinking with it, that's not exactly a win for me, IMO. DISCLAIMER: I have never used MythTV, so I'm not saying that it's harder to use. This is just from my experience with other "free" stuff.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[Belgand]

Uh... 1)I don't have a Tivo, I am hoping to get one soon though 2)it can't possibly work. One of the biggest problems with Futurama was that it was frequently not shown because Fox was instead showing a football game. The game would run in Futurama's pre-Simpsons timeslot, sometimes even pre-empting the Simpsons.

Re:Nice Feature, but..

[iantri]

While I appreciate the response, that's absolutely crazy!

I didn't have this problem, we had a large antenna that was on the roof of the house and picked up all stations in the area really well.

This is what I have.. but it needs to be oriented in the right direction to prevent ghosting (on Toronto signals, they are very strong) or static noise (on the Buffalo stations, which do not come in so well unless the antenna is pointed towards Buffalo, at which point they come in perfectly.).

I would need AT LEAST another three antennas on my roof (in addition to the one already up there).

If I actually happen across enough money to afford that I think I would pay Rogers to extend cable service to my house! :)

what does that mean?

[dcstimm]

web content? Tivos will then be able to recognize web content and direct it to the appropriate home device. what does that mean?

Re:what does that mean?

[qmchenry]

MP3s to your multi-zone a/v system
DVD rips to the closest TV
Spam to skillet in kitchen (yumm!)
And holographic programs to the nearest holodeck..

Re:what does that mean?

[chris.alonso]

ie, connect to a realplayer stream and it goes to your stereo. wmv file to your tv. etc.

Re:what does that mean?

[AKAImBatman]

I'm thinking that the idea is to build something that works like the news broadcasts in Babylon 5. You watch your news stream like you do today, but occasional "hot links" will be overlaid to take you to a "more info" website.

Personally, I'm not so sure about the idea. Television works by turning your brain off. The Internet works by turning your brain on (or at least the semblance of a brain that some people seem to carry). As with most situations where things are mixed, I fear you'll end up with the worst of the two instead of the best of the two.

Re:what does that mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

It means dumbass marketroid babble. The summary starts with "Damon Darlin from Business 2.0 writes". That pretty much says it all.

Re:what does that mean?

[AKAImBatman]

On second thought, it sounds more like a TV interface for files from the internet. *shrug* Not quite sure how that's supposed to work.

Re:what does that mean?

[Rick Genter]

I thought it was more like the Federation broadcasts in Starship Troopers. "Would you like to know more?"

Those were the funniest (and only redeeming) scenes in that otherwise god-awful movie...

Re:what does that mean?

[AndroidCat]

It means that I'd better wire up my trash can as a "home device". Oh wait, I can still use /dev/null for that.

Re:what does that mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it route all Star Trek references to /dev/null?

Re:what does that mean?

[3terrabyte]

Image how bad Starship Trooper 2 is if the FANS of the original movie are pissed off how bad it is!

Re:what does that mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweet! Now I can get Alexa Toolbar for my MASH reruns!!!

All I want to know is ...

[shailesh17]

how much are they paying him?

Stupid question...

[Agent Green]

...how does TiVo get saved when they're really the only viable PVR in the mass consumer market?

Re:Stupid question...

[telstar]

WAKE UP! Virtually every major cable-TV player is getting into the game. 5 years from now I imagine you'll have a challenge trying to find a new standard cablebox that doesn't have TiVo-like features.

Re:Stupid question...

[Three Headed Man]

I agree. The entire industry can't really take you over without you fucking up a lot, when everything else is considered a "TiVo clone". Being the de facto standard and having years on the other people means you need saving?

Re:Stupid question...

[Morgahastu]

Except they are all terrible. I have a Scientific Atlanta PVR and it hurts me to have to use it.

Tivo already has a great device, they just need to convince cable companies to bundle them instead of crappy knock-offs.

Re:Stupid question...

[Fnkmaster]

Business school case study #1: shitty clone products use existing market penetration and/or low price point to destroy premium product offering from market first mover.

Re:Stupid question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtually every major cable-TV player is getting into the game. 5 years from now I imagine you'll have a challenge trying to find a new standard cablebox that doesn't have TiVo-like features.

Yep, I setup my appointment to get an Explorer 8000 from my cable company to play with. I'm sure it's not as nifty as a TiVo, but I'm not a fanatic. As long as I can select listings from a menu and tell it to record them I'll be happy.

Now, my MythTV can do that and more of course, but I don't want to fsck around with trying to control a digital cable box via IR blaster to record content on my premium channels like HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, and TMC since I'd need to front end each tuner in the mythtv backend with a digital cable box and IR blaster, make sure they don't conflict, etc. It seems like it'd be more of a pain in the ass than it's worth for me.

So, for 90% of my content I'll still use the MythTV, but for recording stuff off of pay channels and pay-per-view I can use the Explorer 8000 which has dual tuners built in.

Re:Stupid question...

[AKnightCowboy]

Being the de facto standard and having years on the other people means you need saving?

I guess I work with a bunch of geeks, but every single person in my office that has bought a PVR so far has gotten a ReplayTV. Even the guy that had a Tivo for years dropped his subscription and picked up a ReplayTV. It's the whole Betamax vs. VHS and DVD-RW vs. DVD+RW thing all over again. Technically the ReplayTV is a better system, but TiVo is, like you said, the "de facto standard" to clueless people who want a PVR.

Re:Stupid question...

[3terrabyte]

They're trying. They had a deal with DirectTV who had merged a TIVO with their reciever. Weird thing was, I think the monthly rate was a lot less.

Re:Stupid question...

[Mannerism]

5 years from now I imagine you'll have a challenge trying to find a new standard cablebox that doesn't have TiVo-like features.
I'm already there. The only HDTV box that my cable company supports has an integrated PVR.

Re:Stupid question...

[madcow_ucsb]

I'll believe it when I see it. My mom's comcast digital cable box doesn't even have s-video output and only shows half an hour at a time in the guide. And picture quality looks as bad as OTA.

Last time I visited my dad a couple years ago in Virigina the date stamp on the bottom of his box was 1984 and he went thru one every couple months as they died. Not even composite out on that thing, just RF. And everyone always looked green. They said they'd upgrade in "about 6 months" ever since I lived out there as a kid in 1988. Maybe they finally did, he's since moved to Adelphia land which is at least slightly better.

When I moved out of San Jose for the penninsula a couple years ago, they still had an A/B selector switch on their cable. Maybe they still do. Again, "in about 6 months" for the 6 years I lived there. This was in the heart of Silicon Valley!

Of course, this is why I flat out refuse to use cable again and stick with satellite. *resists the urge to go on a rant arguing for eliminating cable monopolies*

Of course when comparing DirecTV and Dish Network I found that Dish's PVR didn't even have a season pass equivilent. Screw that, that's the best feature of the TiVo. Who the hell wants to pause live TV? With a TiVo I don't think I watched live TV more than a couple times.

Re:Stupid question...

[prockcore]

WAKE UP! Virtually every major cable-TV player is getting into the game. 5 years from now I imagine you'll have a challenge trying to find a new standard cablebox that doesn't have TiVo-like features.

The *majority* of cable subscribers have a plan that doesn't require a cable box.

patents != genius

[Anonymous Coward]

come on now, don't we know better than to gauge the intellectual capacity of someone by how many patents they hold?

Re:patents != genius

[Anonymous Coward]

And how many patents do you possess?

The defense rests, your honor.

Re:patents != genius

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, most of his probably end with "on the Internet" and we know how cheesy those type of patents are.

Re:patents != genius

[forgoil]

We can figure out how much we like someone though, just use a simple formula:

if(someone.patents.software > 0)
EngageMode(EHate);
else
EngageMode(ELike);

Besides, I wouldn't use the word genius about anyone who was involved in making java. I don't see what is so horribly hard about making a horrible combination of Obj-C and Smalltalk, two far better languages.

Re:patents != genius

[Anonymous Coward]

> And how many patents do you possess?
> The defense rests, your honor.

This claim should be removed by Slashdot editors,
b/c it infringes on US Patent #74899773
("An apparatus and method for making clueless comments over the Internet")

The number of patents authored by an individual indeed has VERY little relation to his creativeness and inventiveness.. Patent process involves a lot of paper work and explaining stuff to the company lawyers, etc...Which drives a lot of people away... And then, 99.99% of software patents should have never been granted in the first place...

Re:patents != genius

[eufreka]

purses, pants or shoes? oh my!

Re:patents != genius

[Anonymous Coward]

well 2 with one pending, and I can say with authority any idiot can get as many patents as they want as long as they have enough $ to keep a lawyer gainfully employed.

Re:patents != genius

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the size of the patent portfolio that counts it's how you use it ;P

Re:patents != genius

[Anonymous Coward]

if(someone.patents.software > 0)
EngageMode(EHate);
else
if(someone.likes.microsoft | someone.likes.sco)
EngageMode(EFlame);
else
EngageMode(ELike);

I think anyone who's a genius at making java should be working at Starbucks.

Great

[2names]

This will be great. Really it will. We need to make sure services like Tivo remain available.

TiVo isn't dying

[FortKnox]

Yeah, they were doing poorly, but have enough subscribers that they have a decent revenue stream. In fact, on the second page they even explain this. So this guy isn't 'saving TiVo', he's simply trying to make it enormous.

Re:TiVo isn't dying

[boarder]

bzzzt! try again.

They have enough subscribers NOW, but that means very little. 56% of them are from DirecTV, and their deal ends next year (DirecTV isn't signing a new agreement last time I heard). Losing all of them would be a HUGE hit to their revenue stream. Not only that, but most of the newer DirecTivos suck donkey balls. As soon as my one year agreement with DirecTV ends, I'll be considering dumping them and going back to my ReplayTV. When I move, I probably will go back to Replay. I might try out a different brand of DTivo receiver to see if they suck less than the Hughes one I have now.

Aside from the potential loss of a large portion of their revenue stream, having subscribers doesn't mean profitability. Tivo continually posts quarterly losses, because they just don't have enough penetration to mark up their prices. They have roughly 1.6 million subscribers (many of those could be from multi-unit households), but how many households watch TV? 50 million? They just can't charge enough to be profitable.

Re:TiVo isn't dying

[fupeg]

56% of them are from DirecTV, and their deal ends next year (DirecTV isn't signing a new agreement last time I heard). Losing all of them would be a HUGE hit to their revenue stream.

Why would they lose any of their DirecTV customers? That would require purchasing a new DirecTV-DVR (existing customers would not be eligible for any of the discounted dvrs that DirecTV gives away to new subscribers) or switching from DirecTV to some other satellite/cable provider that would give you a free dvr. There's no reason to believe that they will lose subscribers. What is more likely is that their adoption rate will lower as DirecTV brings in a lot of their subscribers currently. So the rate of increase on their number of subscribers could go down, but not the number of subscribers. They're not in AOL mode (yet.)

Re:TiVo isn't dying

[boarder]

Well, DirecTV doesn't give away DVRs to new customers; they still cost $99. They give away free receivers but not DVRs (usually). New customers pay $99 for an install with the DVR, while you can buy a DTivo at Best Buy for $99.

You also can't get lifetime service on a DTivo, so DirecTV could say that the DVR portion of the device is no longer supported (they control the subscription, not Tivo). If DirecTV no longer supports the Tivo, Tivo will lose subscribers.

In my original post, I meant to say something to the effect that since the deal ends next year, their could be a loss of service. It is by no means guaranteed... DirecTV is not commenting about whether they are or aren't re-signing or what happens if they don't sign. It could just mean they support the legacy people, but sign no new customers. It could also mean that they will no longer support ANY.

Re:TiVo isn't dying

[fupeg]

Well, DirecTV doesn't give away DVRs to new customers

RTFA. It is widely speculated that this is what DirecTV will do when they start selling non-Tivo DirecTV DVRs later this year. This is a move to compete with cable companies who already give away low quality DVRs integrated with their cable boxes...

If DirecTV no longer supports the Tivo, Tivo will lose subscribers.

So do you really think DirecTV might leave their many (500,000+) subscribers with DirecTV Tivo boxes high and dry? It seems pretty obvious that if that happened, then Tivo wouldn't be the only people losing subscribers.

Re:TiVo isn't dying

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not certain -but highly likely- that DTV will drop Tivo in favor of their own inhouse brand. They have made some serious cash overseas with thier own boxes, most of which are heavy on the interactive TV side of things rather than just doing DVR duities.

So, as I see it: Tivo may or or may not stay on with DirecTV. If they do, it may be in the role of simply being a DVR while the inhouse DirecTV boxes go on to do the interacive stuff going forward. They may be a role for Tivo to play no matter what happens.

Regardless of whether they drop Tivo, there is still a huge installed base of DirecTivo boxes and DTV is still selling tons of them. It's going to be years and years before all those DirecTivos are replaced. Whether Tivo is making any money off these DirecTivos is another issue. The boxes sell below cost and DTV users only pay $5 a month per household which means Tivo is getting what, a couple of bucks per household per month at most? They can't live off that.

I can't think of any reason to want an interactive TV box so I can't see replacing my DirecTivo any time soon. Maybe somebody else actually wants interactive TV. *shrug* I just want to timeshift my TV shows.

He he

[Anonymous Coward]

glad somebody got it.

Tivo and patents

[GGardner]

We all know about all the stupid patents out there. But isn't Tivo an example of a company that can/should have been saved by the patent system? Tivo had a great idea, were the first to market (I think?), but now are being killed by copy-cats.

Isn't the fact that Tivo can't (or didn't) get patent protection for its business just as strong an indictment of the patent system as all the lame patents we complain about?

Re:Tivo and patents

[mzwaterski]

Just because someone has a patent doesn't mean that people can't carefully make a device to do a similar thing.

Re:Tivo and patents

[Mz6]

"Just because someone has a patent doesn't mean that people can't carefully make a device to do a similar thing."

Yeah... because then that would be called a monopoly. And we're all pretty familiar with those.

Re:Tivo and patents

[stratjakt]

TiVo has a shitload of patents on it's interface and phone-home methods and whatnot.

You cant patent "device for recording TV digitally", since those devices have existed since the 50s. You can only patent the method. Someone else can come up with a different method (different looking interface and remote, maybe even a less invasive phone-home spying scheme).

Re:Tivo and patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Um not its not.

Re:Tivo and patents

[JaredOfEuropa]

Isn't the fact that Tivo can't (or didn't) get patent protection for its business just as strong an indictment of the patent system as all the lame patents we complain about?

No. The purpose of patents isn't to protect businesses, the purpose is to promote and encourage inventors to share ideas and research rather than keep them to themselves. The incentive to share is in allowing them to recoup some of their efforts from license fees.

The mere fact that Tivo was first does not in any way entitle them to an exclusive market, not even temporarily. There is also no significant research cost for the idea (of a digital video recorder) to be recouped.

Re:Tivo and patents

[pauljlucas]

The purpose of patents isn't to protect businesses, the purpose is to promote and encourage inventors to share ideas and research rather than keep them to themselves.

No. The sole purpose of a patent is "... the right to exlude others from making, using or selling the invention throughout the United States of America ..." That's a direct quote from one of the patent plaques hanging on my wall.

Does a patent force you to disclose your idea? Of course: it's required. But that's not its purpose. Far more people have been sharing ideas for decades through journals (ACM, IEEE, etc.) and not using patents.

Re:Tivo and patents

[JaredOfEuropa]

the right to exlude others from making, using or selling the invention

No, that is merely a means to achieve the purpose I stated. Patents were not invented to merely formalise a 'natural' right exclude others from using your inventions. Patents were recognised to be an artificial construct (and a rather questionable one at that), in which these rights are granted not for your personal benefit, but for the benefit of society as a whole (by encouraging you to share your ideas).

Does a patent force you to disclose your idea? Of course: it's required. But that's not its purpose.

I never said that the purpose of patents is to force you to disclose your idea, it's to encourage its disclosure in exchange for a temporary right to control the use of that idea.

Re:Tivo and patents

[ahbi]

You cant patent "device for recording TV digitally", since those devices have existed since the 50s

Sure you can. You just do a "picture claim." You claim whatever a reasonable person in the 90s/00s would use to preform the general method. You patent 1 claim using an x86 processor. 1 claim using a HD. 1 claim using an optical removable drive (i.e CD/DVD). etc. etc. etc.
You just keep patenting very specific embodiments until no one can reasonable design around your patents.

The 50s patent was old enough that your implementation using 90s/00s technoology is "novel"
Your product is the 1st, so you can probably beat the "obvious" rejections.

Re:Tivo and patents

[jargoone]

maybe even a less invasive phone-home spying scheme

Seriously, take off your tinfoil hat and shut the fuck up. If you can't see that TiVo aggregates data for your benefit, then you just tell them not to do it.

The privacy policy is exceedingly clear about this. Please come back with you have read it.

http://www.tivo.com/5.11.3.asp

Re:Tivo and patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Allow me to quote from the definitive document:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

There you have it, ladies and gentlement. The purpose of patents is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."

My use the US Constitution beats the plaque on your wall by 19,487 points. You fail it!

Re:Tivo and patents

[pauljlucas]

Patents were recognised to be an artificial construct (and a rather questionable one at that), in which these rights are granted not for your personal benefit, but for the benefit of society as a whole (by encouraging you to share your ideas).

Nope. The idea behind patents is to encourage people to put in a lot of effort to invent something new to benefit society. In return for your hard work, you get a limited monopoly. It has nothing to do with sharing your ideas since nobody is allowed to use them anyway without your permission.

I never said that the purpose of patents is to force you to disclose your idea, it's to encourage its disclosure in exchange for a temporary right to control the use of that idea.

Like I said: people have been sharing ideas for decades in journals. The only incentive to publish there is fame. (Typically, you even have to pay to have your paper published.)

Re:Tivo and patents

[isorox]

Timed recordings onto computer? Tetronix profiles and various addons like Columbus have been doing that a lot longer then Tivo's been arround. All tivo did was intergrate the EPG (same as many other digital TV suppliers that have been on the market for years) and add a pretty GUI. It's not innovative.

Re:Tivo and patents

[ad0gg]

For your benefit? Wow, another brain washed fan boy. Does selling this data benefit you?

Can you please explain to me how this benefits me? BTW, thats a great privacy agreement. No where does it state they won't sell your personal information. IE: Name,address,phone.

Re:Tivo and patents

[tricorn]

You could easily give people a limited monopoly without requiring them to disclose their methods. The whole point of a patent is that, in exchange for you making it public, society will give you a monopoly on it for a limited time, after which it becomes public domain (and they no longer have to get your permission in order to use it). If patents have "nothing to do with sharing your ideas", then why are you required to disclose them in order to get a patent?

Patents are the opposite of trade secrets. With a trade secret, you take great care not to disclose your methods. In exchange, you get nothing, even if you "put in a lot of effort to invent something new to benefit society." You have to enforce your own monopoly with trade secrets - no one else can do the same thing because they don't know how and you won't tell them.

Patents do help stimulate invention, by providing a method to make a profit off of the risk involved in the process of inventing something new, even for those inventions that are easily apparent how they work. However, you won't get a patent if you don't disclose how it works, easily apparent or not. And plenty of inventions are disclosed by being patented, even if they'd probably be able to be kept as trade secrets - for one thing, it is a hedge against someone independently re-discovering it, for another you can license it out to others without having to be paranoid about someone leaking it. The essential element of a patent, though, is still disclosure, and that is the primary way it fulfills the Constitutional mandate to "promote the progress of Science", not by simply granting a monopoly to entice people to invent new things.

Yes, many things are shared openly - open source, scientific papers. It's a good part of an argument that patents may not be necessary to get people to share their ideas. However, that doesn't change the fact that a key element of patents is that they require you to disclose your methods, so that everyone can use them (as in, share!) after the patent period has expired.

Re:Tivo and patents

[David Rolfe]

"The data used to produce this highly detailed analysis is derived from anonymous and aggregate data collected when TiVo DVRs make a daily phone call to the company's broadcast center to retrieve and download programming information," the company says.

Holy crap that's old news. You couldn't dig up a newer article than that one? Something more definitive, like some actual viewing habits of ... I dunno, me?

Frankly, I WANT TiVo to tell the powers that be what I watch and don't watch, and what commercials I skip. "Why?" I'm sure you're not asking, because maybe then Sci-Fi wouldn't cancel popular shows like Farscape ;-( And ... by knowing what commercials I skip through the shows I record wouldn't be full of Cialis ads.

Re:Tivo and patents

[pauljlucas]

If patents have "nothing to do with sharing your ideas", then why are you required to disclose them in order to get a patent?

To help prevent others from accidentally using your idea without your permission. If your idea is disclosed to the public, another inventor can't claim, "But I didn't know I was infringing!" in court. It's like a big "No Trespassing" sign where the bounds of where you can't go are clearly marked. Again, patents are to exclude others.

Nice...

[Sv-Manowar]

But competition is coming on strong, with each of the major cable/sattelite providers trying to get in on a market untappedd by tivo (uk) and moving into it's territory (US) i wonder how long Tivo can stay number 1

To *really* fix tivo...

[raygundan]

He needs to get into the DirecTV DVR code and figure out why it takes 30 seconds to display the guide, a minute to open your "Now Playing" list of shows, and 5+ minutes to sort a 30-entry list of season passes.

A huge fraction of Tivo's subscriber base is through the DirecTV tivos-- and despite my great experience with the standalone unit I had, the DirecTV box is so much slower despite 4x the processor speed that I can't even imagine what sort of horrible code is in there. Optimize the UI, *then* add features. DirecTV may singlehandedly turn millions of people away from tivo after they sign up and have a truly subpar experience with it.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[Fulcrum of Evil]

He needs to get into the DirecTV DVR code and figure out why it takes 30 seconds to display the guide, a minute to open your "Now Playing" list of shows, and 5+ minutes to sort a 30-entry list of season passes.

That sounds like a job for ... ME! Are you listening, Tivo? You already have my resume.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[stipe42]

Exactly. Since getting DirectTV in January, the amount of TV I watch has plummetted to virtually nothing. You can't channel flip when it takes fifteen seconds for the channel to change. The DirectTV Tivo doesn't even work right. The only thing it has ever recorded for me randomly are Spanish language movies, no matter how many thumbs down I give it. Several times, it has flat out not recorded items I told it to. Frequently, it records from channels I don't even get and then auto-deletes the recording as soon as it finished. I had a normal Tivo before this and swore by it. I'll be hooking it up again when my DirectTV subscription runs out in January and I can go back to cable.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[raygundan]

Honestly, it sounds like a job for a first-year CS student. DirecTV has really bungled the Tivo software somehow. How long can it possibly take to reorganize a list of 30 entries? Or to read the guide database and print out 10 entries at a time? And if the backend stuff takes so long, why doesn't it get done in the background while the user goes back to watching TV? Even if there is a good reason that reordering your season passes takes 10 minutes, the UI should return control to the user and chug away in the background.

There's a 200MHz CPU in there, if I remember right. Why is it sooooo slow?

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[Buelldozer]

I'm suprised to hear about the slow performance. I have an RCA DirecTivo and it works great. I bought it last year from Best Buy and I don't have any of the issues you describe.

My guide comes up in less then 2 seconds, the "now playing" in less then 5 and I have a similiar amount of Season Passes assigned and that list sorts out in under a minute.

I read somewhere that the slowness is generally an issue of RAM, perhaps you should look at opening your Tivo up and adding another stick?

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[Siniset]

Direct TV is slow just on it's own. My parents had direct TV (got it after I went off to college, the bastards!) and the guide was always slow. So my guess is it's not the TIVO software, but the direct TV software. It probably has something to do with the fact that it's through a satellite uplink rather than cable. Perhaps everytime you try to access the guide, it tries to download it, rather than updating the guide periodically? My parents now have digital cable, and the guide functions work a hell of a lot faster now.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[raygundan]

Interesting... I wonder what the variable is? I have a number of friends mad at me for selling them on the DirecTivo based on my Series 1 standalone tivo experience-- they're all locked into year-long contracts and having the same troubles I am, some worse. There's clearly a set of conditions that need to be met if you're not having the problems-- now we just need to figure out why yours works, and mine and my friends' don't.

I'll see if anybody's got aftermarket RAM for the units-- but I think it's soldered on the motherboard. And I'll go back to my original question-- how much RAM does it take to sort a list of 30 entries? I think my C64 could handle it nearly instantaneously. What is the tivo doing that takes more than an eyeblink?

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[evil0ne]

I completely agree with you on the problems with the DirecTV TiVo. When you compare the guide speed to one of the new free RCA boxes in the other room it is almost embarrassing. However, the ability to record two shows simultaneously and create DVDs of my favorite shows without commercials (thanks TyTool) makes it almost impossible to live without my TiVo. If they fix the speed of the UI I will only be a happier customer.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[Fnkmaster]

I don't get it. I've used DirecTivo plenty of times at my friend's house and it always works much better - meaning faster and more reliable channel switching, better picture quality, etc. - than regular Tivo + digital cable box, in my experience (which is what I currently have). In fact, I had a DirecTivo box for a few months in my old apartment where I had DTV satellite exposure and could mount a dish, and it was great in my experience. Maybe you just have a defective box?

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[ThrasherTT]

It's probably making sure that every desired broadcast of each show can be recorded, in the case that there are overlaps. Two tuners, 30 shows, say maybe 20 channels, and about two weeks' worth of guide data. Add in the fact that it should look for re-broadcasts in the case of an overlap, and whether or not you want it to record reruns and keep as many shows as possible. It probably also keeps its own internal "To Do" list for things it has decided you "should" watch, so it has to go through and modify that as well.

I can see why it takes it a minute or two, but 5+ seems excessive. The longest mine has taken is about 2 minutes, when I did a major reordering of my 25-ish season passes, some of which were set to record every possible showing.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[cmeans]

I'd agree with Fnkmaster on this. I've had my DirecTivo for about 3 years now, and none of those problems.

It can take up to a minute to load up the Now Showing screen, but as my TiVo has been hacked and has 147+ hours of programming recorded, I can appreciate that the original developers didn't expect to have to list so much content :)

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[raygundan]

Honestly, how long can it possibly take to sort 300 shows? It's just three hundred! I have a crappy java program here at work that sorts lists of thousands faster than you can say "I hate my tivo."

I would expect 300 shows to take longer than 20, but I'd expect 20 to take about 1/10 of a second. What can possibly be taking so long for the tivo to do?

Another question-- why are some people's boxes worse than others? Mine is slow, yours is not as slow, another poster says he's got no issue at all. A good friend of mine can't reorder his passes at all, except overnight, because it literally takes several hours to do. Why the variance?

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[CharlieHedlin]

I was reading the contract terms, it there is an out if you send the equipment back.

They aren't as bad as the cell phone carriers.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[forgoil]

I bet they use Bogosort :)

And if you would like to know what that is, check this out:

Bogosort

And if you don't get the joke after reading that, well, congratulations to getting paid for writing the code for DirecTV DVR:)

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a 200MHz CPU in there, if I remember right. Why is it sooooo slow?

My guess would be some sort of memory bandwidth issue. Remember, the DirecTiVo is buffering twice as much content as the regular TiVo since it has two tuners. It also adds to the complexity of season pass issues since a single collision doesn't result in not being able to record the program. While speeding up the interface is a "nice to have" feature, the two tuners is the "must have" feature.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[teamhasnoi]

That sounds like a job for ... ME! Are you listening, Tivo? You already have my resume.

You want to put Windows ME on Tivos?

...my god, that's so crazy IT JUST MIGHT WORK!!!!

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[norkakn]

maybe they are bubble sorting everything without dereferencing any of it

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[svallarian]

Different Direct TV brands yield different results.

I had a hugues receiver and it worked fine, you could scroll through the guide with only about a second delay (for current programs) or 4 seconds (for later programs -- but part of that was because I had hacked the timezone so I could get local channels)

Now, I've also had a RCA receiver that would take 5 seconds or so to switch stations. Later model RCA's seemed to be a bit better about it, but still the interface seemed klunky and slow.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[kkovach]

What exactly is a "huge fraction"?

- Kevin

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[511pf]

My DirecTV with TiVo works fine for me. Maybe it's just you.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[realdpk]

It's a lot more than 30 entries. :) It has to check all future occurances of each show, and then check to see where conflicts are so it knows which ones it will record in the future.

On the other hand, I too wish the UI would return control during long operations. Perhaps a Picture in Picture system could be added, letting you switch between UI and TV.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[mjh]

I agree with the grandparent post, that DirecTiVo's are slow - especially in comparison to SA TiVo's. I would not agree that it's as bad as he makes it out to be. It's not great, but it's certainly better than watching live TV.

But I almost entirely disagree with your post. I originally had an SA TiVo and switched to a DirecTiVo. The DirecTiVo doesn't switch channels any faster than the SA did. And you've got a TiVo, there's no need to surf - browse your "Now Playing" list and find something you know you're going to like. But even if you must channel surf, a much more effective way of doing is it guide surfing. Don't switch channels! Pause live TV, bring up the guide and figure out what's ACTUALLY ON instead of hitting commercials 50% of the time and not knowing. Then when you find something you like, switch the channel once.

As far as asking TiVo to stop recording spanish language movies, that's a relatively trivial thing to fix by removing the spanish language channels from your "Channels I receive" list. TiVo will never record a suggestion off of a channel it doesn't think you get. This will also fix the problem of recording from channels that you don't receive.

As for me, personally, there are two features that I can't give up with my DirecTiVo:

1. Perfect picture quality - based on the already digitally encoded DirecTV signal instead of the wimpy hardware encoder that comes in the standalone.
2. Dual tuner - I can record two things at once VASTLY cutting down on the number of conflicts.

My SA TiVo was great for introducing me to the technology, but IMHO, my DTiVo is the way DVRs ought to be.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[Fulcrum of Evil]

my god, that's so crazy IT JUST MIGHT WORK!!!!

Naw, man. That's just plain crazy.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got 3 direct tivos, and I completely agree with what you are saying. Way too slow! It's the only real blight on an otherwise awesome product.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[gamgee5273]

I realize that YMMV, but, uhhhh... your DirecTV setup is clearly not working correctly and you need to reset that unit or ask DirecTV what might be happening.

My wife and I absolutely adore our DirecTiVo. The dual tuners is a life saver, especially since I'm recording portions of the Olympics right now, which goes up against things like The Daily Show. On top of that, I have a keyword search running for all Godzilla movies. Sometimes is does pick up that a movie will be on a channel I don't get, but it doesn't record it if it finds that I do not receive the channel. And I have never had an issue with the TiVo Suggestions and the Thumbs Up/Down after about a week of actively rating things.

As I said, I think you need to reset the machine or, perhaps, ask for another. My wife and I, however, have gleefully kicked cable out of the house and couldn't be happier.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[3terrabyte]

Because it's a computer inside there.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[cmeans]

I certainly agree that it shouldn't take so long to display the list...but all things considered, it's a small price to pay...after all, in the whole time I've had this unit, it's only "freaked-out" once or twice. Certainly can't say that for any of the WinCE/Window's boxes I have.

As to the various end-user experiences...I can't say...but if they're hacked...maybe they've got too much added on.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[raygundan]

That's a fair assesment of the actual work involved, but the fact remains that my series 1 standalone tivo, with slower processor and less memory, was faster at the same operations. I suspect that having two tuners multiplies the amount of work, but not enough to account for the multiple orders of magnitude we've slowed down. Especially in the case of my poor friend whose tivo takes several hours to reorg the season passes.

But like I said earlier-- even if there *is* a legit reason for the slowness, why not save the new SP order, and do the schedule shuffle in the background while the user goes back to watching TV?

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[nuggetman]

than regular Tivo + digital cable box, in my experience (which is what I currently have)

i havent heard any first hand experience, what is tivo like with a cable box? is it like using a cable box on a vcr, IE only the currently active channel can be recorded, or can you record one thing and watch another

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[ThrasherTT]

Several hours?! Wow... that really, really sucks. I have no idea what could possibly take that long, given a default setup.

I wonder if it might be something resulting from the fact that the TiVo is already saving 2 MPEG2 streams in the background, while you are fiddling with the SP Manager? I never checked, does it keep buffering the tuners' data while it is recomputing the To Do list? I imagine that it does, as that'd be a pretty nasty feature gap. Maybe part of the problem is that the systems are woefully underpowered, memory bandwidth-wise, to handle all three operations... especially when the recomputation is large and complex (many SP's set to record all broadcasts)...

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[Fnkmaster]

Hmm, I agree there are some strange software imperfections, but in my experience my old series 1 standalone Tivo is about 10-20 times more reliable than my digital cable box from Time Warner (measured primarily in terms of relative number of times the two boxes have to be hard rebooted to fix a major screwup). The digital cable box needs a reboot on a weekly basis at least, especially if you've been watching any HDTV - now THAT is unacceptable for consumer electronics. The Tivo gets rebooted once every 5-6 months perhaps, if that.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[JDAustin]

I live in a condo with ~20ish units. The condo association was offered a DirecTV dish to serve everyone in the building a few month ago for nocharge ($1500 dish). My Wife and I decided to switch after dealing with crappy cable that is 1/2 foreign channels for $45+ a month. The DirecTV (and a DirecTV DVR/Tivo) was hooked up and it does everything it said it would do. The Tivo unit does not take a minute to open the now playing list, it takes a few seconds at the most. Using the Tivo guide, its very fast (although the DirecTV guide was noticble slower, but not 30+seconds slower). I dont know about the season passes though.

The funny thing about this whole endever is that when I called cable to cancel, they offered to cut my rate to $19/month for a year if I stayed with them.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just bought the new DirecTV HD Tivo and have noticed none of the delays regarding displaying the guide,"Now Playing List", etc. Could these be issues on older gerneration boxes only?

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[e40]

I have a DirecTivo, series 2. I have not seen the problems you have. I did notice that when I had 50+ season passes, with some wish lists among them, rearranging the order took about 5 minutes. However, since I got rid of some wish lists and reduce the number to 30, it's faster.

I even added a 120GB disk to my Tivo, and my Now Playing is signficantly longer than for most people. Even so, displaying the list of shows in Now Playing takes a few seconds.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[e40]

I have 2 friends who have DirecTivo (1 has series 1, the other series 2), neither has any of these issues. I've personally spent time in front of the series 1 unit, and it feels just as fast as my series 2.

I'm starting to think you are a troll or are just plain making part of your "story" up. The alternative is that you and your friends where really, really unlucky, and my friends and I were really, really lucky. Seems a little unlikely.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[CatOne]

There's definitely SOMETHING up. I have a Philips unit, and if I hit "record" for a show, I often get "please wait" for 15-60 seconds while it thinks about recording the show.

No idea what it's doing, but sometimes I'll hit fast forward, think it didn't recognize it, so hit it 15 more times. Then 20 seconds later I get 15 hits in a row "medium fast superfast normal medium fast superfast..." pretty funny.

But really, my DirecTivo is REALLLY slow. Painfully so. Not sure it was always this bad... maybe worse since the 3.x series updates? Mine is about 3 years old now.

Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[boarder]

he's not a troll, this is a real issue... all you have to do is look on google. hell, even my installer mentioned the issue to me. it's not just about series 1 vs 2, there are multiple brands of each. there are also other circumstances: how often your machine dials in, how many season passes, how many shows are recorded, etc. call up hughes (who've recently stopped making any more dtivos) and ask tech support about it... they aren't surprised and know how to "fix" it.

One Post

and another

It means this

[elgatozorbas]

web content? Tivos will then be able to recognize web content and direct it to the appropriate home device. what does that mean?

From the article: "You can stream any content from the Net, watch it on your TV, or route it wirelessly to any other device -- MP3 player, PDA, laptop. It can all be done with the ease that TiVo's 1.6 million subscribers already have come to relish: You'll never need to click more than a button or two on a single remote to pull entertainment into any room in your house"
The way I understand it, it means that the original Tivo (which I never saw) was a pure harddisk recorder, while the new one will have some more multimedia computer-like abilities, and be able to talk to other devices. Just my interpretation. The article is mostly about how great TIVO and van Hoff are...

Z

Re:It means this

[NumbThumb]

Um, where do i plug the wifi-card into the stereo?

Re:It means this

[Anonymous Coward]

Just tape it onto the back, or better yet, send it to me, if it's a storage issue.

Re:It means this

[discstickers]

Here.

Moderators Often Smoke Crack

[tilleyrw]

...how does TiVo get saved when they're really the only viable PVR in the mass consumer market?

How does a remark such as the above become moderated to level 5?

The Tivo PVR is functionally equivalent to the ReplayTV PVR. Neither has outstanding functionality. (Although the easily accessible commercial skip on the Replay is very nice. You don't have to hack through configuration screens to find the option as on the Tivo.)

Re:Moderators Often Smoke Crack

[Anonymous Coward]

Pressing Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select for 30 second skip on the remote doesn't qualify as "hacking through configuration screens".

Re:Moderators Often Smoke Crack

[TippyTwoShoes]

I use that hack all the time. My life wouldn't be the same without 30 second skip! What were they thinking when they didn't make that a real button??

This has been tried before

[Myself]

Isn't this the same sort of hyperconsumerist thinking that drove :DigitalConvergence into the ditch too? The makers of the :CueCat also had a cable, which connected one's TV audio output to one's soundcard input, and software to recognize "cues" in the audio, which would then pull up the appropriate page on the computer.

People won't flock to a technology because it infests their computer with all the same advertising they see on TV. People will run screaming the other way, but grab the nifty hardware on the way out.

Re:This has been tried before

[stratjakt]

That device was stupid for so many reasons. First of all, most TVs dont have a line level audio out. And the ones that do, when you connect to it, disables the TVs internal speakers. So now you can't hear TV unless you redirect it through those cheapass lil speakers on your computer desk.

All so you can put ads for the same products being advertised on TV on the screen...

What was the thing where they'd broadcast URLs with the programming? I remember WebTV for windows could snag those URLs, and I thought it was a cool idea (some documentary on Discovery Channel could give me a bunch of links to good sites on ancient egypt). Or if there was a link to relevant subject matter for every Jeapordy! question (answer). That'd be cool too.

Only time I ever saw it used was when a Ford commercial came on, I got a link to ford.com.

Why not publish a SDK

[ron_ivi]

If they'd publish a SDK and you'll have *millions* of programmers saving Tivo, instead of just one.

Re:Why not publish a SDK

[dave420]

Or, a million programmers writing competing software. If Tivo aren't paying the programmers, Tivo doesn't own anything.

Re:Why not publish a SDK

[Anonymous Coward]

But they all help sell Tivo boxes.

IBM doesn't own most of the software written for the IBM-PC, yet they still make money from that product line from the early 1980s.

You'd think Tivo would be content to be the IBM of the consumer space.

Re:Why not publish a SDK

[werfele]

TiVo has a published API for the existing Home Media Option, which JavaHMO takes advantage of. It wouldn't be surpising if they do the same for their next generation Home Media offering.

Re:Why not publish a SDK

[cayenne8]

"...and you'll have *millions* of programmers saving Tivo..."

I didn't know Tivo was 'dying'...

Re:Why not publish a SDK

[Anonymous Coward]

well, the article implied there's one guy trying to save it.

Re:Why not publish a SDK

[Jahf]

Not dying, but definitely beginning to flounder. DirecTV is most likely going to switch to a homegrown box in the next year or two. TiVo has no other deals (at least none that are public yet) with large providers and that is really what would keep their current business afloat for the long-haul.

I still have hopes that they'll make a digital cable version of their HDTiVo and that then they'll be able to ink some serious deals. However if that doesn't happen they are in serious trouble in the not too distant future. Between Moxi, NDS (the DVR that DirecTV will begin using next year in conjunction with TiVo boxes if rumors are true), embedded players like MontaVista (who don't sell anything direct but have been working with Japanese DVR manufacturers) and various knock-offs and cheap (cheap being good in the mass-market STB world even at the expense of features).

Perhaps TiVo will cut out a new niche, but it will be alot harder to do that with something other than TV since that is what 99% of the consumers think of when they think entertainment.

Re:Why not publish a SDK

[Moofie]

What, you mean content to have their proprietary firmware reverse-engineered, and then stupidly selling the crown jewels to a little tiny company that has come to 0wn the industry?

Yeah, being IBM's PC division is great. Not.

Re:Why not publish a SDK

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if millions of tivio boxes start ./'ing mom&pop programmers' web sites where they've put up the latest clip of fluffy being sucked into a leaf blower.

Sounds like folks are still asleep at the wheel at tivio.

Re:Why not publish a SDK

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, being IBM's PC division is great. Not.

$2.8 billion per quarter, and an increase of 18% (what IBM's PC division made in Q1 2004) is more than Tivo'll ever see.

While their total market share's behind Dell the IBM PC division doesn't target end-user sales, and in corporate sales they're roughly equal to HP and Dell. Furthermore they have a higher percentage of laptops (better profit) than Dell and HP.

Yet you say "Not". Why wouldn't you want to be IBM's PC division?

Re:Why not publish a SDK

[Moofie]

Because I'd rather be a market leader and innovator than another manufacturer of the Same Old Boxes.

I /love/ the Thinkpad line...but I like the Powerbooks much mobettah.

Re:Why not publish a SDK

[dave420]

Come on, folks - how on earth is that trolling? The mods on this site are shit. straight-up shit.

Wierd guy

[KillaKen187]

"Out of this crucible, you get something beautiful. If everyone is willing to get along, you get mediocrity"

This guy sounds like a philosopher not a programmer. Now that is Strangeberry

Re:Wierd guy

[Anonymous Coward]

"If everyone is willing to get along, you get mediocrity"

My boss thinks that. Or maybe he's just an A-hole.

Media extenders for Windows Media Center

[figleaf]

Media extenders (for XBox or standalone), which is supposed to ship this Christmas season, will allow this in conjuntion with a Windows Media Center.

How about this generation

[teamhasnoi]

of Tivos knowing when it's on a channel that is showing nothing or one I'm not subscribed for, *And Not Recording It*?

And an easy way of deleting channels - with a thumbnail that shows what's on it?

And the prevention of third parties removing all sorts of useful features like home media option, networking, ect. (DirectTV, you dirty SOBs).

Admittedly, these are the big 3 things that annoy me about my Tivo - I don't know if they are common to standalones, but IMHO DirectTV has really wrecked something good

Re:How about this generation

[JoeNiner]

Go into settings and fill in the "Channels I receive" list. A pain in hte ass, and something it should do automatically, but it will solve your first two problems. The good side of DirecTivo: Only 5$ a month, which is what you would pay DirecTV for the second tuner anyway. This box is a lot better than a second tuner.

Re:How about this generation

[seinman]

"knowing when it's on a channel that is showing nothing or one I'm not subscribed for, *And Not Recording It*?"

"an easy way of deleting channels"

Standalone TiVos do these with ease. I guess you'll have to complain to DirecTV about these issues.

Re:How about this generation

[teamhasnoi]

The 20 dollar RCA DirectTV box we had before did it automatically, then let you go through and delete channels via a thumbnail that showed what was on at the time.

For something that cost so little, it kicked ass in the functionally department.

After sitting and trying to remember what's on a channel by its 3-4 letter name (and having no easy way to flip to the channel to see what's on it) so I can delete it, I want to go to Direct TV and kick some ass in their Department of Functionality. I really don't want to spend the ample amount of time and effort that this worthless 'Channels I Receive' demands. Crap - I'd have to take notes, for god's sake.

Re:How about this generation

[David Rolfe]

I've had a series 1, and upgraded to a series 2, and I've not had the hassles you've described... but as for a way to handing the "Channels I recieve" issue it's pretty easy...

After you've switched your guide to the tivo guide, and not the directv grid just do this:

Go into channels I receive, click select on any channels you know you don't get or you know you hate -- QVC for example.

If you don't know what the channel is ... press 'live tv' once and then tune in that channel. if you don't get it or don't like it press 'left' once... it will pop you back to 'channels i receive' then you can just deselect that one and move on.

TiVo will remember the channels you don't recieve/don't like even through lineup changes and channel additions and deletions.

I've found that by whittling my channels list down to the ones I watch the most, and cutting out the fluff it makes it more likely that when I flip on the tv it will already be buffering up something I like.

More /. advertising?

[sczimme]

Damon Darlin from Business 2.0 writes "We just posted a story on...

Wow - I guess advertisements no longer need to be camouflaged at all.

Re:More /. advertising?

[stratjakt]

Not for TiVo or Apple.

Now run out and buy a new and improved TiVo, with all the old "phone home and spy on you in the middle of the night" functionality you remember, but now augmented with Hyper-X-Treme advertisement redirection!

Re:More /. advertising?

[Lord_Dweomer]

"Wow - I guess advertisements no longer need to be camouflaged at all."

Better they not be camoflaged at all than come in the form of trickery and astroturfing.

whats this mean?

[vile8]

Excellent, I can stream to my computer, and using the other technology meant to enable connection of computers beyond the computer world, send the information via bluetooth to my fridge with the tv mounted in it.

TiVo is a victim

[mhollis]

of their own success. Basically, TiVo replaces a standard VCR, only more effectively. It can record shows while playing back, it can let you skip commercials more effectively than a VCR and it's a cool device.

But a "generic TiVo" leased from cable and satellite television companies does the same thing exactly. They all enhance the television viewing experience with high-quality instant playback for "timeshifting." What none of these devices do is allow you to permanently record television in a removable device.

Want to (temporarily) save TiVo? Add a feature that will take a certain segment of the recorded video to an on-board dual-layer DVD recorder. Let the viewer have the option of cutting out the commercials, starting the recording at a certain spot and ending at a certain spot, pick up recording when the actual program restarts, etc. Once you are all done, you have a DVD for your collection.

The reason why this is a temporary save is that the generic models will immediately try to do the same thing. Hey, competition sux sometimes.

I don't use my computer while I'm watching television. I do know that there are some people whose only access to the Internet, e-mail and the Worldwide Web are through devices like "WebTV" but I can't see that (small) market really hustling out there to get a TiVo. Bill Gates is correct; the television viewing experience is really different from that of working on a computer. The only possible likeness is playing games.

Were TiVo able to enhance a game-player's experience, they'd really have something. Perhaps one possible enhancement would be the creation of a shared on-line experience for console games that do not allow networked game play, but that sounds unlikely to me.

Re:TiVo is a victim

[stratjakt]

Why do we have to "save" TiVo? Why do we give a shit if TiVo is "saved"? What's with these pet companies that slashbots love so much. Really. Just because they used linux in the device?

What's so great about paying a monthly fee to have a device phone home and upload marketting data based on my viewing habits?

I say, if other people can make a cheaper device, one that just records and plays back TV, that doesn't phone home, and doesn't have any service fees to just use it - they deserve my business.

I just want to record and watch TV. I dont want to rate shows, or have a device pretend to tell me what I want to watch. I know what I want to watch, and I know what time it's on.

Re:TiVo is a victim

[gurps_npc]

I think that would not be a temporary save, but a long term save, if they could pull it off.

Why? Because the content producers would scream COPY-RIGHT INFRINGEMENT faster than Tivo could build the first one - even though the VCR companies already fought and won that battle.

TIVO's competition has strong connections to that industry, many of them are depenedent on them so would not follow too quickly, if at all.

Re:TiVo is a victim

[Otto]

Want to (temporarily) save TiVo? Add a feature that will take a certain segment of the recorded video to an on-board dual-layer DVD recorder. Let the viewer have the option of cutting out the commercials, starting the recording at a certain spot and ending at a certain spot, pick up recording when the actual program restarts, etc. Once you are all done, you have a DVD for your collection.

What, you mean like the Pioneer DVR-320-S and Pioneer DVR-520H-S?

Okay, they don't have editing out commercials capability yet, and I doubt they are dual layer. So it's not totally there. But they do have Tivo+DVD Recorder.

Re:TiVo is a victim

[peteMG]

Bill Gates is correct; the television viewing experience is really different from that of working on a computer.

Wasn't that Steve Jobs?

" Do you have any other thoughts about where your competitors are taking their strategies? For example, Windows Media PCs are computers attached to TV sets.

Well, we've always been very clear on that. We don't think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."

2/2004 interview with macworld

Re:TiVo is a victim

[Anonymous Coward]

Here we go again:

1) No one gives a rat's patootie what you (as an individual) watch. Relax and remove the tinfoil hat.

2) Those of us with busy lives can't always sit down to watch what we like. /overyourself

Re:TiVo is a victim

[SewersOfRivendell]

But a "generic TiVo" leased from cable and satellite television companies does the same thing exactly.

The generic offerings from cable companies may be glorified VCRs, complete with unfriendly user interfaces, but you've obviously never used a Tivo. It's not just a replacement for a VCR, not even close. It's an entirely new genre of device, and you don't know how effectively it will change your TV watching habits until you own it.

Let's see if I can explain it. A Tivo is effectively your own personal TV-watching robot. It's as if you trained a robot in your preferences and dedicated it to applying those preferences to operating a high-definition VCR (with a huge supply of blank tape) all day.

To carry the analogy further: with the dual-tuner DirecTV Tivos, it's like having two robots at two high-def VCR's.

Re:TiVo is a victim

[mhollis]

In the Betamax case the US Court system found that home copying for personal use is not infringement. This law has also been applied to PVRs. Frankly, it is common sense. You do have a right to record what you see on TV. I see no difference between this and the home use of a home DVD disk recorder (as has been mentioned in this forum). TiVo's competition would have to include some means (even if it were not as good) of "backing up" the material on their hard disks or seriously lose market share to TiVo. That makes it a temporary save in my book.

Re:TiVo is a victim

[mhollis]

I do not dispute your claim that Jobs did say what he said, but in 1995, I was doing media work for Microsoft and recorded an interview with Gates about the future of computers where he was asked specifically about the merging of computers and television.

Since I later edited the interview and his comments into a video for the Microsoft company, I remember his comments in detail.

Might Jobs have said this first? Sure. Might some other computer software person said this first? Absolutely.

Re:TiVo is a victim

[mhollis]

you've obviously never used a Tivo.

You are correct. But The TiVo company still loses market share to these overglorified VCRs leased by cable companies. That is why their fortunes have fallen -- xomewhat.

And elsewhere in this discussion I hear comments that the TiVo device does not record the way the user hoped, recording Spanish-language shows instead of what they wanted and not recording when told to.

Re:TiVo is a victim

[Otto]

What's so great about paying a monthly fee to have a device phone home and upload marketting data based on my viewing habits?

I don't know. I have a Tivo. I pay no monthly fee, but I do let it phone home and upload my viewing. In fact, I signed up to have it upload my detailed and specific viewing (opt-in) because I want my opinion to count. If they can pass along what shows suck to somebody, and back it up with data, then I'm all for it. Improve my selection.

I say, if other people can make a cheaper device, one that just records and plays back TV, that doesn't phone home, and doesn't have any service fees to just use it - they deserve my business.

I agree.

I just want to record and watch TV. I dont want to rate shows, or have a device pretend to tell me what I want to watch. I know what I want to watch, and I know what time it's on.

I know what I want to watch, and I don't give a shit what time it's on. If all you want is a digital VCR with a clock in it, then good for you. I happen to want something a little more intuitive. I like my Tivo: I like the way it works, I like the interface, I like the suggestions feature, I sometimes like the occassional advertising it throws onto the main menu (but not always).

Sometimes, the fact that the majority of people like a device is all that's needed to get an outpouring of people saying "I like the device." It's not necessary to attribute it to some kind of meme propogation or some such silly thing.

Re:TiVo is a victim

[David Rolfe]

I want one of these so bad that my wife hides and destroys any ads or circulars in the paper and post for these. TiVos with burners. I have to have one. :) A 4.7gig disc will hold lots of 'medium quality' Daily Shows... so I wouldn't say the dual-layer thing is a big issue. You could fit more than one iFC movie recorded at 'high quality' on a dvd-r.

Are you onthe pipe with them?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Stupid question... (Score:1) "

I see it hasn't even been moderated.

please, please, please fix that

[boarder]

It even gets worse than that... on some DTivos, if you don't call in often enough and let the drive get filled with shows, it will slow down the machine to near unusability.

I had this happen, and it would take 5 minutes to bring up the list of recorded shows and hours to reorder the season passes. Now THAT is shitty programming. The tech support said there were only two ways to fix it: either wipe the drive clean or go through the process of deleting shows manually (10 minutes to do per show).

I can't understand why they would put out a product that is unbelievably slow at its fastest, then expect users to want to stay with the product... maybe that is why Hughes is no longer making DirecTivos.

I can think of a number of things Tivo could do to make their UI more efficient, and I'm sure the coding would be simple to make it faster (how hard is it to sort a list of 30 shows?).

Re:please, please, please fix that

[511pf]

I've got a 120 GB drive in my DirecTV DVR and I have never had this problem. Maybe they gave me "the good code".

Re:please, please, please fix that

[boarder]

It could also be that you got "the good model." There are multiple brands of them out there. You also don't mention whether you have Series 1 or 2. Series 1 can be fixed by a RAM cache card (costs as much as the device itself). I have only heard of this problem on one model of Series 2 devices (the Hughes HDVR2). Even the guy who came to install it warned me before installing that it would be much slower than I expected. According to the tech support guy, it also has to do with how often I let it dial in (I don't have it connected to the phone line right now). Others say that it has to do with the drive filling up, so your 120GB might not get as full as the 40GB.

IMDB integration?

[swb]

Since many are hooked to the internet 24/7, I'd love to see IMDB integration with Tivo -- have the details screen for a program show you an IMDB page (or IMDB data) for the given movie, with the ability to browse around and then pick selections for future wishlists, etc.

Re:IMDB integration?

[Rude Turnip]

It does this already, just not with IMBD. You get a list of actors, the director, genre, year, etc.

Re:IMDB integration?

[forgoil]

Should also have a connection to www.tvtome.com then, since a lot of the material on TV is infact TV series.

But then again, I prefer channel Internet. No commercials, watch on demand, and better quality that the shity cable... And then I usually have access to Firefox.

Maybe it's better to spend the money on a plasma to begin with, hooks up to the PC easily :))

Re:IMDB integration?

[cmj]

The TivoWebPlus does this and more, and you can do it anywhere on the internet.

All you need is your TiVo connected to your network.

Competition

[dfj225]

This might be a little off topic, but I think its ok since it deals with TIVO's competition. I recently had Comcast digital cable installed and have been playing around with the On Demand feature. So far it seems like a promising feature, but needs much more content. The thing I like about On Demand is, unlike TIVO, is that I can watch something that didn't necessarily air yet (although in reality almost all of the content is previously aired stuff). I think that as soon as networks start to embrace On Demand type services more, it will be a big hit, making boxes like TIVO almost obsolete. I think what they should strive for now is putting up entire old seasons of television shows. I think it would be great to be able to watch any episode of Futurama when I want and for series that are still being run, they could add the new episodes a day after they air. On Demand should shape up to be a great technology, but right now it definetly needs better content. I can't really complain seeing how it comes free with any digital cable package. However, since they do use it as a major selling point I think Comcast should work with the networks to get better grade material on it. Once they do, I will never want to use a TIVO.

Re:Competition

[stratjakt]

For On Demand to work, they have to eliminate the pay-per-view model. Comcast is unlikely to ever let that go, which is a shame.

Forget first run movies, forget the hundreds of specialty channels. Give me the regular gammut of channels, put all the specialty stuff on On Demand. No need for 5 "home improvement" channels, if I wanted to watch some episodes of "this old House" where they tackled a project like my own, I could.

But I never paid to watch it on PBS, and if I was going to pay to watch it, I'd order the DVD collection. I (like many others) don't like spending money on stuff I don't get to keep. There's probably some human nature psychology crap to explain that.

Thing is, their business model isnt based on giving customers what they want. It's based on bundling a dozen useless channels with one good one, and making you pay for all of them.

Digital cable - to them - is nothing about picture quality or cool new features, it's all about requiring me to pay for each TV in my home.

On Demand isn't about cool technology, it's about making me pay every time I watch a show.

Meh. TV is dying, the cable industry is killing it. I was reading an article about how book sales are climbing, and it was alluding to the fact that corporations are killing other forms of popular entertainment (TV, movies, radio, video games), and more people are turning back to books. Which, ultimately is a good thing, I suppose.

Re:Competition

[dfj225]

Not everything on On Demand is pay per view. In fact, the only thing I have found so far that is PPV are movies, and even this doesn't have to be PPV, for instance, my package came with Starz for free, so whatever movies Starz is playing I can watch on On Demand for free. All of the normal television channels are free also. The only ones I have really looked at are Comedy Central and Adult Swim. You can watch whatever shows they have listed with no PPV fees. I think PPV movies mainly competes with video rentals (and that seems to be the way Comcast advertises it). You are right though, if Comcast ever did make every show PPV, I would not want to watch it, but I would really love if I could see any episode from every season of Seinfeld whenever I want, which is something that they don't do yet.

Re:Competition

[stratjakt]

Yeah, they might sell some sort of "unlimited" On Demand viewing package one day.

Of course, it'll be "unlimited" just like my "unlimited" cablemodem, that is, arbitrarily limited.

How long until they send me some threatening legalese letter because I streamed all the ATHF shows back-to-back, and they assume its because I'm recording them all for my personal library. Maybe that's what I'm doing, maybe I'm having a marathon ATHF party with my friends.

Hell, OD uses up bandwidth. How long till my service is disconnected mid-month because I'm "abusing" it by letting my family watch too much TV. Apparently I let them use too much internet and had to call and apologize to my corporate masters at Comcast for the transgression.

The old-world media empires will never "get it" and will try to shoehorn technology into their business model, rather than try to come up with newer business models based around technology.

Re:Competition

[dfj225]

Yes, the whole fake "unlimited" deal with Comcast is kind of upsetting, luckily I have never run into that sort of problem with my internet service from them. Hopefully they will never impose that sort of thing on On Demand television, I mean the whole point is to view what you want, when you want.

Whatever

[OS24Ever]

The death of TiVo is greatly exaggerated. Time Warner offers the DVR in my area. I got it after using TiVo for 3 years. I sent it back within a week. The thing sucks.

TiVo's wealth of advantages are it's software. Season Passes, rating show thumbs up/thumbs down getting other shows based on your ratings, etc. I've used them since 2000. With the recent price reductions in the monthly charge it's well worth it. I've got one on both TVs and use my wireless network to connect for the updates/transfer files between them.

When I wanted to upgrade, I get a new one for $199 - $299 or whatever and keep paying the $12.95 for the first / $6.95 there after makes more sense than the $299 up front because I've yet to keep a TiVo for two years due to upgrades, change in whatever, etc.

Re:Whatever

[stratjakt]

Thats fine for you.

Most people wouldnt send back a free device, just to spend 300 bucks on another device that does the same thing, plus an additional monthly fee. Most people dont give a shit about the "thumbs up" button. They just dont want to miss Outback Jack.

Tivo has a lot of work to do if they want to sell one to me, for instance. I just dont see "let our cheesy 'switch(genre){};' algorithm tell you what shows you like to watch" thing as the killer app.

Re:Whatever

[OS24Ever]

Recording an episode on a Time Warner DVR: It records every freaking instance of it on any channel. So if for example you're watching a show like Friends that is rerun on 10 channels and shown new on one only 1/4 the year

TiVo knows the difference, the DVD I had in the spring of 2003 did not.

You may mock the thumbs up/down thing but when you're bored shitless at 2AM and there aint crap on anything, even the soft porn pay channels the randomly picked shows based on preference are a godsend for the terminally bored

Re: Java genius?

[stratjakt]

Ya but look at how many patents that guy has!

I didn't know "genious" on slashdot was equated to "how much frivolous IP you claim". That Darl McBride guy must be the greatest mind ever to walk the earth!

MSFT is on a much talked about patent-filing binge. With each new application, they become "smarter".

Re: Java genius?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's referring to the people who wrote the JIT compiler? I agree though, the language looks like it was designed by a retarded 2-year-old.

You can fix the EPG slowness now

[hirschma]

Change the channel guide like this:

* Go to your guide,
* Hit the "info" button on your remote,
* Change the style from DirecTV grid to Tivo Live Guide.

The Tivo style guide is better (IMO) and super fast. I'm guessing that they had to include the DirecTV grid for some contractual reason, but really want to folks to use their EPG.

Jonathan

Who owns the listings information owns the market

[cardpuncher]

Analogue TiVos didn't last long in the UK market: the advantages of the programme schedule information aren't really apparent with 5 channels.

I don't imagine they'll last long in any other market, since what they're basically selling is programme listings, the hardware is incidental.

STB makers have much bigger volumes and they are natural allies of cable/satellite distribution networks - who have the schedule information. Not much room in there for TiVo in the long run.

And none of this wonderful weird fruit technology will be much use when the distribution networks DRM the content to the extent you can't (legally) ship it around in your home.

I notice TiVo didn't pay cash...

Yahoo confirms, TIVO is dying ...

[Anonymous Coward]

were doing poorly ???
Try ARE doing poorly.
5 year stock price chart

Salient fact about TIVO : TIVO loses money. Decent revenue stream you say? Continual loses for an easy-to-clone product from an aging Silicon Valley company is bad news. A programmer from Strangeberry who invented Java is not going to save TIVO. Did Java save sun ?

Re:Yahoo confirms, TIVO is dying ...

[FinestLittleSpace]

funnily enough, it looks like it could be about to save sun :-)

Re:Yahoo confirms, TIVO is dying ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dropping stock price does not necessarily mean the company is doing poorly. It means the public THINK the company is doing poorly.

Econ101, friend.

Re:Yahoo confirms, TIVO is dying ...

[jargoone]

Did Java save sun ?

It certainly saved them from having to come up with new buzzwords to tack onto completely unrelated technologies.

Re:Yahoo confirms, TIVO is dying ...

[Emugamer]

take a look at their SEC filing of June 9th. on Item 2 Title: MANAGEMENT'S DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS OF FINANCIAL CONDITION ... it sheds some light on where they think they are.

Re:Yahoo confirms, TIVO is dying ...

[MacJedi]

perhaps you forgot about, oh, say the dot-com crash?

For fun, let's compare Tivo and Redhat

List of patents

[openSoar]

Arthur Van Hoff's resume replete with list of patents here.

Re:List of patents

[CompWerks]

He created his html resume with Microsoft Word 9 - he can't be that smart.

Re:List of patents

[djdavetrouble]

Sed:
He created his html resume with Microsoft Word 9 - he can't be that smart.
As if the chief Smartberry types his own resume... DUhhh. He has an Adminberry for that.

Re:List of patents

[djdavetrouble]

from the list of patents: System and method for secure peer-to-peer communication between downloaded programs. Arthur van Hoff, Sami Shaio, Graham Hamilton, Marianne Mueller. Sun Microsystems 06/02/98.

Secure P2P ? R337 !!!!!!!!!

You will never shut down the REAL napster.

Defensive Blogging

[laetus]

Stipe42, you may be right, but I have to wonder sometimes if comments like yours are, for lack of a better word, defensive blogging by marketing people.

You know, someone paid to sit around all day and defend a company's product online in high-profile blogs and review sites like Slashdot, using legitimate user profiles (or in this case, maybe as a marketroid for cable companies looking to slam DirectTV).

Does anyone know if "defensive blogging" happens? I googled for pages on this topic but couldn't find any stories about it, but I'm sure it happens.

Re:Defensive Blogging

[mekkab]

ITs called astroturfing.
Caveat Lector.

Re:Defensive Blogging

[laetus]

Thanks. As soon as I googled on "astroturfing blogs," I the topic had even been on Slashdot before:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/18/2043 20 6

Question is, can it be reduced? I doubt it.

Re:Defensive Blogging

[mekkab]

ITs always an issue on travel web sites where they review accomodations and restaurants. Is it a real tourist? or a ringer for the place?

Its all about developing heuristics that set off your BS meter.

I'm already using the Tivo guide.

[raygundan]

I don't want to think about how slow it would be back with the default DirecTV guide. It may be faster, but it's still slower than molasses.

Genius? Any clown can create a language

[hopethishelps]

He was one of the Java geniuses at Sun

Java is one of the very, very few programming languages ever created which brought no new ideas to programming. It's more or less a subset of C++, with a garbage-collector (as popularized by Lisp in the 1960s). The original intent was to compile it to a compact interpretable form somewhat like BCPL's ocode (circa 1970).

Re:Genius? Any clown can create a language

[pauljlucas]

Java is one of the very, very few programming languages ever created which brought no new ideas to programming.

Finally, somebody who "gets it." Even the virtual machine was done earlier by UCSD Pascal (and probably others). I really don't understand why some people are so enamored with Java. It's a mediocre language using recycled syntax and ideas.

Re:Genius? Any clown can create a language

[ViolentGreen]

It did bring a couple of new ideas though. There two big ones that stick out, the serializable interface and another one whose name slips my mind. It's been a while since I used them and I get them a little confused. Basically one interface allows converts an object to a class and the other coverts a class to a string. You can also convert back up.

This allows for some really neat things involving sending objects and classes to remote machines. I had a CS professior who created a distributed computing (seti-at-home type) application that would connect to a server download pieces of arbitrary code, execute it and return the result back to the server. If someone had computationally intensive bits of code, they could just up it to the server.

I am fairly certain nothing before (or possibly since) could allow this.

Re:Genius? Any clown can create a language

[pauljlucas]

... the serializable interface ...

Perl has had this for some time. And probably Lisp too.

Re:Genius? Any clown can create a language

[bjsyd70]

Java's big idea is secure execution of code delivered over a network from someone you don't trust. Competitors are JavaScript and SQL. Java is compiled, better standardarized, and more OO. Java has lost in this area.

Re:Genius? Any clown can create a language

[Anonymous Coward]

Java's big idea is secure execution of code delivered over a network from someone you don't trust.

But to accomplish this, Java applets are so restricted in what they can do as to be virtually useless. They can't write files on the client, for example. They can just draw pretty pictures.

Competitors are JavaScript and SQL. Java is compiled, better standardarized, and more OO.
SQL is very well standardized, just as well as Java for practical purposes. It addresses a limited, but very useful, application domain. It was not intended to be OO.
I don't know what you mean by saying that Java is "more OO" than Javascript. Javascript is an interesting language, one of the few that has objects without classes. For simple user-interface applications, like displaying a tree-structured menu on a web page, Javascript is usually a more appropriate tool than Java.

Java has lost in this area.
Well, I'm not sure you're right, but I hope you will be :-)

There are so many cheaper alternatives?

[Moderation abuser]

Really? A Tivo costs $99 now.

Re:There are so many cheaper alternatives?

[MindStalker]

$99 dollars after 100 mail in rebate. Personally I never much trusted mail in rebates. Or, you can get a DirecTV tivo for $99 straight (plus 15 dollar shipping fee) if you have their service, and its only 5 dollars a month subscription instead of 12.95.

Re:There are so many cheaper alternatives?

[3terrabyte]

All rebates are backed by law. I have received all of mine. I once got a rejection postcard from a mfg rebate because I was in the wrong zip code. I took it to the store and they paid me cash on the spot.

They "work" because people are too lazy to fill them out right away, and then procrastinate and forget.

Save Tivo?

[smooth wombat]

Is that anything like finding Nemo?

Re:Save Tivo?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but its a great way to get your company name in print so your stock price goes up. Oh, and inventing a "GOD" while your at it helps too. Good PR stuff you know, cuz it builds name recognition. Because, unless you live under a rock, you must have heard of something "technical" called "Java", so *he* must be good so therefor by association the company must be good!

Just too bad so many people think the product still sucks, but thats just personal preference as far as I'm concerned. Personally I'd rather build my own so I can have the features I want, not just what the "Sponsors" or the MPAA decides that I should have.

lots of patent..

[joeldg]

having a jillion patents means he is pretty aware of the legal system and that he in fact needs to protect is IP, in particular with which industry he is in.
it is not necessarilly a factor in "genius" in my opinion, it is however a factor in "covering of the buttocks" in a hardened and cutthroat television device busines..

The date...

[Anonymous Coward]

Forward to the future or what? The date of the Business 2.0 article is September 01, 2004...

No new ideas?

[Anonymous Coward]

It introduced the canard that interpreted programs run just as fast as compiled programs.

Re:No new ideas?

[stratjakt]

Java is a compiled language. Oh wait, I see what you're saying... A compiled program can be just as slow (or slower) than an interpreted one.

Yeah, Java really drove that point home.

tivo's weak competition will save tivo

[jeffehobbs]

TiVo has the mindshare and still remains the best of breed PVR out there, both in terms of technology and UI. Geeks might not think UI is important but it really is; jJust examine this account of what goes wrong when the technology is there (sort of) but the UI is not.

~jeff

Re:tivo's weak competition will save tivo

[subVorkian]

What a difference! If TiVo were a beverage, it'd be a tall glass of Jamaican ginger beer with chipped ice and a lime wedge, while the Explorer 800 would be a paper cup of warm fake lemonade stirred with the finger of a nose-picking six-year-old.

need I say anymore -- thanks for the link.

Original TiVos are slow too

[Cato]

I have an original Series 1 TiVo, and it's been incredibly slow for some time - the only thing that sped it up was deleting a huge number of season passes. I find it hard to work out why it's so incredibly slow - I suspect really bad database design, indexing and/or in-memory algorithms, as the amount of data it has to search is not that enormous. Intelligent algorithms and on-disk indexes should make it go a lot more quickly...

Re:Original TiVos are slow too

[bcombee]

The Series 1 devices only have 16MB of RAM, which isn't enough for larger databases or upgraded drives, so they tend to swap. One of the less common hacks for the S1 is to upgrade the RAM to 32MB, which seems to improve performance a lot.

Re:Original TiVos are slow too

[raygundan]

My S1 was slower than S2 boxes, but both are faster than the DTV units. I had twice as many season passes on the S1, and a hard drive four times as large. My DTV unit is unmodified, and yet the S1 still kicks its ass.

There ARE good reasons to channel and web surf

[notthepainter]

One common thought I've been seeing is that people don't want to web surf while watching TV. I can think of many situations where one would want JUST this.

• You are watching a sporting event and want to look up some stats
• You are watching a movie and want to check out the actors and actresses other films
• Ditto for a song you here during a movie
• And horrors, you might want to research a product you just happened to see an ad for

There are many uses here.

Re:There ARE good reasons to channel and web surf

[Duhavid]

Yup.

I was assuming, however, that they are aiming at a different way of watching the movies, one where the movies are in some catalog on the net, and one could browse to and watch, when one wanted, from the net. Then we find that TIVO has the catalog and stream to TIVO part of thing done (probably in concert with a big player in the entergainment industry, for the catalog), and they charge for this new service that they have enabled with their devices.

Course, then the copy cats follow.

Speeding up Tivo hints {Re:To *really* fix tivo...

[CallFinalClass]

Yes, this does well and truly suck. However, there are some things you can do to help your DirecTivo out. * Go through the channels and cut them down to just the ones you'll watch. Get rid of the PPVs, shopping channels and such (unless you want them). * Change the EPG to the Tivo style as other have mentioned, the DirecTV style is very slow. Better, but way slower * (This one blows) Keep the number of "now playing" shows down * (also blows) Get a new DirecTivo; I got a newer model and the response is much better. If your DTV unit takes 15 seconds to change channels, that's very high, I get 2-3 seconds.

Web content to a DVR? Torrentocracy + Mythtv

[Anonymous Coward]

Been there, done that - and no subscription fees or DRM pandering either! Check out Torrentocracy (for Mythtv) to give you -more- than just web content.

What would save Tivo? TV Napster

[Moderation abuser]

Peer to peer distribution of recorded shows. It'll never happen though.

Re:What would save Tivo? TV Napster

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll never happe because it's illegal, you dumbass.

Re:What would save Tivo? TV Napster

[Anonymous Coward]

we allready have that (duh)

that YOU never heard of it means nothing...

TiVo and dual tuners

[Cato]

Once you are on digital TV, whether cable, satellite or broadcast (terrestrial), TiVo's inability to tune into one TV channel while recording on another is very painful. It's really the digital set top box's fault - in the UK, Sky+ is a TiVo like device from the Sky satellite TV service that has dual digital tuners - but TiVo really suffers as a result, particularly in households where one person likes watching live TV and the other person wants to watch recorded stuff...

The lack of a wired link for remote commands between the STB and the TiVo is also painful - every now and then the Sky box switched itself off on receiving a channel change command, so I had to slow down the IR sending even more. Channel changing is truly glacial, even though the Sky remote can change channels incredibly fast - there've been few useful upgrades to the TiVo software for things like this.

Re:TiVo and dual tuners

[511pf]

Not sure if you're in the UK, but in the US, DirecTV PVR with TiVo has dual tuners.

Re:TiVo and dual tuners

[Ldir]

TiVo already has these capabilities where appropriate. The DirecTiVo boxes (integrated DirecTV DBS receiver and TiVo) support recording two streams simultaneously. You can also watch a third, recorded program at the same time. The new HD DirecTiVo supports this for OTA (broadcast) digital programming as well.

The stand-alone TiVos include a control port for a wired link to DirecTV STBs. Unfortunately, some of the new, cheap DirecTV receivers lack the proper input for wired control. Most, perhaps all of the older models had this port (called the "low-speed data port").

Re:TiVo and dual tuners

[Patrick Lewis]

The DirectTV Tivo has dual tuners. You can watch one live channel and record another, or you can watch a recording and record two live channels. I have had my unit for 3 years, so this really isn't new. FYI, the HTDV TiVo has four tuners.

What you are probably referring to is the TiVo stand-alone unit. The problem here is that TiVo has to encode the analog signal, something that the DirecTV or HDTV units (or your generic digital cable box) don't have to do. Dual tuners in these analog TiVo boxes would likely be prohibitively expensive.

Re:TiVo and dual tuners

[helfon1]

Most modern TV's have multiple inputs and you can watch one program and record another for about 5 dollars at radio shack.

What I have done with mine is I put a splitter on my cable line before it reaches the Tivo Box. Now I have two coaxial cables that both carry cable for one TV. Run one into your TV's coaxial cable input and run the other into Tivo. Then take your yellow video cable and red and white audio cables that come out of Tivo and plug them into a second input jack on your TV.

Now on your main TV input you have your plain old cable(without movie channels:( ) and on input1 you have Tivo with everything your cable box descrables. I agree it's not the best solution but it's super easy and I use it all the time.

Geez, weird.

[hirschma]

Mine is super fast. It is a Hughes branded Series 2, no mods, and it tends to be totally full at all times. Sorry that your experience is non-optimal :(

Jonathan

Re:Geez, weird.

[raygundan]

Yeah, mine too. Hughes HDVR2, no mods or upgrades at all. I have a series 1 standalone with a TurboNet card and an 80GB second drive that runs circles around it.

I wish I knew what the magic variable was, so I could make my tivo stop sucking and start making my tv less painful like the old one did.

Canada...

[gUmbi]

All I want to know is...when are they going to release Tivo to the Canadian market???

Re:Canada...

[jo42]

Me too...!

Of course, I could always pay Rogers Cable another 20 Canadian pesos a month and get an HDTV PVR...

Ads

[dfj225]

An interesting point that the article speaks briefly about is advertising and how advertisers hate Tivo because it can skip adds. The article mentions using Tivo's stat keeping to target a customer more directly and deliever relevant ads. I think this is really the future for advertising, not the static model of current television. For instance, I hate most adds because I'm not interested in what they are selling. I don't care if the newest Maxi pad can absorb a whole pitcher of iced tea, as a male I'm never going to need them. I often find car commercials very, very annoying, but when I was looking for a new car it was uesful to know what companies were having incentives. If ad companies could send me ads about products or television shows that I would be interested in, I think I might actually like to view them. Hopefully services like Tivo will help to bring this about.

Re:Ads

[jmichaelg]

We watch a show to see a particular performance, not to watch a pitch for some product. Ads break up story continuity. It's bad enough to go to a movie theater and have to wait through 15 minutes of ads to see the movie you paid to see but at least once the ads are over, they're not stopping the movie at various plot points to show some more ads.

If I want to find out about cars, stereos, DVRs, whatever, I go to the net and research what's out there. If I want to watch a performance, I want to see the performance.

Re:Ads

[Tazzy531]

Actually, ReplayTV had that feature. In collaboration with the media industry, TIVO didn't implement this feature so that they wouldn't get sued. However, Tivo can manually fast forward.

Re:Ads

[dfj225]

True, I don't think that ads should break up a show, but since ads are a fact of life, I think that after the show is over if I have to view ads they should at least be on a topic that I am interested in.

Re: Java genius?

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap, it's Paul Graham!

You're right though, they so should have hired a LISP programmer for the job.

that's because it's not the killer app

[mckwant]

The "TiVo picking things for you" is nice, but the main effect of getting TiVo is that you're no longer tied to times. My wife and I routinely record things during the week, then "catch up" saturday afternoon. If we don't really care about something, it just sorta expires.

Also, if you're a sports fan, TiVo is worth its weight in gold. No commercials, no halftime, you can blitz through "plays under review", and, at least for football, you can even blow through the huddle. I've watched every play of an entire game in about an hour. Basically, TiVo gave me most of my Sunday back.

Oh, and we have two Series 1 TiVos from about 5 years ago, and they still work fine. They're a little small compared to the new ones, but we don't usually fill ours up anyway.

Re:that's because it's not the killer app

[Blakey Rat]

Isn't that basically what the parent of your post just said?

Why spend $300 + subscription for the basic time-shifting ability of the Tivo when you can just get a box that does the same thing from your cable/satellite provider for free? (or really cheap... my DVR from Dish Network cost $50 one-time.)

Re:that's because it's not the killer app

[OS24Ever]

My original series one that I paid the $249 on got hit by lightning four months after I paid the $249 and fried the modem. I still have it in a box and have yet to part with it. Been trying to find a way to get it on a wireless network without a large investment. Now I"ve got two of the TiVo/DVD from Toshiba. They're nice

BusinessWeek confirms: TIVO may die.

[Anonymous Coward]

For a less press release style suck up to TIVO, and more insightful, informative take, let's see what
Business Week has to say about TIVO.


Indeed, much of TiVo's installed base has come from its exclusive deal with DirecTV (DTV ), which has been hawking digital recorders as a differentiator from cable providers such as Comcast (CMCSA ). TiVo's agreement with DirecTV doesn't expire until 2007. But NDS (NNDS ), a sister company to DirecTV, recently revealed it has struck a deal to offer its competing digital-recording technology to new DirecTV customers. Sources say by as early as November, set-top-box makers such as Samsung and Thomson (TMS ) could begin shipping NDS digital recorders to DirecTV, which is considering offering them to new customers for free.

Meanwhile, TiVo has been stymied in its efforts to sign a major cable provider. Comcast, Time Warner (TWX ), and other cable companies have asked for better deals than TiVo is willing to accept, people with knowledge of the negotiations say.

Still, Ramsay remains confident that in a few years TiVo can boast as many as 10 million subscribers. It can reach profitability with 3 million standalone customers if its plan to diversify its business model with licensing and advertising revenue also takes shape, analysts predict.

In the interim, the losses continue. For the current quarter, analysts estimate TiVo will report a loss of 24 cents a share on revenue of $25.8 million. For the fiscal year ending January, 2005, they're expecting a loss of 95 cents a share, on revenue of $115.8 million. If TiVo keeps losing money and consumer mindshare, it could become takeover bait. Worse, it could become another forgotten pioneer of the new digital age.

Pissed at Direct TV?

[teamhasnoi]

Copy and paste your Slashdot posts directly here!

Let's /. them until they fix the annoying little stuff! Hold them accountable! Make their servers smoke like a Scorched 3d game!

Tivo = neat device but...

[Anonymous Coward]

the only problem is that there's nothing good on television. Documentaries are interesting (TLC, Discovery, History ... ), but not worth buying cable every month for.

I put together a little PVR box b/c it seemed like such a neat idea. Then I realized there was nothing on TV worth recording. I can still watch downloaded movies on it, and it's a good file / mp3 / backup server.

Why by a Tivo when TV is so lame?

But who will save...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who will save the long hold times waiting to speak with someone at tivo?

Who will save the extra crap tivo adds to the main menu advertising stuff I have no interest in seeing?

Tivo's quality is starting to go away. The appliance and original idea is cool. But they are becoming greedy and making the service suffer.

No margins in the hardware

[winkydink]

Tivo is all about the subscriptions. That's unlkely to change, though they will be pressured to put more "value" into what you get for your $$$.

Yeah that would be great....

[grahamsz]

Someone could license the tivo architecture and merge it with a dvd recorder.

Maybe pioneer could do it...

http://www.pioneerburner.com/

getting warmer...

[sleepingsquirrel]

Here's a direct quote from Section 8 of my copy of the Constitution sitting on my desk...

The Congress shall have Power...

...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Re:getting warmer...

[pauljlucas]

Yes? So? Your point? (This doesn't contradict what I said.)

Re:off topic but..

[ThePlague]

I guess Taco doesn't like his mistakes being pointed out.

Let's think ahead here...

[Anonymous Coward]

to when HDTV is widespread and most people can receive and watch HD programs. Tivo recently got the FCC to approve a copying-between-devices functionality -- maybe they will do more in the near future.

Will the cable companies be so quick to let their customers have any freedom with their digital HD recordings? They are freaked out by this Tivo is not freaked out by this.

Tivo needs to leverage their willingness to play on the customer's side and work with the FCC to this end, while the cable companies' DVRs rot when HD comes around.

see what i mean

[Anonymous Coward]

proof : see parent post !!!!

there may be cheaper clones but...

[enrico_suave]

The DVR that your cable company gives you might not be all it's cracked up to be... witness this rant from boing boing...

I hate this digital video recorder: Scientific-Atlanta Explorer 8000

As much as I like making my own homebrew alternatives to TiVo, and think competition is a good thing... UI-wise TiVo still has the lead (hopefully they won't blow it)

e.

Sci Atlanta Explorer 8000 Sucks

[SoCalChris]

We had an Explorer 8000 through Charter Cable. The thing was absolutely worthless.

The first one we had would record shows, but they would record very choppy. The audio and video would play a half second or so, then freeze for 2-3 seconds continually. Nothing recorded was even watchable.

They replaced that one with a new one. The new one would play back shows ok, but it would reboot itself 10-15 times per day. When you've got two kids under the age of 3 wondering why they can't ever watch their shows, that gets real annoying, fast.

They replaced that unit with a third one. It usually worked, but would occasionally forget to record a show, or scheduled recordings would be unscheduled for some reason.

The entire thing seemed really buggy, and was SLOW. It would take a few seconds to change channels, to pause, or do anything. That may not sound bad, but it gets frustrating when you change the channel, and it doesn't respond for a few seconds, so you press the button again, and you end up going past what you wanted.

Since then we dropped Charter (Except for the internet service), and now have Dish Network. Their DVR is better, but it still sucks in my opinion. We're planning on cancelling Dish Network pretty soon, and just getting a Tivo or Replay TV with basic cable.

Re:Sci Atlanta Explorer 8000 Sucks

[Isca]

If you like Tivo, and can get Dish network service, why not just do DirectTV? You can't use the HMO, but you can record two shows at once (which will also allow you to watch tv through the tivo, thereby always having the pause/rewind feature)

Re:Sci Atlanta Explorer 8000 Sucks

[MBCook]

Do yourself a favor. Get DirecTV. You get DirecTV and a DirecTiVo (techinally DirecTV DVR with TiVo Service) and you'll be in heaven. All the content is digital and looks great (like Dish should be, I've never had it). But the great part is the TiVo. Not only is it a TiVo with that great TiVo interface and such, it has TWO TUNERS. You can RECORD TWO SHOWS AT ONCE OFF DIFFERENT CHANNELS, and watch something that was pre-recorded while it's doing that. The thing is fantastic. Sometimes it can be a little slow (nothing like you've mentioned), but it's no prolem. And my box is a year old so there should be even better ones by now. The best part is the service is only $5 on top of the regular bill, so it's actually cheaper than the TiVo service. Record of local channels (from DirecTV), cable channels, premium channels and such. If you HDTV, there is the HDTV Tivo for DirecTV. If you have a home theater setup, you can have the TiVo record the Dolby Digital soundtracks for programs that have them, so you get 5.1 and everything (mostly on PPV and Premium channels, but great none the less).

Go with a DirecTiVo, you'll be in heaven. If you have any questions, e-mail me or reply and I'll try to answer them. It's fantastic.

Sorry if this sounds like an ad, but I LOVE my DirecTiVo. Gotta promote 'em, you know.

IE only ... doesn't work in mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't seem to work under mozilla.

Why would I want to pay a subscribtion fee??

[ChinaJoe]

It seems to me that the fee is a total ripoff. Why would I want to pay for something that offers nothing?? Because I want to have shows recorded that I don't want to watch??

All I want is a glorified VCR and not get ripped off. Why is that sooo hard??

Re:Why would I want to pay a subscribtion fee??

[txtracer]

So don't pay it. TiVo isn't holding a gun to your head.

Does TiVo need saving?

[YouHaveSnail]

Does TiVo really need saving? It's the best PVR around... you plug it in, and it just works. TiVo gets it.

I heard someone say recently that TiVo is the Macintosh of PVR's. They were talking about ease of use, not market share. As far as I know, TiVo is pretty much the Microsoft of PVR's in terms of market share. Or at least the Dell.

If TiVo is having financial issues, I don't think it's because of lack of consumer interest or difficulty in selling units. It could well be due to regular, difficult, business issues, like having too many irons in the fire or having to worry about Microsoft's nefarious tactics. I'm sure that the cable companies are trying to horn in on TiVo's market with their various video on demand services, but they tend not to work as well as TiVo anyway.

But really, TiVo is a great device/service that already does exactly what I want it to do. They don't need to turn it into something else.

Re:Does TiVo need saving?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the article, it has a graph on the 2nd page demonstrating that they have yet to turn a profit. They have been operating at losses in the tens of millions of dollars (from a low of $50 million to a high of about $225 million) every year of its existence.

If your company operates continuously at a loss, you'll eventually go out of business. Add to this the competition, and you'll see that TiVo is doomed unless it changes its strategy.

Re:Does TiVo need saving?

[YouHaveSnail]

You're right. Apparently the answer to my question is "yes, TiVo does need saving."

But it sounds like they should be looking to a CEO and not a software engineer to solve their problems. I keep giving them money, and so do many of my friends and probably a huge proportion of /. readers and all sorts of non-techie people as well. That's a pretty nice spot to be in for any business. If their expenses are consistantly outpacing their revenue, well, that's a business problem that needs to be solved.

I don't think adding web content to TiVo is likely to fix their problems. Now, letting customers share their recorded video with friends might be an interesting enough feature to drive new sales and get existing users to pay for a feature upgrade. But still, you don't turn a money-burning company around for the long term on the strength of a nifty new feature. You've got to cut expenses and open up new markets. That's the sort of thing that CEO's do, not programmers.

TiVO is safe

[TippyTwoShoes]

TiVO is safe because unlike a built-in PVR that you buy from your CATV Company, you're not locked into staying with your current provider. What if RCN or COX or whoever goes under?? Can I still use my COXiVO?

Re:TiVO is safe

[radish]

Except you don't BUY them from cable companies, you RENT them. Duh.

yet another incorrect use of "content"

[brre]

> recognize web content

I'd love to have a device that would recognize content and reject bits that are content-free.

What the device will do is deal with formats and protocols, not content.

Yet another example of use of "content" to refer to something else.

The article BTW comes up with the magnificent neologism "digital content format" by which it means format.

TiVo is like a drug

[CyNRG]

I've had a TiVo from the beginning. I can't understand why it hasn't become the Microsoft of set top boxes. I've never met anyone who has TiVo that hasn't loved it. Once you get TiVo, WOW!

I can't imagine not having TiVo. It is part of my life. I set up the programs to record, and watch them when I get home. Especially some cool programs that are in the middle of the night. Pausing live TV is just...no words to describe. Instant replay that I control! I mean geez!

I only watch about six hours of TV per week, so it had better be what I want.

The box is a little slow at times because it is way underpowered CPU wise to reduce cost.

I just don't understand why everyone hasn't got a TiVo.

Maybe it's just so radical of a concept that it is beyond normal comprehension. Like when Edison's movies first came out in the early 1900's. At many showings a person had to stand up near the screen and explain what was happenning on the movie screen.

BSOD's ... coming to a screen near you!

[Anonymous Coward]

Need I say more ?

Didnt know it needed saving???

[Anonymous Coward]

TiVo's tenacious market position and profit margins has been a frontpage business story for months now. Great product, yes, but they are in an awkward crossroads businesswise.

I am very concerned that moving forward TiVO and HD will be largely incompatible.

The movement of video enthusiasts to HDTV is a massive looming problem, as Tivo has little possibility of distribution of HDTV without a carrier deal, and their only existing one (DirectTV) is a tenuous one at best.

It has already been regulated that HD signals will be flagged for copyright and all hardware manufacturers will be required by the FCC to honor it by not recording HD flagged with it, which could cast a long shadow over OTA HD recording.

Cable companies are moving forward with making money off their own (likely lameass) HD cable box PVR solutions, and seemingly have no intention of opening their HD boxes to TiVo access.

Strangeberry is a solution i search of a problem.

The problem is HDTV. IMHO, PVR is more important than HDTV, but I sure am tired of watching TiVo programming on my 16:9 42" HDTV - its not pretty, even in Extreme Fine Quality mode.

Re:Didnt know it needed saving???

[Anonymous Coward]

TiVo's tenacious market position and profit margins has been a frontpage business story for months now. Great product, yes, but they are in an awkward crossroads businesswise.

Did you mean "TiVo's precarious market position . . ."

Making Tivo a better PVR will save Tivo

[swb]

There's a ton of missing features right now on Tivo -- batch save to VCR, and so on.

Instead of adding a bunch of "intraweb" integration, why not make it much more featureful at what it primarily is *for*?

Re:Making Tivo a better PVR will save Tivo

[e40]

Precisely!

Why is it that companies always do this shit? Come out with a good product then sit on their ass and do nothing to it? Then, later when they fail because the competition kills them they wonder what the fuck happened?

Apple did this in the 80's? They almost died from it. They had a kick ass GUI in '84, then ... nothing until the 90's. Cripes, Mac OS X is based on Mach and FreeBSD, which were both around in '84. That was real smart waiting 15 years.

Netflix. Great launch. It took them 2 fucking years to add "put a movie currently in the theatre into your queue", and that's the only new feature I know about since they started the service!

Tivo is just the latest example that pisses me off. There are so many things they could have improved. Nada. Zip. Zero. In-fucking-credible.

Right now, Tivo has the software edge. If they keep sitting on their ass, they will not continue to have the edge. Someone else will come out with something that blows them out of the water, and I will happily switch. I will not be loyal to a company that does this shit.

OK, I feel better now.

Re:Making Tivo a better PVR will save Tivo

[swb]

I think it might have something to do with the gap between people who get it and everyone else. People who get Tivo see its just a start -- that a few (a dozen, by my guess) key features would make it not just good but unbelievable. To the people in control of Tivo, those extra features just complicate it for ordinary people.

It might also be that the Tivo people see just basic timeshifting of shows as the core value, and that everything else is just icing. Although as you point out, it's trivial for competitors to swoop in and replicate the core value. But if Tivo had taken the feature sets further? There'd be nobody that could touch them.

How TiVo Can Change Your Life!

[raianoat]

Hopefully this article is correct in saying that Strangeberry may prevent TiVo from dying. I can't imagine life without it :)!

---------
Alex
www.tivoblog.com

Tivo's new Features

[razmaspaz]

I may have missed a whole story on this I don't know, but TiVo's website claims (with no real detail yet) that soon they will have TiVo To Go :

Coming Soon... TiVoToGo(TM)!

Leaving town? Take your favorite shows with you! TiVoToGo(TM) offers unprecedented portability, extending your digital recording with the ability to transfer recorded programs from your TiVo® box to your computer. Only with TiVo® service.

Seems pretty cool to me you can see for yourself here

With all of the talk about TiVo getting greedy and not adding features, they seem to be following the demands of their consumers pretty closely. They just made the home media option free, you can share stuff between tivos. I for one will continue ot give them my $12/mo as long as they continue to churn out new features and offer them to me for no extra charge. Go TiVo

I doubt TiVo will die...

[HomeGroove]

Full disclosure:
I didn't RTFA.
I'm a TiVo subscriber.
I'm a Apple zealot.

I think TiVo == Apple in some ways. Haven't people been predicting the downfall of Apple for quite some time now? Aren't TiVo and Mac owners all fanatics (for some a bit too much)? And besides, if TiVo goes poof, don't you fully expect someone will hack it to get program data (see MythTV). I haven't gotten much into the hack TiVo community yet (although I'm about to, 40 hours ain't enough) but isn't the reason behind not hacking the program info is because it violates the EULA? And I'd assume it'd also break future updates. Anyway, I doubt TiVo will be going away anytime soon.

Re:I doubt TiVo will die...

[triffidsting]

The tivo hacking faq addresses this. http://www.tivofaq.com/ or rather, http://tivo.samba.org/index.cgi?req=show&file=faq0 1.010.htp

Basically, TiVo has been very "understanding" with the tivo hacking community, so the practice of hacking it to break the subscription model is avoided.

I can only speculate that this "understanding" as a barrier would dissolve if the company ever went under.

Speaking of nice features...

[elhaf]

Go to the Now Showing... screen and press enter. This gives you lots of extra information about the shows you have recorded. I'm not sure how to get this for shows that have yet to be recorded, but I'm sure the information is there.

will Microsoft sue?

[rtphokie]

The next generation Tivos will then be able to recognize web content and direct it to the appropriate home device. This could be the stuff that saves tivo because none of the set top boxes will have this ability.

If ultra easy to use time shifting and commercial elimination isn't enough to interest people in buying TiVos, a bad implementation of WebTV isn't going to do it either.

Re:TiVo is like a crippled VCR

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi. You have now met me. I have a TIVO, a friend gave it to me when he upgraded his. I hated it, and threw it in a closet.

TIVOs are like a crippled version of my VCR. What we need is a stand-alone device with ALL of the functionality of a VCR, but for the digital age. That means stand-alone, no subscriptions, no Internet connections, no DRM whatsoever, and made to last for an indefinite number of years.

Until that device comes along, I'll stick to using my VCRs, and my Linux DVD ripping, transcoding, and burning skills with playback on the new Phillips 69$ DivX DVD player.

itunes

[Anonymous Coward]

so when do we get to buy music from itunes on tivo?

The reason why people like Java...

[SuperKendall]

You don't seem to fully "get it" though. The reason why so many people like Java is exactly BECAUSE it did not try to invent anything new - instead it took good ideas from all over and combined them. Usually in the field it's all a big case of NIH (Not Invented Here) and people constantly are re-doing stuff that's already been thought through.

Building something new just for the sake of building something new, just does not make sense. Trying to combine the best features from many languages makes a lot of sense. A lot of people seem to think so, even Microsoft - duplication being the scincerest form of flattery.

Re:The reason why people like Java...

[pauljlucas]

Usually in the field it's all a big case of NIH (Not Invented Here) and people constantly are re-doing stuff that's already been thought through.

How ironic. Just about everything in Java is redone. The syntax is C++ (but not quite); the container classes are sort of, kind of like STL or Rogue Wave (but not quite). The object model is like Smalltalk (but not quite). Java has a big case of NIH since jsut about everything in it is like something else, but was reinvented.

Some things, e.g., paremeterized types, are clearly a good idea, yet Sun chose to omit them for years. And then when they finally were added, the implementation is sub-optimal. (Auto-boxing is NOT a good idea; running on the old JVM is NOT a good goal.)

rsync IMDB

[Curt Cox]

Given the size of the drive(s) in the average TiVo, it would make more sense to keep a local copy and rsync it periodically. The entire database is only a gig.

Re:rsync IMDB

[swb]

That would be ideal, although I wonder how much space it would take up completely indexed to the point of minimum disk I/O and CPU when doing searches or references. Or the opposite, with minimum disk space usage, how much CPU and disk pounding would it take to do more complicated searches?

Nope, its more like freeing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Kevin Mitnick.
Or Bobby Fischer.

I got moderated into oblivion for saying this last

[tgd]

tivo story, but its still as true now as a week ago.

MythTV is a nightmare to set up, and there's no company out there that I can buy a pre-configured one from. KnoppMyth may work if you have a certain set of hardware, but my time is far too valuable to spend a week researching the right hardware, buying $500 or $1000 worth of computing equipment and a case suitable for going in my living room, and blowing a day setting it all up.

If I could buy a decent looking unit that I plugged in and works, then I'd buy one. Until then, I've outgrown the need to blow days at a time playing with that sort of stuff. I enjoy it sometimes, but I'm just plain too busy.

At $100 for a Tivo, thats maybe an hour or two worth of my time. Hard to compete with that.

Record the commercials to watch later

[Boarder2]

Reading through the comments and stuff, people seem to suggest that they would watch commercials if they were targeted towards them.

I agree with them, I would watch them if they were something I was interested in.

The thing is, Tivo could already do this, as if I recall correctly, every night at 2:20am (or so) my DirecTivo needs to change to a channel to download content. If they're downloading content on that channel, why not just record the video that's on that channel too? They could run 30 minutes of commercials and record them.

Then they could present them to you in categorys:

Automotive/Womens Products/Household/etc

They're already using 30 minutes of my recording time late at night to download stuff as it is, they could make the advertisers happy(er) and I would actually watch commercials.

Ironic?

[SuperKendall]

How ironic. Just about everything in Java is redone. The syntax is C++ (but not quite); the container classes are sort of, kind of like STL or Rogue Wave (but not quite). The object model is like Smalltalk (but not quite). Java has a big case of NIH since jsut about everything in it is like something else, but was reinvented.

Refined, not redone. The syntax is not just "Not quite C++" - the whole point is that the sytax is a mix of C, C++ and other languages (like ADA for packages).

Your last sentance make zero sense. NIH - but borrowed from everywhere. What? Again, Java is put together from many parts and really relies heavily on that which has gone before, hardly inventing anything - the exact 100 opposite case of NIH. NIH is when someone has developed an app server AND custom persistance layer, not when they derived from a library to slightly modify it.

Some things, e.g., paremeterized types, are clearly a good idea, yet Sun chose to omit them for years. And then when they finally were added, the implementation is sub-optimal. (Auto-boxing is NOT a good idea; running on the old JVM is NOT a good goal.)

So says you. I personally am rather happy at the thought that code I compile with 1.5 will work on 1.4 clients. I do somewhat regret some of the limitations that result, but I respect the approach a lot. That's what is called being responsible with a MATURE platform where you need to respect deployed systems. Micrsofot of course with a beta language has more leeway in forcing 50MB downloads on people whenever they please, or forcing rework of code with new versions.

Nice sig

[Anonymous Coward]

If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.

If people are constantly mistaking what you mean, it would seem to imply that you aren't expressing yourself clearly.

Price point comparisons

[fizbin]

Having looked into this a little bit, it appears that the cheapest decent PVR box constructable with retail components and MythTV is still going to run you around $250 plus labor to assemble and install. Compare this to $270 for an 80-hour Tivo, with a $100 mail-in rebate.

Now, with Tivo there is still the subscription price, but the best bet economically would be to go with Tivo. (or other commercial PVR) Of course, if you have many of the expensive components for a PVR already lying around and assemble PC's all the time (and enjoy doing so), then I guess MythTV could be for you.

Also, if you're willing to hack and fiddle with things to achieve some particular purpose not available with an off-the-shelf Tivo (I don't know - integration with your internet-enabled toaster or something), then the choice is clear. (but if so, then you knew that)

But for everyone else? Tivo. Were I in the market for a PVR, I'd just get a Tivo, and I say that as someone who just a week ago had three computers disassembled all over the office, messing with dd and hexedit to turn a toasted machine (physical read error on the sector with the root directory) back into one which not only boots again, but appears to be in perfect working order. With other people, it might be the time or computer hardware/software fiddling involved; with me, the hardware prices just don't favor building it myself.

And then there's the radical option of simply not watching TV at all...

Re:Price point comparisons

[strider44]

that's assuming you get it new. If you're like me, and already have lots of old parts available then it's very cost-efficient indeed :)

Re:I got moderated into oblivion for saying this l

[LinuxHam]

Just to keep the facts straight, I spent $500, did absolutely zero research, dug up a dusty old Hauppauge WinTV PCI card, and it "just worked" (TM). Only after that did I spend time trying to get it working by hand because I wanted to know how it worked. Nothing about days or weeks spent setting it up. Just boot up, choose the option to reformat and install on the PC, let it install, enter my zip code, choose my cable provider, and I had a PVR in 30 minutes that also had news headlines and a local weather radar loop as a screen saver. So no, its not hard to compete with your TiVO setup time. Not at all.

And after 2 1/2 years, the two will cross each other at cost effectiveness. A LOT sooner if you order the home media option for your TiVO to get half of what Myth offers.

And I do have a tricked out TiVO so I didn't keep Myth. I am planning on going back, though, since I need a content server for my CarPC project. Just saying, don't be so dismissive. KnoppMyth works very, very well and is quite easy to setup.

Can we just have quality listings???

[Fishy]

Lets start with the basics, the listing for the tico are going down hill fast. Here in the UK even the BBC listing are rubbish.

I've told tivo I can find out the correct contact in the BBC so tribune can get a better quality of listing, but they don't give a hoot, and we are left with guide data which is so bad it cannot be used to record programmes.

Can tivo just fix the basic problems before they move on?

Who needs P2P -

[thewldisntenuff]

If you've got Bittorrent?

There are a hell of a lot of tv episode torrents out there for download with the torrent-downloader of your choice....Hell, I've got a few full seasons of shows like Las Vegas and Futurama....

Link - http://www.suprnova.org/

Myth TV is Free, Free, Free

[debian4life]

If you have a spare machine laying around and a TV capture card. Then you have to go through the nightmare of setting it up.

So if I can go out and get a Motherboard, Processor, Fan, RAM, hard drive, NIC, TV Capture card and anything else that makes this run and have it come in at least $30 less than a new Tivo (as low as $149 at times), then sign me up.

The reason I say $30 less, is that is what it would take for me to justify the headache of setting it up .

Otherwise, I will quit worrying about having 27 Linux boxes laying around to replace all my household appliances and just go spend a little money for something that works right out of the box.

Re:Myth TV is Free, Free, Free

[Hassman]

TIVO only costs 99 dollars now:
TIVO!

Re:Myth TV is Free, Free, Free

[giz]

The other thing about Myth TV, is that it is only *free* in that it relies on getting guide data from Zap2it. I have no idea why Zap2it provides all that data online for free, but the one thing I do know is, that without the guide data, Myth TV or any other home brew DVR is nothing more than a PC with a capture card, and that doesn't equal a Tivo or a ReplayTv.

The day Zap2it stops being so friendly is the day Myth TV users are up the creek. Whether or not you agree that the cost of the Tivo subscription (which is largely paying for your guide) is reasonable or not, at least you know you're going to get guide data, so that your subscriptions and programming searches are going to work, and match what is playing.

Re:Speeding up Tivo hints {Re:To *really* fix tivo

[raygundan]

I have a 4-month-old HDVR2. I've pruned the channels down to just the 100 or so I actually get. I've been using the tivo-style guide since day one, since I got used to it on my old tivo. There are no modifications. "Now playing" is empty enough that it fills itself with recommendations, and there are just under 30 season passes, most for new episodes only.

And yet it's still dog-slow compared to my old Series 1, which had 2x more season passes, a 4x bigger hard drive, and less RAM. All of the things you mention help somewhat, but they don't fix it by a long shot. At least I'm not one of the *really* unlucky folks, who can't change season pass order in less than an hour.

count(patents) == dick size ??

[Anonymous Coward]

wtf is going on
are many (software) patents really something to be proud of???

Re:TiVo is like a crippled VCR

[Hassman]

AHAHAHA!!! You still use a VCR!! I got some old tapes for you if you'd like. How about my comedore 64 too? By the way, nintendo released a better system about 15 years ago called the Super Nintendo...

I think it is time you took off your jelly bracelets and cut your hair...it's time you upgraded man.

and nobody wants that functionality

[Anonymous Coward]

so i fail to see how this would save anyone except the whales.

Re:I got moderated into oblivion for saying this l

[tgd]

You got lucky if you did zero research and ended up with a box thats fast enough and has the right video hardware to work. Very lucky. Far more hardware doesn't work with MythTV than does.

I also assume in that 30 minute time you included the time to build the computer? Install all the hardware? No, of course not.

And my home media option didn't change the cost effectiveness at all, since it doesn't cost a dime...

I'm not being dismissive, I'm just pointing out that in a market where PVR options are available, MythTV is not a viable alternative for 99.99% of the people who may want a PVR. Its an interesting project, its good software, but its not a real option for replacing Tivo until I can order a MythTV box for the same price that fits in with my stereo equipment in terms of sound, size and looks. Believe me, I'd own one if someone was doing that... but no one is.

If I was in college and had lots of free time to screw with things, I'd be all over it, too.

He was one of the Java geniuses

[jkirby]

For God's sake... Please... A new oxymoron has been invented ("Java Geneius")

Content is king

[giz]

And the people who make the content want to control how you get it, and what you do with it. Tivo is in the unfortunate position of being squeezed by the entertainment conglomerates who own most of the content, and don't like the fact that Tivo exists.

To placate them, Tivo engineered in anti-extraction technology into the series-2, and now are working on the Tivo to go addition which is a content encryption locking/unlocking technology that will allow you to move content from your Tivo to a PC or other device, that is only playable on a player that has the Digital Rights Management software allowing you to unlock it.

Many people who have Tivos also have broadband, and home networks, allowing them to get their Tivo updates through the Internet, and this already includes "content" in the form of Tivo ads which come up in the guide. It's not hard to see where this is going... video ala cart. Note I didn't say on demand, and quite frankly, unless everyone gets fiber to their house, on-demand will never be viable.

What Tivo has proved convincingly, is that most people don't *really* want on-demand programming. What they want is to select as much programming as they're interested in, and let the DVR aquire that programming and store it, so that at some later time, when they have time, they can enjoy the entertainment.

This is where the entertainment conglomerates are typically short sighted and leave a lot of money on the table, because unless it's available at blockbuster, there's a tremendous amount of entertainment material that people are willing to pay for, which just isn't available. All the studios need to do is make this material available in a broadcast quality format, and the cash will come flooding in. Would you rather go to blockbuster and wander the isles looking for the great indie movie your friends all raved about (which Blockbuster has 2 DvD's that will be checked out until next year) or would you rather take 10 minutes to order them on friday morning, knowing that when you get home friday night, they'll be sitting on your Tivo waiting for you to watch them when you have time?

The entertainment conglomerates are so obsessed with the money they think they're losing to pirating (and the fact is they've been losing this money for years, and nothing has changed whatsoever) that they treat their customer base as if they are all potential video pirates, rather than looking at what customers want to do with the content.

Tivo can see the future very well, and they know that they have the potential to be the delivery endpoint for all this content. They can't afford to piss off the media companies. Fortunately they have "Tivo" brand recognition, customer loyalty and excellent word of mouth going for them. Strangeberry has certainly got them a lot of press, but I doubt they see it as being much more than a speculative R&D group, perhaps in the end not unlike Xerox Parc. Most people know that Tivo is a MIPS based Linux box under the covers, and there's no magic to what they're doing technically. What's more important in the long run is not the gee-whiz technology, or even the user-friendliness, which most people agree has been Tivo's strongest selling point. In the end, it will all hinge on where the most content is available, and the way things are going, I certainly wouldn't bet against the box with the brand name recognition, and best relationship with the content providers.

Re:I got moderated into oblivion for saying this l

[lakeland]

yes and no... there is a time and money tradeoff, for instance you notice he used a hauppauge card, which costs roughly twice as much but its MPEG encoding means virtually any hardware is capable.

Of course, for people with more money and less time, there are always people who will do the work for you. e.g. hushpc, or I see newegg sell a sort of bundle designed for mythtv.

Of course, none of these will come close to the price of TiVo. A top-of-the-line hushpc could easily set you back $1k

Sun decided not to hire van Hoff in 1991

[SimHacker]

The article incorrectly states that "Sun scientist and Java inventor James Gosling heard about van Hoff through colleagues in 1993, while the Dutchman was still earning his master's degree at Scotland's prestigious Strathclyde University."

James Gosling certainly knew about Arthur van Hoff before 1993, at least since 1989 when Arthur released his amazing "GoodNeWS".

While I was working at Sun from 1990-1991, we flew Arthur out from Scotland to California and negotiated with him about integrating GoodNeWS aka HyperNeWS aka COOL aka HyperLook) into Sun's X11/NeWS window system. We spent quite a bit of time redesigning a new version of HyperNeWS for The NeWS Toolkit, I ported HyperNeWS to TNT, and Arthur delivered a prototype of the new system called "COOL" (Customizable Open Look).

Arthur was well known and respected in the NeWS community for his incredible work with HyperNeWS, NeWS, PostScript, a C to PostScript compiler called PdB, an SGML parser, and other amaing stuff. We lobbied Sun quite hard to convince them to hire Arthur, but they strung him along for a long time then finally refused, because they wanted to kill NeWS instead of doing something great with it.

But I wanted to work with Arthur anyway, so I left Sun and went out to the Turing Institute in Glasgow Scotland, to work with Arthur. We developed HyperNeWS into a product called "HyperLook", which we released in 1992. HyperLook included a wonderful PostScript graphics editor that you could use to create user interface components and customize the look and feel of the desktop with PostScript code and graphics.

I also ported SimCity to SunOS and used HyperLook to build the SimCity user interface and client/server interface, which we released at the same time.

As Peter Delany wrote on 10-29-1991:

Ok, I'll try to liven things up a little. Perhaps Don Hopkins or the XNeWS developers

Pat Naughton and James Gosling, could follow up with a few tid bits. Or a line from Tim Niblett and Author v

Re:I got moderated into oblivion for saying this l

[LinuxHam]

Last go 'round, I swear.

1. Okay, so I got lucky.

2. No, I bought it pre-built. Did you include in your time estimate how long it took Philips or Sony to assemble your box? No. Of course not. I added an ethernet card to my TiVO and a TV card to my Myth experiment. Its a wash.

3. Okay, so you have 1/10th the features that Myth offers.

4. MythTV is not a viable alternative for 99.99% -- I'm *really* not trying to argue, but I sure hate it when people use that figure. As if you're in a position to say.

5. its not a real option for replacing Tivo until I can order a MythTV box for the same price -- Not a real option for you. Granted.

6. If I was in college and had lots of free time to screw with things, I'd be all over it, too. -- Don't know where that one came from. I'm usually the one throwing the "call me when you graduate, kiddo" line. Maybe you thought I had an extra digit on my UID or something (and forgot that UIDs around 500k graduated 3 years ago). I mean, I respect your seniority, but you only predate me by about a year. Sorry, we're both /. geezers like it or not.

Thanks for the dialog. I only hope you see things are better than you remember. I experimented with it. It worked out of the box. I bought the PC to be an ESX Server so I had to blow it away and move on. I guess I am a "one in ten thousand" kinda guy.

Stream/rip/store?

[yet another coward]

Can TiVo rip or store?

Save TIVO? Hmmm go buy a ReplayTV 5040

[adsl]

And you get automatic Ad skip and an easy upgrade with a huge new HD for less than $100.00. Then you don't need a TIVO you need a ReplayTV!

Turn the TV into something interesting

[alcmaeon]

Now, if he could invent a box, other than a game console, that I could attach to my TV that would make the TV into something I would be willing to waste an hour or two in front of, it would be a real accomplishement.

Why would a hard-core Java and TiVo guy...

[caferace]

...write his resume in MS Word, saved to HTML.

Just curious...

German TiVo Alternatives

[swoswo]

As far as I can see, TiVo is not available in Germany. Any slashdotters with experiences with alternatives for Germany around?

Yes. The ReplayTV 5000-series.

[Richard Steiner]

They actively mark the start and end of each block of commercial messages at record time, and then can either skip those blocks automagically (with around 80% reliability in my experience) during playback or can quickly skip back and forth between program segment start locations (end-of-commercial block markers) using the arrow keys.

The former turns several minutes of intrusive commercial messages into a fractional-second screen blip and a little icon in the lower righthand corner indicating commercial skip, while the latter has the general effect of breaking a show up into chapters that can be navigated between at will.

A 30-second forward skip button doesn't compare...

tivo has patents 6 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

the inventors name is barton

it is called multimedia time warping system and dates to 97/98

Tivo needs saving?

[Blitzenn]

I think someone should tell Tivo that they are in need of saving. They don't seem to have that impression. In fact, they state that their subscriber growth tripled in the first quarter of the year and inside reports say that has continued in the second quarter. There financial statements are sound and express a healthy business according the Charles Scwabb Co. I don't understand where the statement comes from that Tivo needs saving? Saving from what? Prosperity? I think that statement would be better applied to Replay, not Tivo.