Has TiVo's Fate Been Sealed?

ChipGuy writes "Things are getting bleak for TiVo, reports the New York Times, and adds that TiVo blew a major opportunity to team up with Comcast. And that might have cost CEO Michael Ramsey the job. Om Malik writes that 'The fate of TiVo also highlights the dilemma facing a lot of "exploding TV" start-ups. The technology does not necessarily translate into profits and a business,' and breaks down the financials -- over half a billion dollars in losses so far. PVRBlog adds that 'When the story of TiVo is written, this Comcast negotiation could be the point when the company's outcome was decided.' More reactions here."

Comments

Re:Ce La Vie (in bad accent)

[sydsavage]

You are mistaken. My MythTV box, built around the Hauppauge PVR-350, has better quality encoding than TiVo. MPEG-2 recording at full SDTV resolution of 720x480, while an unhacked TiVo is limited to around half that.

Re:Ce La Vie (in bad accent)

[bdcrazy]

I have a pentium III 733 and a hauppage wintv pci card thats over 4 years old, and it records really nice movies. Dscaler and virtual dub are great with it. might be the included software, or that it comes with a onboard mpeg encoder that doesn't work very nicely.

Re:So how much is a MythTV?

[sydsavage]

Yep, a home built MythTV box is going to cost more than TiVo, and it's not exactly a plug and play experience. Here's an approximate breakdown of what I spent building mine:

• $30 case
• $70 motherboard (Shuttle MN31N)
• $80 cpu (AMD Athlon XP 2500+)
• $90 512 meg ram
• $50 40 gig harddrive
• $120 250 gig harddrive
• $180 Hauppauge PVR-350
• $80 DVD burner (not necessary, but nice to have)
• Many, many hours getting the right combination of drivers, etc compiled

Now, before anybody jumps all over me and says I could have saved $x here or there, I should point out that I originally built the computer to be a linux workstation, and then decided to try my hand at building a DVR. Originally, I spent $335, including shipping, to put together a decent box to run SuSE 9.1. I went for the Shuttle mobo so I wouldn't have to buy a seperate graphics card or sound card. This board has a twin VGA nVidia GeForce4 MX with shared memory, Realtek ALC650 audio, and onboard 1394 and USB 2.0. It is capable of digital audio out with the addition of a $30 header board. I went with the AMD processor because I wanted good performance, without spending too much. The board supports anything from a Duron 700 up to an Athlon XP3000+ (or possibly higher, I think that's all that was out when the documentation was printed).

So, if you wanted to trim the price down further, you could find a motherboard with integrated graphics that has S-Video out, and then get the cheaper Hauppauge PVR-250 or another capture card. This will give up some quality, as the PVR-350's video out is allegedly much better than other graphics cards, but it's a trade-off for price. You could get by with a lot slower processor than mine. You can get buy with a lot less memory than I have. You could probably find a case for free or close to it.

Another possible route would be to start with a Shuttle bare bones system, and add a Hauppauge or other capture card into the one PCI slot. I hope to add more capture cards to my system, so I ended up ruling out this solution.

As far as the time I put into it, I consider that to be an education. Without a reason, I wouldn't normally get my hands so deep into the o/s internals. I learned a lot about kernel modules and how they work on this project.

If you decide to do this, I highly recommend it. But don't go into it thinking it's a way to get cheap TiVo. It's a way to have fun building a cool project that you will (hopefully) enjoy long after the building is done. I still take a lot of pride in my system, and really enjoy showing it off to guests. And it does a whole lot more than TiVo, I should add.

Re:Half-a-Billion Smackers?

[Dun Malg]

Just out of curiosity I've checked Yahoo! finance and AFAICT TiVo was profitable this year and has almost a 100 million in cash. Can someone explain to me where the "half billion" in net losses is coming from?

They're half a billion in debt, but are currently making a profit. Frankly, the link to the "half billion" figure is to some jackass "Business 2.0" staff writer's personal weblog. This "Om Malik" guy doesn't really impress me. He's a lower-tier writer with questionable opinions. Frankly, anyone who looks only at debt while ignoring profits is a dunce. The /. article lapping it up is the typical misunderstanding of the world of finance. Nobody seems to understand the difference between "defecit" and "debt".