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Can TiVo be Saved?
ChipGuy writes "TiVo's death watch has begun. The company is having a tough time finding traction in the marketplace, as more and more competitors rush into the market, most of them deep pocketed satellite and cable companies. But is all lost? What if the company went private and became the anti-cable, letting us download, store, organize, and serve media from both cable and -- this is the important part -- the internet.
Others believe that TiVo should get into the content aggregation business."
TiVo can't sell content unless they have distribution rights. But that won't happen unless the media corporations divest themselves of their distribution businesses. AFAIK no government of any major developed country has so far had the balls even to ask the media corps to play fair in the marketplace, so I can't see this sort of unbundling happening soon.
God, you're a fucking moron.
First of all, the phone jockeys, whether they "know" anything or not, are the primary interface to the customer. I'm not saying *they* were personally, maliciously lying. That's not the fucking point. The point was that somewhere along they line, they were TOLD what to say. Someone, somewhere, within either the telephone call center organization or management instructed the phone staff how to respond to that question. And if they're giving out completely incorrect information, and you KNOW it's incorrect, you're saying that, as a customer, you should just ignore it and/or take it? This isn't a case of the phone staff not knowing something "technical"; this is a case of a company using their main customer interface to actively spread information that is incorrect to shield blame from itself. And yes, that's what it is, whether 1000 people or ten call up about the 30 second skip, which has been an integral feature of DVRs since the birth of TiVo.
This was merely a response to someone who said "don't ever fuck with the 30 second skip", and was pointing out that someone already had. And not only had they fucked with it, but they were, collectively as an organization, lying about why they did, i.e., that it was "illegal" to have a 30 second skip when that is clearly wrong. And no, dipshit, they weren't just "wrong". This wasn't just a "mistake". You don't accidentally specifically say that you can't have a 30 second skip because it's "illegal", and for two different phone agents and two different "supervisors" on separate days to say the same thing. And they weren't stumbling for the answer, they knew exactly what to say. In other words, WHETHER THEY THEMSELVES KNOW WHETHER IT'S ILLEGAL OR NOT IS IRRELEVANT.
But, dumbass, I could give a shit less about Charter's 30 second skip. As I said in my original post, I was TESTING the Charter DVR unit. It is NOT my primary DVR, nor will it ever be. My job responsibilities led me to test several DVRs, one of which was Charter's BMC9012.
Nice job with your stinging reply. Get a fucking brain before you respond next time. I can't believe I had to spell out to you why it's wrong for the customer service/support organization to actively spread incorrect information with a goal of shielding itself from a decision that IT MADE, itself, that negatively impacts the customer.