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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."
I have held off from getting TiVo or the equivalant as I had figured that this would happen. Just like most types of technology things get smaller and cheaper. (then the big boys take over)
I figure that the Cable companies are going to move very quickly in this arena. My own (Comcast) offers "On Demand" programming right now for free. I can view programs, store and play later as if it were a movie/DVD. It sounds like the next step is to watch what ever you want, when you want as long as you pay what they want.
I can wait for it all to come together, I know how to program my VCR.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
I work for TiVo.
Believe me, it can be very disheartening to work for an innovator in a marketplace where large established companies have such control over the distribution channels.
Cable companies and satellite companies already have a "lock" to a large extent on their customers and for them to sell an additional service such as a DVR requires so much less capital investment in marketing, and let's face it, making a good product, than it takes for a company like TiVo.
And those companies already have much deeper pockets than a small company like TiVo with which to absorb the losses associated with pushing this rather expensive technology out to users.
It's kind of funny to me that people will pay $80 cable bills without a whimper but will cry foul at the concept of paying $13 a month to TiVo to make the cable service so much more worthwhile.
Cable DVRs suck. Most people would be much happier with a TiVo and would find the extra expense to be justified. I know I'm biased but I honestly believe that.
My comments are my own and I do not speak for my employer.
Whoever this ChipGuy fellow is, he sure hates Tivo! Not only is this story a dupe, but ChipGuy submitted both of them. I wonder how many were rejected. ; )
Here's the original.
Pick your poison:
1. "My cable company's DVR works just fine, why should I pay extra for a TiVO?"
2. "I don't watch TV, why do I want a TiVo?"
3. "My MythTV box only took me 3 weeks to get working, and I will probably only have to mess with the guide data stream a few times a year, and the hardware only cost twice as much as a TiVo."
We've heard them all before...
1. Tivo licenses content.
2. Tivo provides nice search interface for Tivo BitTorrent client.
3. Tivo provides centralized Torrent servers and includes content in $12.95.
4. Goodbye cable!
Has anybody tried the new SDK? It's pretty cool...they should have done it from the beginning.
But, since we've been told to start sharing our unininformed opinions:
1) I don't see where turning TiVo into an Internet storage device is a huge win. Yeah, maybe it's a good idea and they should do it, but that will be just as easy for others to duplicate as the PVR business.
2) I'm not sure whether Jarvis is hinting that they should become a warez enabler, but if he is, that's a dead-end business plan. As surely as piracy will continue to exist, that surely will it remain impossible to run a major business on that model in developed countries.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Content aggregation sounds like a great idea, but remember that cable companies have a lot of exisiting ties with the media companies that actually produce the content. Even if Tivo starts doing this, the second they turn profitable the cable companies will play their relationships (I've worked in entertainment... the whole industry is about the relationships) with the media companies to undercut Tivo and get them out. I like the idea of Tivo, but I think the company is fighting an uphill battle.
I say they get bought by Comcast or Time Warner before the end of the decade.
Not to sound pessimistic, but what happens to all the Tivo boxes if the subscription Tivo relies on goes away? Can they be converted to work with other schedulers? Would they at least maintain a basic 'dumb' disk-based VCR like capability?
The sad truth is this: TiVo will fail.
The reasons are simple:
1. The cable companies are rolling their own DVRs. TiVo failed to get traction here, and it will kill them.
2. TiVo has hobbled itself. There were features out there that could have helped them (essentially value adds above and beyond the cable company DVRs), but they were too slow to market, and too restrictive in their implementation. Examples: TiVo to Go. Network-able TiVos. Commercial skip. Good features, but TiVo hobbled them (or implemented them late) either through proprietary standards or by not officially advertising them to Joe Sixpack.
-EvilMagnus
Kinda funny that I finish reading an article on news.com about them exceeding 3 million subscribers, to find out on slashdot that it's dying.
Is it dying faster or slower then Apple and BSD?
Disclaimer: Not a Tivo subscriber. I'd like to, but you can't get some of that in Canada.
Maybe the best bet for Tivo's survival is to get acquired by DirecTV. The Tivo/DirecTV (or "DirecTivo") integration is excellent. I can't even remember how I watched tv at all before I had my DirecTivo box.
Anyone who has tried Comcast's alternative to Tivo knows that the interface is completely horrible. It actually makes me angry just to think about it.
When I move this summer, I'm planning on continuing with DirecTV service rather than switching to cable strictly because of the tight integration with Tivo. The Tivo partnership is already a huge asset to DirecTV, they might as well add Tivo to their balance sheet and make it official.
Tivo is my favorite robot friend (next is Roomba). Tivo has made TV fun and interesting again. I discovered Battlestar Galactica thanks to Tivo. I think I'd cry if Tivo died... seriously.
I want nobody to ever mess with 30 second skip. DO NOT FUCK WITH 30 SECOND SKIP.
I got the Charter DVR service from Charter Communications as a test, which is a Motorola BMC9012 running Digeo's MOXI software.
When first set up, the skip button was a 30 second skip, and replay was a 7 second reverse jump.
After the box downloaded its first software update, the skip button stopped working. It became a 15 minute skip. What the fuck purpose is a 15 minute skip?
I called Charter to inquire about this. I asked what the purpose of the 15 minute skip button was; they responded that it was to jump quickly into a program (WTF?). I asked them why it was no longer a 30 second skip. The person I was talking to responded that it was "illegal" to have a 30 second skip.
After I recovered myself from this egregiously wrong statement, I informed him there was no state of federal law prohibiting a 30 second skip on a PVR, and further informed him of other PVRs that do just that. He insisted there was "a law". I asked to speak to his supervisor, who again told me it was "against the law" to have a 30 second skip, and that Charter had to "obey they law". I again informed him there was no such law, and asked him to cite any such law. The conversation essentially went nowhere. I tried the next day with the same result.
While pondering the absurdity of it all, I got a call back from a manager at Charter who had apparently become aware of my call. He apologized for the phone representatives saying that it was "illegal"...he said, essentially, that they shouldn't have said it was "illegal" or "against the law", but that Charter had "legal concerns" with its content providers and advertisers. I pointed out that Charter's corporate "legal concerns" are a lot different than something being "illegal", and that the phone agents might not want to tell people that.
But ultimately, how many people will get DVR services like this and never know there was such a thing as a 30-second skip? They'll be tickled that they can record 40 hours of video (not knowing they could record 400 by just adding a drive, which of course is disabled on this box) and fast forward through commercials like a VCR, and that they can pay Charter an extra monthly fee to watch the recorded content on another TV in their own home (not knowing that it's technically possible to also watch it on their laptop, PDA, portable media player, or anywhere else they should be able to watch it). And the ones who do know about the 30-second skip will probably swallow Charter's "we can't do it because it's illegal" copout.
And when July rolls around, those same people won't wonder how we're unable to do things we could do 30 years ago with the VCR when their DVR box tells them they're not allowed to record ER in HD (and that they must watch it live), and a call to Charter only elicits the blameless "Well, we have to follow what the TV networks make us do - it's not our fault..."
The cable and satellite providers might be in the best position to provide DVR services that can tune all of the subscribed channels on their networks directly, without having to have some kind of convoluted IR Blaster setup or multiple settops, but they're also in the best position to severely restrict the featuresets and functionality of those boxes as well...