Lunch with TiVo's E. Stephen Mack

Thomas Hawk writes "On Monday I had lunch with one of TiVo's earliest employees, Director of Service Operations, E. Stephen Mack. We talked about where TiVo is going, where they are today and where they have been -- CableCARD, HME, why TiVo is not interested in being bought out, their deal with Netflix and more."

Comments

My Suggestion:

[Arghdee]

Release your product in Australia! Or at the very least, in Europe, so that there is a native PAL version that we can grey import...

FYI, there is a small community of Tivo users here already. http://minnie.tuhs.org/twiki/bin/view

Re:My Suggestion:

[Ed Avis]

Tivo is marketed in Britain as Sky Plus. I don't know if it records terrestrial as well as satellite.

Re:My Suggestion:

[AndyS]

Not any more. Sky+ is different hardware and only works with Sky. It also looks nothing like the Tivo.

Used to own one, now slowly replacing it with a Myth box.

Tivo, I'll miss you when you're gone

[PaulModz]

I loved my old Tivo more than any audio-video component I've ever owned. That said, I just don't see Tivo turning into the brains at the center of your home theater. I kinda tried for a while, but decided it would be easier and cheaper (in the long run, plus time == money) to just use a PC.

M$ and Sony are trying to replace Tivo from one side (the new XBox and PlayStation are both stealthy attempts to put a CPU in the center of your home theater). On the other side, DVRs are becoming a ubiquitous commodity on set-tops boxes, and it doesn't seem like Tivo can really offer them anything besides the name Tivo, which is probably the most valuable thing Tivo owns (witness the on-again off-again nature of their deal with Comcast).

Imagine if the VCR as we know it had been invented by one company back in the late 70's. Now imagine how long that company would have survived if the only product it ever sold was a VCR with a monthly service fee (while other companies were giving away VCRs, to boot).

My current thinking is that people who care will buy something that better suits their needs, and people who don't will take the free stuff offered by Cable and Satellite providers.

Re:Tivo, I'll miss you when you're gone

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other side, DVRs are becoming a ubiquitous commodity on set-tops boxes, and it doesn't seem like Tivo can really offer them anything besides the name Tivo, which is probably the most valuable thing Tivo owns

Especially now that DirecTV kicked them to the curb. Their new PVR seems to have almost exactly the same functionality as the TiVo version, just without the TiVo brand name. Too bad for TiVo I guess. I know TiVo has become the little pet of the Slashdot crowd but I really have no idea why. I've used one and I can't see anything special that really sets it apart from the multitude of other PVRs on the market these days. They don't even have dual tuners in them so you're stuck watching pre-recorded content while it's recording something unless you put in a splitter to watch live TV. You lose the pausing live TV feature if you do that though.

Re:Tivo, I'll miss you when you're gone

[tdemark]

On the other side, DVRs are becoming a ubiquitous commodity on set-tops boxes, and it doesn't seem like Tivo can really offer them anything besides the name Tivo, which is probably the most valuable thing Tivo owns (witness the on-again off-again nature of their deal with Comcast).

Have you ever used a STB DVR? Their interface redefines the word "sucks".

I have a DCT-6412 Phase II from Comcast (Dual Tuner HDTV DVR) and a Series 1 Tivo. The DVR portion of the STB goes mostly unused - I pick up a few shows each week that are HD on it. Everything else gets picked up by the Tivo. Yes, the interface is that bad.

When I first got the STB, I tried to completely replace the Tivo, but couldn't. The interface is sllllooooooowwwwwww. During normal operation, button presses are delayed anywhere from .5 to 3 seconds. Occasionally, the unit won't respond for 10 or 15 seconds, but it will queue all your remote presses... so when it comes back alive, it freaks out by executing all the commands you sent it when you thought it wasn't getting your keypresses.

Unless you select from the Guide, picking shows to record is a chore. First, to select by title, they give you a five character 1983 video game high score selector: A A A A A . You go to each letter, press up or down to find the appropriate character, press right to continue on. Combine this with the molasses-like interface and it is downright painful.

The system is buggy, too. For example, let's say you don't want you kids to see that "Hot, Naked Coeds" is playing on Channel 199 (VOD). You can't hide the channel in the guide, but you can set the system to replace adult titles with "Adult Programming". This works well until you go to pick a program to record. Adult titles in this list appear where they would if the "Adult Programming" title was not in effect (eg - "Hot, Naked Coeds" would, appropriately, be filed under "HO"). However, if you scan down the list of titles, the system will eventually get tripped up on "Adult Programming" appearing in the list and reset you back to the "AD" titles. This makes it impossible to scan down the title list. My theory is that when "Adult Programming" appeared at a specific location on the list (eg - first or last), the system got confused and assumed you were still in the "A"s.

The only two things that the STB has going for it are: (1) Dual tuners and (2) HDTV recording. The Tivo Series 3 is going to fix that, though. My hope is that Comcast will make a smart choice and offer Tivo Series 3 as an option next year sometime as their DVR offering. Because their current offering, when compared with Tivo, just plain sucks.

- Tony

Re:Tivo, I'll miss you when you're gone

[ChildeRoland]

I've never seen any cable companies giving DVRs away for free.

Re:Tivo, I'll miss you when you're gone

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick clarification about the "Adult Programming" item above. With the kids safe titles off, you would see:

Game Show
Good Morning America
Great Explosions
Hot, Naked Coeds
Just Shoot Me

With it on, you would see:

Game Show
Good Morning America
Great Explosions
Adult Programming
Just Shoot Me

When scrolling down the list in this configuration, the STB would reset the list back to the "Ad"s when it hit an "Adult Programming" in a certain location on the list.

- Tony

Re:Tivo, I'll miss you when you're gone

[Anonymous Coward]

With it on, you would see:
Game Show
Good Morning America
Great Explosions
Adult Programming
Just Shoot Me

You sure that's not supposed to be:
Game Show
Good Morning America
Adult Programming
Adult Programming
Adult Programming?
: p

Re:Tivo, I'll miss you when you're gone

[Anonymous Coward]

Most are actually, usually with a rebate involved though. Directv has been sending me cards advertising their "free after rebate" DVR for a few months now, and according to COX's website, their DVR is free up front. (See here

Re:Tivo, I'll miss you when you're gone

[hawkbug]

"They don't even have dual tuners in them so you're stuck watching pre-recorded content while it's recording something unless you put in a splitter to watch live TV."

I have a dual tuner Tivo right now and I love it. It's a DirecTivo of course, the Sony SAT-T60. It doesn't do HD obviously, but the minute they come out with the series 3 HD dual tuner ones, I'm all over it. That means I'll have to drop DirecTV, but since they dissed Tivo, I have no problem with that.

Re:Tivo, I'll miss you when you're gone

[ChildeRoland]

Let me repeat myself:

"I've never seen any _cable companies_ giving DVRs away for free." (emphasis added)

cheaper and offering more

[stevea1210]

I personally went with the DVR from Comcast. IMHO it was a better offering than tivo (pains me to say Comcast offered a better deal). No upfront fee for the box, cheaper per month, can record hi-def, complete integration with my cable box. So Comcast offered me something that was A)cheaper (upfront and per month), B)able to do things Tivo can't (hi-def and integration) It wasn't a hard choice for me on which to go with.

Re:cheaper and offering more

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I personally went with the DVR from Comcast. IMHO it was a better offering than tivo (pains me to say Comcast offered a better deal).

I don't trust Tivo as a company anymore and went with a smaller company with a less restricted product when I decided on a PVR. That said, it is not fair to compare Tivo to Comcast on price. Comcast just raises everyone's subscription fees to cover the difference (seeing as they have a monopoly in most areas they are available). Ditto on integration with a Cable box. The truth of the matter is, Tivo has pretty much sold out to the cable companies and given the cable companies' leverage a lot more people are choosing like you. It is too bad too, since the cable companies are motivated to remove as much of the ability to store video long-term and skip commercials as possible. They will kill the 30 second skip as much as possible. They will try to ad more advertisements using the PVR. They are motivated to make it hard and/or expensive for you to archive video, since then you would be less tied to them and since they are owned largely by the same corps as content producers who want to sell you that archived copy on DVD.

You may have made a wise choice in the short term, but the long term consequences are going to suck.

Meanwhile, I'll be using the built in editor on my PVR to remove commercials for my favorite shows/movies before I burn them to DVD or VCD. I'll also be exporting recent episodes of shows to mpeg-4 so I can watch them on my laptop while flying/commuting. It even uses less battery than a DVD would and I can catch up on those shows I haven't gotten to before I delete those not worth archiving. Also note, I pay no monthly fee for my PVR and can pick my choice of independent scheduling providers instead of being tied to one particular service.

I'm firmly convinced all this functionality should be in every PVR, except of course those being made by corporation with a vested interest in them being less functional and those companies who have signed huge sales contracts with those companies. Oh well, hopefully IPTV will take off and fundamentally change the market, separating content from other content and from being tied to delivery mechanism.

So? I went panhandling with ReplayTV's former CEO

[elrous0]

You don't see ME writing a fracking article about it.

-Eric

Real

[HTH NE1]

I remember TiVo once announcing a partnership with Real Networks to get net content onto TiVos.

Apparently the results of that deal are still being held up by buffering.

He doesn't mention GPLv3, but they mention him

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

The Tivo got mentioned a few times in relation to DRM during the launch of the GPLv3 drafting process, and during the post-launch press.

Here's a transcript of the opening presentation of the GPLv3, where Richard mentions Tivo:

For instance, the Tivo is designed so that if you modify the program and install it, it won't run. We have written provisions designed to forbid that use of our software. We can't forbid people from making such devices, nasty as it is, but we can, we believe, forbid them to use GPL covered software in that corrupt way.

Need Algorithm Help?

[iiii]

Mr. Mack,

I love TiVo. It rocks. I can never go back to non-TiVo tv.

But one thing that gets on my nerves is the long, long, long time it takes to rearrange the priority order in the Season Passes. Firstly, anything that runs this long can and should be done in the background. Secondly, the job is not that hard - a decent algorithm should be able to re-plan the to-do list in very little time, certainly a few seconds or less. My old DirecTV Tivo took a long time to do it, and my new DirecTV HD DVR with TiVo takes more than five minutes to do this, during which I cannot use it for anything else. Absolutely ridiculous, and very frustrating.

I know I could create a more efficient algorithm and I'm offering to help. If you want my help pls contact me. We might even be able to make a deal where I only get compensated if I improve the performance of the algorithm. It would save millions precious minutes of their lives, and make them happier with their TiVo systems. Let's talk.

Re:Need Algorithm Help?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that there's no reason why updating the recording priorities shouldn't be done in the background but I have to say that the updates take much less time in version 7 of the TiVo software. DirecTV controls the OS version on DirecTV TiVo units and hasn't wanted to upgrade them so unfortunately you're stuck with the older slower algorithms.