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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."
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.
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.