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TiVo to Drop Lifetime Service Plan
Thomas Hawk writes "TiVo held their most recent analyst conference call today and on the call announced that they will be dropping their lifetime subscription option as well as offering three new monthly no upfront fee TiVo plans combining their box and service for one year, two year and three year commitments. Additionally they announced that their highly anticipated Series 3 HDTV standalone model with CableCARD support will not be available until after "mid year," a new retail partnership with Radio Shack and the fact that the company is in solid discussions with other cable operators for deals similar to their previously announced Comcast initiative."
MythTV (www.mythtv.org) is looking better and better.
How exactly are they making it more difficult to avoid commercials? I still fast forward through them just like before. The only change I've noticed is more commercials support Tivo's "press thumbs up for more info" thing if you do watch them.
-- "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" -Optimus Prime
Well... at least I'll get a hell of a lot of money for my TiVo with lifetime sub on ebay.
Remember lifetime sub was for the lifetime of the unit, not your lifetime.
Also. The only thing that has changed is that they have dropped Lifetime subs and added more subscription options.
You'll still be able to go to a store and buy a unit, and get a service only subsription for $12 and change. You'll also be able to buy a second service only subscription and get the multi-service discount of $6 and change on the additional units.
The change is that if you don't want to eat the cost of a unit upfront, there are news subscription options where the cost is amortized for a couple of years.
I would have agreed with the difficult part 3 days ago, but then I watched my buddy set one up from scratch in only a few hours. And that was on cheap, dated hardware. It works well and looks beautiful, here is the guide he used.