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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."
Oh dear. I love my (series 1 UK) Tivo but I knew they'd been struggling. Didn't realise it was this bad.
If TiVo doesn't offer lifetife subscriptions anymore, then it might just suggest that they won't be around for anyone's lifetime. The fact that they are partnering up with a retail chain on its last legs, RadioShack, doesn't bode well for its future. It's a pity to see such an inventive company put its survival into doubt.
Still, the lack of the new model until mid-year doesn't bother me much. Existing models already due everything a user could want, the Series 2 records your shows. For 40 hours. What more could you want? Although there have been some issues with build quality (see some of the reviews on the Amazon listing) that hopefully will be fixed in the next generation.
they will be dropping their lifetime subscription option
Will they just stop offering it and honor existing owners, or do they plan to force everyone to downgrade to a monthly subscription model? And does this include their free "basic" service?
If the latter, and it includes their free basic service, they can expect one hell of a class-action from folks like me who bought an OEM TiVo box (as opposed to rolling their own Myth box) only because of the free lifetime basic service.
Heh... From the article, "According to Rogers, with TiVo's higher monthly fees and one year lock in they have increased the lifetime value of a TiVo customer by over $100."
Do they really want to say things like that in public? It might sound optimistic and fluffy, but just means "we will milk an extra hundred bucks from suckers who use TiVo every 2-3 years". Not the best PR material...
A MythTV box will cost more than a TiVo, based on their new three-year plan. It will work on your television, not just your computer - the MythTV software is intended to be used on a standalone computer that is dedicated to DVR functions.
The benefit over TiVo for most users is that MythTV doesn't lock you into someone else's content control system. The stories about abuses from the makers of the devices or from the studios, abetted by the makers, are not hard to find. As Cory Doctorow says, nobody woke up this morning wanting their DVR to do less than it did yesterday. Yet, that's exactly what you are agreeing to allow when you buy a TiVo or use a Windows Media PC - someone else has more rights on your machine than you do.
Now, outside the DRM realm, another important issue that makes MythTV attractive is expandability. Yes, TiVo is hackable, but it's not meant to be hackable easily. My particular MythTV box has two tuners, and room for at least two more (I could actually have eight if I went with dual-tuner cards). TiVo has one tuner. A settop DVR from a cable or satellite company usually has two tuners, but you can't add more.
And if you're reading Slashdot, you're probably willing to play with your toys anyway, right? MythTV is fun. :-)
Illegitimi non carborundum
A MythTV box will cost more than a TiVo, based on their new three-year plan.
Horsepucky!
IF and only if you include the price of a full PC, the costs come out comparable (for $469, you can build a damn fine low-end PC). Tuner cards cost well under $100, and you don't need a monitor (since you would presumeably use this with an existing TV, and if not, you'd need to consider that in the price of a TiVo as well).
Until now, Myth and the like have served a niche audience of people who would tend to have a decent PC in their livingroom anyway, and for an extra $50 could also use it as a PVR. This move has shifted the balance even for people wanting a dedicated DVR in their TV room - You could even go so far as to buy a cheap-ass Dell and throw in a capture card for less than the 3-year plan.
I wish I could get my MythTV box fully functional. I've spent far more on it over the years than I have on my Tivo and it still doesn't measure up. It can do more "stuff" but it does it in a much less polished way. In this latest attempt, the IR receiver on my PVR350 doesn't work, though it did work in a previous incarnation.
The core MythTV documentation is severely lacking. There are lots of good tutorials out there, but since every tutorial focuses on a specific set of hardware you can waste a lot of time if you have slightly different hardware than the tutorial.
Anybody know how to keep my MythTV box from locking up when the disk gets full? I have a separate partition just for recordings, but MythTV can't seem to figure out that it should delete old ones when the partition is full. I never had to configure my Tivo to handle this very obvious issue.
I keep working on my MythTV box because I know that my series 1 Tivo will fail someday, but unless there are some major improvements in the MythTV documentation and code I expect that I'll keep using my Tivo until it dies.
TiVo is in a lot of financial trouble, looking at its key statistics: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=TIVO
The company has negative earnings per share and its profit margin is almost -25%! Almost 15% of the companies shares on the market are shorted. Thats crazy!
I think that dropping the Lifetime Service Plan is a desperate gimmick to get more revenue. It might work, but who knows.
However, I don't think computer based PVRs are going to make a dent in the market...they are too complicated. Adding a card into a computer is too complicated for Joe Schmo. Watching TV on a computer screen is an alien concept to most people. A friend who was over last night thought that watching TV on my PVR-350 was 'interesting'. "You do realize that this is really weird, right?" she said, "I'm not sure if I really liked the experience." But the idea of not having a monthly fee for TiVo intreaged her.
But...I think that computer based PVRs will make a huge dent in the tech savvy market...because it is flexable...and for now...DRM free.
There are two REALLY big blunders that TiVo is making with this new pricing model:
1. The box is only warrantied for 1 year, but you can be under contract for up to 3! If the box dies on you 13 months into your contract, you're stuck either paying for 23 more months of service on a box you can't use, or paying TiVo a fee to swap your box for a refurbished model and move your service to it.
2. Hidden away in the fine print (but mentioned at the TiVoCommunity.com forums) is that the monthly fee you're paying doesn't automatically go down to the $12.95/month "service-only" option once your contract period is up. You have to call TiVo and request that it be lowered to save yourself the extra monthly fee, which is buying you NOTHING, not even warranty coverage. It's a win-win for them, no one had to do the new coding in their billing system, and they get to take advantage of everyone too busy to note exactly what month they purchased their TiVo in.
I've been a huge TiVo fanboy, I've owned 6 boxes since 2000, and have referred enough friends and family to TiVo to earn a 140 hour box, a Nikon digicam, and an iPod Shuffle, but I think my love affair may be coming to an end over this. I'm already suffering through using a Motorola HD DVR on my HDTV, and was planning on getting the HD TiVo later this year when it was introduced, but now I'm sorely tempted to get a Microsoft Media Center box instead, as it'll work with my Xbox 360...
At a minimum, TiVo really needs to warranty the box for as long as the contract is in effect, and swap it out for NO CHARGE when one breaks, they also need to automatically revert the charge to the "service-only" option after the contract has expired.
Fortunately, TiVo breakdowns are pretty rare, but they do happen. I lost a hard drive in my Toshiba DVD/TiVo box after it was only 5 months old, and I lost a modem in my 20 Hour Series 1 box in 2001. The Toshiba was replaced under warranty, and I hacked in an ethernet card to repair the Series 1 box.
I used to easily defend TiVo's monthly fee by pointing out that not only did they have to pay for guide data, but they had to pay for ISP service for the boxes to dial in nighly to retrieve guide data. Now that most of the people I know have their TiVos hooked to their home network, it's a lot harder to defend...
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein