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The Trouble With TiVo

Posted by Zonk on from the cute-little-antenna-guy dept.

BobCratchit writes "Multichannel News has an interesting take on TiVo: The DVR company has incredible mindshare but is totally dependent on cable providers to survive. Cable does not have many good reasons to let TiVo thrive. As a result, TiVo is destined to fade away unless it can carve out a niche as the cool kids' DVR (a la Macintosh) with products like the $299 HD DVR it just announced. From the article: 'TiVo has long been a darling of consumer-tech reviewers -- check out, for example, these happy hosannas from BusinessWeek, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. These guys are constantly befuddled that TiVo hasn't been more successful. Yes, TiVos make cute little popping noises when you click the remote. And they definitely provide cool features, like suggesting shows you might be interested in. But the cognoscenti enamored with TiVo's whizziness ignore a certain reality. It's easier to get a DVR from your cable company. And most people prefer to rent, not own, a set-top.'"

2 of 369 comments (clear)

  1. Re:DVR by Reverend528 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, and nothing like losing a minute of the show because of a false positive...
    Mythtv doesn't actually delete the commercials, it merely flags them so that they may be automagically skipped. In the event of a false positive, it's quite easy to go back and see what was skipped.
    --
    Badass Resumes
  2. Re:DVR by jargoone · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sigh. Every time a TiVo article gets posted, I have to do this. Here we go.

    Have you looked at any of TiVo's features in the last, oh, 7 years? TiVo can do a large subset of what you can do with a MythTV box, "Media Center-ish" PC (whatever that means), and has a service to download stuff. With a TiVo, you can use it as a DVR, transfer recordings to your PC, play your own music, play music on the internet, play purchased movies that are downloaded to your TiVo, check traffic, check weather, check movie listings, buy movie tickets, and that's just using their out-of-the-box supported features. They have an open API for application development that makes the possibilities nearly endless.

    And as a bonus, since it's "done right", people like me can watch TV without worrying about my guide data provider vanishing, or my wife calling me because the damn front-end needs restarting.

    Based on every cable company's DVR I've seen, they better be looking elsewhere for lunch.