The Trouble With TiVo

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.'"

Comments

Renting == Future Model

[Anonymous Coward]

No suprise people like renting, as it's quickly becoming the 'new' model for everything.

You don't own a cellphone, you rent it.
You don't own the DVR, you rent it.
You don't own that DVD, you license it.

Pretty soon, you will not 'own' your 'Personal' Computer, you will rent it.
You already effectivly rent the software, it works for the MMORPG, it can work for Microsoft Word.

It's a way to ensure a 100% foolproof revenue stream.

Re:Renting == Future Model

[Lumpy]

Dude you already RENT a Tivo. if you do not pay for the lifetime subscription after purchase you are in essence RENTING it.

Yeah,yeah, you can call it subscribing to the guide service, but then why does it completely stop working when I stop paying? it should work as a VCR and let me access everything I recorded when on the service.

I know that some of the wierder DVD recorders have a "tivo basic" that does just that, but the older Tivo's and the new HD units dont.

Re:Renting == Future Model

[tlhIngan]

Dude you already RENT a Tivo. if you do not pay for the lifetime subscription after purchase you are in essence RENTING it.

Except you own the hardware, and can do anything you want with it. By your definition, you "rent" cellphones, too, since if you stop paying, it doesn't work (well, emergency calls do, but TiVo works as a nice TV tuner with a 1/2 hour trick play buffer, too).

Try that with your cablebox DVR - open it up, pop out the hard drive. Then return it. You'll find that you'll be charged some huge fee because the cablebox "doesn't work - user tampering". With TiVo, you own the hardware. Even if you buy one brand new from the store, you can drop it out of a plane to look at the crater it makes. You can't return it, but hey. If you stop paying your Cable company, they'll want the box back and charge you some huge fee because it's broken.

Re:Renting == Future Model

[amigabill]

I don't get why people would like this. I hate renting. I want to buy it and be done with it, not be on the hook to continually pay and pay and pay forever even after the purchase price has been met multiple times over. I hate cable co boxes. I currently do not have any of them. I dont want one. I'll be stuck with one soon when I get FIOS, but I'd rather own it. I may buy this Tivo HD to replace it, especially since it's a lot cheaper than the Series 3. I own my cell phone. I need to buy a new one because it sucks and I can't use it at home, but it's mine. I would never lease a car, and don't understand why anyone does. I think it's rediculous. I just bought a new car a month ago. It's financed, so it'll take a few years to truely be "mine", but there ain't no lease manager telling me what I can and cannot do with the car. It's my car, I do what I wish with it, drilling holes, swapping interior, adding soundproofing (lotsa road noise), add an aftermarket nav system (Wasn't available from manufacturer with one), it's mine.

Great Things for TiVo

[tarsi210]

TiVo has some great things going for it. Whether or not it can beat the marketing and packaging deals of the cable and sat companies, I don't know, but there's some aspects that just beat out other offerings, including Mythboxen:

It works. All the time, every time, with minor exceptions. I have a wife who loves certain TV programs and will easily strangle anything that doesn't work and record them like they should.

It doesn't require a degree to run Sure, it might lack some more complex features that some people like. It might make annoying, "to-TOINK!", noises when you move around. But an idiot with a blindfold could sort it out, and that makes it easy on me. Not that my wife's an idiot; far from it. But I don't need to be explaining to her how to run the damned TV.

I can screw with it Because I own the box, it's mine. I can hack it, fiddle with it, change out hard drives, use them for something else, add to it, paint it, whatever I want. I might void my warranty, but whoop-de-do. I can because I own it.

Re:Great Things for TiVo

[Anonymous Coward]

TiVo is the iPod of DVRs.

It does the things you're most likely to want, it does them well, and it does them easily and reliably.

I also run BeyondTV on a PC, which can remove commercials, but it doesn't do it perfectly, so I'd rather use TiVo and skip manually. I haven't used any other DVRs but I hear about them crashing, failing to record, and so on.

what TiVo needs to do is:

[FudRucker]

obfuscate what identifies what it is when connected to a Cable System, fix it so it looks like an ordinary television, as a cable subscriber i know cable companies can identify what is connected to their systems, TVs, cable modems (mac address) & etc... i don't know exactly how they do this but they do it somehow...

Loved ours but...

[jeillah]

We bought a DirectTV Tivo several years ago and fell in love with it. We would still be using it except that all of a sudden we couldn't connect to the service any longer and kept getting messages saying we needed to fix it. We tried and tried, called customer support, tried again and again. Nothing we did worked to fix the problem. What was happening was when it dialed out it would connect to the service then drop the connection. Oh we could still use Tivo, we got the program guide updates and all that but we kept getting the error messages. We were determined to find out why. Finally after many hours of plodding through customer service hell, both DirecTV and Tivo, we found out that because Tivo and DirectTV had a falling out, they no longer support each other and there was no way it was ever gonna get resolved. We could keep going the way we were for a while but eventually bad things were gonna happen. We looked into it and found out that we could get the DirecTV DVR for less than we paid for monthly Tivo service. And we didn't have to buy the box. We don't like the new one as much as we did Tivo but I guess we'll get used to it. And what's better is if they decide to obsolete this box, we get another one for free. Not like the Tivo doorstop that we have now...

How can Tivo hope to stay around if they are going to treat loyal customers like this? They won't easily get anymore business from us because of this, no matter how much we liked them...

Anyone have any ideas as to what I can do with my old Tivo hardware?

Re:DVR

[utopianfiat]

I have serious issues with MythTV- especially the fact that I have to drop an arm, leg, and half a genital on a machine fast enough to record 480i...
Although I suppose it's even worse now that I have to compile it to parallel-process on a couple of Opterons just to be able to do 1080p. Once my setup upgrades start costing less than $2000, I'll upgrade to HDTV :/

TiVo Lite versus DIY

[Nom du Keyboard]

With a $299 price point including remote + monthly subscription fees (yet a reliable subscription service), how does the new TiVo Lite stack up against DIY? Chopping a rough 60% off the price of the current HD model does change the equation.

Is there any Series III hack yet to avoid the TiVo subscription in favor of an open source solution?

Re:Shouda stayed with DirecTV

[xantho]

If Tivo were bought by DirecTV, do you think that anyone who doesn't subscribe to DirecTV would be able to get one? Look at what DirecTV tried to do with Major League Baseball. They signed a deal to be the exclusive carrier of Extra Innings (which is the package with all the out of town games on the extra channels), and didn't want to let go of it until there was a giant uproar, John Effing Kerry got involved, and the cable companies started trying to throw their weight around.

Re:DVR

[ben there...]

I hope the cable cos do eat TiVo's lunch. As it stands, a TiVo is just a DVR "done right," according to people that own them. If regular DVRs become that good/decent/whatever, it will force TiVo to come up with something better.

Like the equivalent of a pre-built MythTV box. Or a Media Center-ish small form factor PC for the living room. Or like an AppleTV, with a service to download stuff. The kind of thing that's powerful, but that grandma could use.

And cheap program data, cheap hard drive upgrades, DVD burning, the whole works. Not the expensive, limited, single-purpose box it is now. Until then, I'll be happy with my own custom box. But I won't recommend it for grandma.

What tivo needs to survive

[theatrecade]

Remember the days of AVR (analog video recording) set your timer record your show.. pop out a VHS tape? If tivo integrated just one thing (the pop out of media) it would skyrocket TiVo. I have a PC setup at home with DVR software and once a week I copy all shows to dvd. There are about 10 shows that i watch mainly all anime or cartoons. I also have my digital cable box with DVR built-in but I only use it for channel changing because I want to have a record of the shows I watch last beyond "the drive is full" erasure.

Re:It's the subscription.

[thczv]

Sometimes I think like you, that the Tivo subscription is too high. Other times I compare to the other things I spend my money on. My cost for a second Tivo (due to the multi-service discount) is only $6.95 per month. This is is about 75% of the cost of a single movie ticket. Today, I will probably spend around $6.95 on my lunch, and in 20 to 30 hours or so it will be in the sewer. But my Tivo will still be giving. There are very few things that I spend $6.95 on that give me as much as my Tivo. Even if I had to pay full price, it would be worth doing. My stupid comcast DVR sucks compared to my Tivo. I estimate that at least 90% of the people who don't want a Tivo have never used one, and so don't know what they are missing. thczv

Re:DVR

[glindsey]

And MythTV's recording stability is going to be seriously negatively impacted by Zap2It Labs shutting down. Yes, MythTV's dev team has stated they can go back to website scraping, but that will break every single time the website's format is slightly altered.

Don't get me wrong, I really like MythTV, but when it loses its only source of reliable guide data, I anticipate some serious problems.

Re:$10/month from the cable company and you're don

[rizzo420]

because i don't give a crap about HD content or digital cable and i don't have satellite cable.

for the record, my series2DT tivo has 2 tuners, so i can watch and record different channels at the same time, or record 2 channels and watch a third on the cable setting on my tv, having it split to both my tivo and my tv's coax input.

i had a tuner break on my tivo. only one of them had the issue (it was black and white), but the other tuner worked fine. even though i'm out of the original warranty, they replaced it for free (well, they charged me for the new box until they received the old one).

i don't get a guide with my extended basic cable, so i get that with my tivo subscription.

my tivo remote integrated perfectly with my tv and is able to change channels (though i usually change them with the tivo), turn the power on and off, adjust the volume, and switch between the various inputs.

i also happen to like the little sound it makes.

i bought the tivo wireless adapter on sale at amazon and it connected flawlessly to my WPA2 protected, MAC filtered, hidden SSID wireless network without a hitch and has never lost connection. it connects smoothly to my computer to grab music, movie, and image files. my computer easily grabs tivo recordings without issue as well.

since i don't care about having digital cable or HD content, i see no reason to switch.

Wireless Spectrum, Google, and TiVo

[martyb]

What DO you get if you put these together?

• Google Set to Bid $4.6 Billion for Airwaves
• FTFA: Let's consider one other option: Could TiVo sell itself, perhaps to Cisco/Scientific Atlanta or Motorola? Not likely. True, the company is affordable. TiVo's market cap was around $550 million as of Thursday. The problem is that TiVo carries baggage -- i.e., its existing business model. Cisco/SA and Motorola wouldn't want to continue to service and support the 4.3 million TiVo subscribers out there, and it would be a rather pricey acquisition just to get the technology. I can't imagine buying TiVo would tickle Comcast's fancy either.(emphasis added)

The author of the article apparently perceives support of 4.3 million fanatic users as a burden!!??!!! I propose that Google would do well to buy TiVo.

Granted, there are additional costs beyond an acquisition: building the wireless infrastructure, merging it all together... but to put this in perspective, I just checked market caps:

• GOOG $158 Billion ($158,390 Million)
• TIVO $.55 Billion ($000,550 Million)

(NB: GOOG's Market Cap went up $190M while I was writing this post.)

Lessee, $4.6B + $0.55B = $5.1B for nation-wide reach, a fanatic user-base (TiVo users), direct access to what customers are watching (more data!), YouTube tie-in capability (they already have a distributed video infrastructure)... what's not to like?

Heck, google could afford to give TiVos away, and have a guaranteed platform on which to sell its ads - nationwide, just for a few $billion more.

Prediction: if Google gets the wireless spectrum it is looking for, I expect to see "GooTiVo" (TM) within a year.

Re:DVR

[jsdcnet]

I hope the cable cos do eat TiVo's lunch. As it stands, a TiVo is just a DVR "done right," according to people that own them. If regular DVRs become that good/decent/whatever, it will force TiVo to come up with something better. I owned a TiVo (direcTV version) for 4 years and I've been using the Comcast supplied Motorola DVR for a year now. The difference is night and day. Comcast is a clunky, unreliable POS and TiVo was a brilliantly designed totally reliable joy to use. If the cable cos do "eat TiVo's lunch" I expect that just means we'll all be stuck using clunky unreliable POS's forever, since the cableco's will have no incentive to improve their product.

Off air recording

[tgibbs]

Here's another one. A big reason why many people get cable is for better quality. But with this new TiVo and an ordinary roof antenna, it is possible in many areas to pull in all of the network channels in full HD quality, and with TiVo, you can watch what you want when you want. So who needs hundreds of channels to flip through when you've got a 12 hour backlog saved on your TiVo? Of course, there are movie channels and cable channel special shows like The Sopranos, but are they really worth paying $50 a month for cable, when pretty much anything that's any good will be available soon on DVD and a basic NetFlix account costs just $5/ month?