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The Sad History and (Possibly) Bright Future of TiVo
gjt writes "For the couch-potato geek, one name typically comes to mind: TiVo — the company that invented the DVR, and with it, timeshifting. TiVo has been around for more than 10 years now. And TiVo fans (like myself) tend to love TiVo. Yet, despite being well-loved and despite having been around longer than the Apple iPod, TiVo comes nowhere close to the iPod/iPhone's success. Apple sells more iPod and iPhone products in a single quarter than TiVo has sold in the entire lifetime of the company. At its peak, TiVo had only 4.4 million active users — that was over three years ago. Now TiVo the number is about 2.7 million. So I wanted to find out why TiVo hasn't been more successful — especially with a seeming lack of competition on store shelves. I did some research and posted my finding about TiVo's past, present, and future. The key takeaway seems to be that TiVo is a victim of cable industry collusion, loopholes in FCC regulations, and, of course, plenty of their own mistakes."
I'm not sure there is any DVR that is better than a Tivo. I say this as someone who has used MythTV, Tivo, and 3 different cable company's DVRs. When it comes right down to it, anyone can use Tivo. The cable company DVR's are not smart enough, MythTV (admittedly a long ass time ago) was hard to use and difficult to setup.
As for faster, a Series 2 Tivo that is upgraded and starts to have a lot of things on the drive can be a bit slot responding to the remote. This is no longer true with my series 3 HD XL. The speed is great no matter if the drive has 300 items recorded.
Cheaper: yes and no. the $700 price tag I paid for my upgrade ($900 for someone without a previous Tivo to get a discount) is the top of the line Tivo with lifetime service. My last Tivo was $300 and $250 for the lifetime subscription (Yes, I got it that long ago). It is still going strong at my brothers house (I sold it to him for $200 to help me pay for my new Tivo). Even ignoring the $200 I got from selling it, I got it August of 2002. 90 months divided by $550 = $6/month. Well under the Cable company price for a DVR. I did upgrade the hard drive in the Tivo with 2 160GB drives part way through it's life. Both were taken out of service from PC upgrades, but figure an average hard drive price of $100 that gets you up to $750, or $8.33/month. I unfortunately do not know how they fare against each other in power usage, so I honestly can't add in the possible differences between those.
In order for my new $700 Tivo to be more economical than the cable company offering (And assuming I will be tossing a 2GB external drive on it to expand it Figure $100 for the drive, $30 for the enclosure I already have that I plan on using and that makes it $830. 55 months to be same price as the cable DVR. Just over 4 and a half years.
It is a gamble that it will last that long, but if I win that gamble it is just savings at that point.
As for looks, I've not seen a DVR interface that is prettier than Tivo. Would love for someone to show me. It really *IS* as good as Tivo fans make it out to be.
Do you Gentoo!?
Actually, my Dad says that in the Days before TV they'd often set up a Reel-to-Reel tape recorder to record a radio show they'd otherwise miss, and then listen to it later. So "time shifting" is at least as old as reel-to-reel...
listings for mythTv from SchedulesDirect: $20 PER YEAR
listings for Tivo: $16 PER MONTH.
No reason for guide data for tivo to cost so frakking much. And then there is the idea they think that if you hack your box - YOUR BOX, you bought it - to get listings somewhere else that you are stealing service from them.
No, getting listings from them without paying would be theft of services. Getting your listings from somewhere else is not.
TiVo is run by a bunch of corporate farkwads.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!