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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 never bought one because of the monthly fee. I would buy one immediately if there was no monthly fee. I assume there is still a monthly fee, correct?
There is absolutely no reason to have a monthly fee on this piece of hardware. I understand there is a minor "service" they provide in getting schedules and being able to set up recording through an internet page, but in no way does that constitute the size of the monthly fee I remember seeing.
Also, I believe the device stopped working after you stopped paying the monthly fee. What? Why can't it work like an old-school VCR at that point where you have to manually program when it should record?
Please correct me if my history is off, or things have changed. I'd take a serious look at a TiVo if things are now different.
File away with 8-track, betamax and video disks
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Surely that depends on what type of "time shifting" you mean. If you're talking about "recording to watch later"
Yup. That's what time-shifting has meant since the term was coined.
In the '70s.
With the introduction of the VCR.
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.
Why are you even comparing TiVo to the iPod. Why should it come close to the iPod/iPhone's success? They aren't competing products...Are you saying that a product is only successful if it sells the same number of units as an iPod or is as popular as an iPhone?
i have the HD tivo, and i move every 4 months... getting the cablecard from the cable company and getting it installed is always a GIANT headache, usually having to deal with comcast customer service that pretends they have never heard of a tivo or cablecard...BUT, after it's set up and working.... nothing beats it. dual HD tuners, that can record while you are downloading web content simultaneously, with high quality netflix streaming, a giant hard drive with eSATA to seamlessly attach any 3rd party hard drive for additional storage... it's a dream and 100% wife approved, but if she had to figure it all out and convince comcast that she really did know what she was talking about, she would never get it set up. it is most certainly a cable company conspiracy. i enjoy my chats with all the cable installer guys as i ask them to justify the cablecard which is just a glorified hardware password... eventually i can get them all to admit that it's just about renting you another piece of hardware. i'm always charged a monthly fee to rent my multistream cablecard... without the cablecard the digital service has no value, and subscribers can not use their own cablecards, so i don't understand how it's legal to sell the service and require the hardware rental as a separate fee... also, the channel lineups available are a giant mess requiring much effort to remove duplicates... can't really fault tivo for that... more conspiracy. i'm just wondering if the set top boxes distributed by comcast also contain 5 copies of most network channels.
My LiteOn PVR has a simple timer for recording like a VCR.
It has user-replaceable parts.
It doesn't require a paid subscription.
LiteOn doesn't sell records of my viewing habits.
It hasn't got a partition allocated for ads.
It doesn't display ad-banners when I pause or fast forward.
It has editing features.
It has a built-in DVD burner.
Yeah, TiVo offers a few neat features, but I'd have to give up a lot of utility and a great deal of privacy to get them. F-k that. My next PVR will be a computer with a Hauppauge tuner.
The cost is the primary reason I don't have a Tivo anymore. When we bumped up to HD, the HD Tivo was something like $800, so we just went with TWC's DVR. I'm on the verge of going back to Tivo, though, because the box from TW is probably about the most useless pile of electronics you can possibly assemble and still legally refer to as a DVR. It sometimes just fails to record, and probably 4 out of 5 times, fast-forwarding or rewinding will desync the audio. Tivo was expensive, but it never had rookie problems like that.
one should learn about history
History doesn't begin at the VCR, and I think your definition of timershifter is off. I would argue that if you're going to consider a VCR a timeshifter, then you should also consider the phonograph and the human memory cortex timeshifters as well. I'm pretty sure that "recording device" is not the same thing as "timeshifter". A timeshifter allows you to view a stream of data at a point in time other than what it is also simultaneously chronicling. View and Chronicle are separate timelines. This is impossible with a VCR. It could probably be achieved with a complicated array of VCRs, but that invention does not exist.
TiVo, in my humble opinion, is based on a fairly flimsy premise: that television is so important to watch that you are willing to spend time and money to make sure you get to watch all of some part of it. Really? Seriously, what is on television that you couldn't miss?
My answer to that it doesn't so much let you watch *more* TV, as improve the quality of what you do watch. Say I watch an hour of TV every day. I can use that time to watch whatever happens to be on, or I can use time shifting to watch something good.
At the quality end of the TV drama spectrum, you're really missing out if you don't watch all the episodes, in the right order. There's no way I'd want to see The Wire or Lost out of order.