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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."
perhaps this is a quibbling point, but TiVo didn't invent timeshifting. the invention of the VCR was responsible for that. one should learn about history a bit more before attempting to romanticize it unnecessarily.
Tivo: $250 up-front + $7 / mo CableCard rental + $15 / mo Tivo Subscription fee
vs.
Cable: $15 / mo for something that works for most people.
(...and if your Tivo breaks, you get to buy another one.)
For me, I never got a Tivo because of the cost. You need to purchase the equipment and then pay a monthly fee. I believe it is $12.95/month now. I already pay $80/month for cable and Internet access, $50/month for phone, add on heat, electricity and rent and I'm already down a paycheck. I have a DVR at home built with leftover parts and a $40 tuner card that works just fine. I can also move those files between my laptop and any other computer, so I can take my recorded shows anywhere.
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
>> I wanted to find out why TiVo hasn't been more successful
I'm very happy with my Mythtv box. It does way more than a Tivo does, I can customise it, and it has no monthly fees. (Although I do subscribe to Schedules Direct for listings, but that's only $20 per year ).
As long as cable box manufacturers are selling boxes to cable companies, instead of to consumers, I'm not sure how things will get better. I guess this is a difference between the "end-to-end" model of the Internet and other networks such as the cable network.
Everyone I have discussed CableCards with has basically come to the same conclusion: the cable companies wanted it to fail. I think this stems from their desire to keep control out of the hands of consumers; anything that breaks that principle must be marginalized as much as possible. You see the same deal with locked handsets from the mobile phone companies... they take a perfectly decent piece of hardware, flash their shitty branded firmware on it that actually disables features built in to the phone, then try to sell those features back to you (or in my case, don't offer them).
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
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?
The trouble is that, as a basic technical task, doing what a Tivo does isn't rocket surgery(particularly now that more broadcasts and cable transmissions are already being transmitted in a nice compressed digital format, and computing power gets ever cheaper. Tivo still wins over the competition in terms of having a UI and attention to quality that isn't utter crap, unlike most of the cable-bundled boxes; but, because of the technical workings of cable, that doesn't really help them enough.
With computers, there is room for the "more expensive but better user experience/interface" option, because all a computer has to do to interact with the internet is speak a few common networking protocols. Even if your ISP has never heard of mac or linux or whatever, that just means that their phone drones won't help you configure.
With cable, the cable companies rule with an iron fist, and have (largely successfully) resisted any efforts to change that. Cablecard is a clusterfuck. One can only assume that it was intended to fail(or, at least, those who wanted it to fail assigned it a task so difficult that no good faith implementation could possibly work properly). This gives first-party boxes a huge advantage over Tivos in all but cases of serious enthusiasts.
In South Africa I had digital satelite TV which had about 70 channels. Later they came out with a DVR with time shifting. After moving to the Netherlands I expected a way-better service (being "1st world") and everything. Not so: the UPC digital cable service was pretty much the same and in the same order of price. It also had about the same number of channels but there are many Dutch language channels that I don't watch. Major differences are the prevalence of sub-titles in the Dutch service on all English channels except for things like Euro news and CNN, CNBC etc. Also less film info on the film channels (the SA film info always had date of film, directory and leads). Film channels are a premium extra. And no BBC food channel - *sigh*.
Tivos have been able to use Wifi instead of telephone lines for years now. In fact, you have to if you want to use their Netflix or Amazon movie download service.
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.
Tivo hasn't required a phone line for Tivo since the Series 2 came out... what, six or seven years ago?
With the Series 1, you had to hack it to go phone-free, but I have not had a phone line hooked to a Tivo in probably pushing eight years.
Come on, really? Tivo is losing subscribers for a few reasons: 1) Cable companies now offer their own DVRs -- Tivo used to be the only game in town 2) You don't have to buy a new DVR if your cable company's DVR fails; you just trade in your old one -- with Tivo...if it's outside the warranty period you have to buy a new one (yes, I know the cable company charges you a monthly rental fee) 3) Cable companies don't charge anything for the privilege of recording onto a DVR (Tivo makes you buy the box AND charges you a monthly fee). I used to have Tivo, and I liked it, but not enough to buy a third new box after my first two failed. Especially considering the above.
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.
My UK TiVo still has a little "As recommended by Sky" logo when it boots.
But Sky (Rupert Murdoch's satellite TV service) now has its own DVR.
It *really* annoys me when people coo about how clever their Sky+ is. "I can pause live TV! How awesome is that?", when TiVo had done it for years.
OTOH now you can get cheap DVRs from all kinds of manufacturers, so nobody's all that impressed any more, there's a free market, and that's all for the best.
I still think TiVo has the best UI over all.
I agree entirely - these are different markets, how is this comparison irrelvant? Were they just slow for today's obligitary daily Iphone mention?
One might as well say that the TiVo doesn't sell as much as Nokia, or Microsoft (both of whom have shipped far more than Apple - indeed, can we have an article on how Apple don't sell as many phones as most other phone companies, or how Macs don't sell as much as Windows PCs? Of course that would be viewed as flamebait...)
Lumping the Iphone with the Ipod also makes different sense - so the Tivo has to compete against two different families of products, not just one? Why not compare the Iphone to say, every product that Microsoft have ever released...
The comparison also makes no sense in that the Tivo is measured in terms of the number of current users, whilst figures for things like phones are usually total sales. What are the Tivo's total sales, ever?
How's that stack up against being a "Toaster Oven Geek"? Or "iPhone Geek"? Or "Honda Civic Geek"? Hell, I'm hungry, I think I'm going to go be a Peanut-Butter-and-Jelly-on-White-Bread-Geek.
Some of the Tivo's decline is attributable to the fact that they stopped evolving. Instead of
improving their product, they decided to sue potential competitors. They also decided to get in
bed with Big Cable. Once they were the only "authorized" 3rd party content channel they were in
a very precarious position.
They would have been much better off with an entire cabal of similar companies by their side.
Tivo was surpassed by Free Software and stymied by HDTV standards intended to allow for openness
but really only served as a means to lock out most of the market.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I used to have a Tivo. I had two in fact, including my personal favorite DVR of all-time, the Humax Tivo (to my knowledge, the only stand-alone DVR to date that allows you to burn your recordings to DVD). Tivo had great features, one-of-a-kind abilities (like the aforementioned burning to DVD option), and the best user interface in the DVR business. There were some downsides (a lousy 30 minute recording queue, sluggish menu performance on some of the models, etc.). But for the most part it was *the* superior DVR.
So why did I give it up? Two reasons: digital cable and HD. Tivo lagged way behind my cableco's native DVR on implementing both. Cablecards took a while to come out, and were buggy and a pain in the ass to install. Their HD models were expensive and, again, lagged behind my cableco. And when my cableco went to Switched Digital Video (SDV) even the cablecard stopped working for many of the newer HD channels. It just got tiring having to constantly wrestle with my cableco over my rogue DVR. It was a lot easier for me to just pay the $9 a month and get the cableco's native DVR (which is actually pretty good, though certainly no Tivo). That's probably what the cableco intended all along, I'm sure--but I'm not going to spend a fortune and put up with missing channels just to tell them to go to hell.
Tivo's collapse as DVR leader can basically be traced to one thing: their failure to license their technology to or reach an agreement with the cable companies. Without the official support of the Time-Warners and Comcasts of the world, they've essentially condemned themselves to forever being the outsider in the digital TV world. So they will always lag behind with kludgy solutions like buggy cablecards and hit-or-miss SDV adapters (don't get me started on those things). And, even for a pretty dedicated videophile and TV addict like myself, the native cableco DVR is just too tempting an alternative.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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!
For the couch-potato geek, one name typically comes to mind: TiVo.
To become a success for the masses, a product has to appeal to the masses. The reason the iPod and iPhone were successful was not that they were the first or the most powerful phones, but because they were well marketed and are usable and appeal to your average non-geek.
The corporate history is full of the graves of the people who did not understand this. One example which comes to my mind is home automation, ten/twenty years ago people were hyped about this and promised that your home would be fully automated by AI and computers. Now we are in 2010 and your average home only has the basics of home automation, just because it is fairly expensive and does not appeal to the masses (I do not wake up in the morning and wonder how cool it would be to pay 20k to have my heating fulling automated). It may come in the future but when it will come, it will have been re-thought to appeal to a viable customer base (like Apple with the iPod has beaten the crap out of the Archos and other MP3 players).
Now you may argue that Archos was there before Apple, but the fact is that Apple understood how to market their iPod.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
At that CES, ReplayTV won "Best of Show". Ten years ago Replay was letting people share and stream their recorded shows over the internet, schedule shows via web over internet, and automatically blanking commercials. For all these wonderful abilities Replay was sued into extinction bu the TV/Movie companies. Tivo was always their bitch, and so they let it totter along to give the illusion of choice...
There were ways to connect the TiVo via broadband back then, they needed to make it supported, but it was as simple as plugging in an Ethernet adapter and putting codes in the dialing prefix.
Expense is another part, it has always been way more expensive to use TiVo than the cable company. TiVo should have focused on cost reduction more, without making it a light service. They probably could have indroduced ads earlier (Your cable company depends on ads) to make it cost competitive, but they were busy trying to deliver the best experience and weren't considering cost as a primary objective.
I think the DVR was a rather obvious technology at this time. I had spent a few hours here and there to get my computer to do exactly the same thing for a couple of years. I didn't have the resources to do it cost effectively or in a user friendly way. The fact that Replay and TiVo came out at the same time highlights that it was a matter of computing power catching up and normal technological evolution. Startups like TiVo and Replay are going to have a hard time competing with the big companies like Scientific Atlanta and Motorola when the barriers to entry are so low.
Tivo's monthly fee of about $10 is NOT saved by re-purposing an old computer into a DVR, because the old computer eats almost that much power every month (assuming 40 watts for a tivo and 200 watts for a computer, running 24/7).
Some people are saying "vs $15 for cable" and confusing people... they may mean $15 per month for a cable company DVR. OR, depending on context, they may also mean BASIC cable, which is sometimes given a different name by the cable company so the cable company can name their $50/month package "Basic," and thus sell it to callers who assume "Basic" means "cheapest." Cable companies are regulated and have to offer a service (they don't have to call it "basic") that is just the broadcast stations and local access for a regulated rate, about $15.
I always thought Apple should buy TiVo's patents and tech and rebrand the failed AppleTV. Apple has the cash, marketing position, and design gurus to make an amazingly elegant, easy to use device integrated with beautiful TVs and screens, with all the backend apps to add value (iTunes integration, iMovie, etc.), and TiVo has the all the original patents that Apple could afford to defend. And Apple could turn into the big bullies themselves against the cable companies, especially if they can lobby for net neutrality legislation.
Seems like a perfect marriage to me.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines - Unknown
Disclaimer: I own 3 Tivos; a Series 2 standalone bought in 2002 that's going strong (albeit soon to be nearly obsoleted by Comcast's digital conversion), and two HD Tivos. It will be a sad day when I have to replace them with POS cable products or some Frankenstein
IMHO, what's hurt Tivo has been a couple of things. One is painfully slow technology refresh.
When I bought my Series 2 in 2002, most digital cable channels (HBO, Encore, etc) offered DD 5.1 audio on most or all programs. The Series 2 had no digital audio interface but even by 2002 standards should have been able to handle digital audio. It wasn't until the release of the Series 3 some 3? 4? years later, which required a CableCard (and thus the delay for CableCard) before digital audio was available.
What should have happened is a new unit (Series 2.5?) issued with digital audio capabilities to bridge that gap. HD would have still been an issue, but HD boxes would downcovert and we could have had digital audio. Other hardware items they should have been more aggressive about include external storage and DVD burning. They had a burner model but it was too little, too late.
Tivo also blew it on "open access" advocacy.
They should have made a lot more noise about CableCard and breaking the cable company digital encoding stranglehold. A much more public advocacy that made it plain that cable companies are really only interested in monopolies and bullshit upcharges for throwaway hardware paid for 10x over by rental fees.
PC integration has also been lame and crippled. Tivo 2 Go should have used TivoDesktop to generate burn-ready DVD ISOs and not required third party software or bullshit copy protection.
I still love my Tivos for what they do with elegance, simplicity and reliability, but wholly agree they just can't really get it together.
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.
Seriously, anyone who thinks people are going to continue to pay $50-$150/month for *TV* in this economy is leaving on their parent's salary. I make six figures, and I'd be damned if I'm going to shell out anywhere near $50/month for hundreds of junk channels when I only watch 5-6 shows.
Look you're *not normal*. And you're browsing a website full of people who aren't normal just like you. You have the knowledge and the technical expertise to set up an alternative that works for you, but that makes you *atypical*.
Honestly, look outside your little box for a second. Do you honestly think your mother or grandmother is gonna break out a PC and stream TV from Hulu? No. Hell, your average PC owner probably doesn't even realize they *can* hook their computer up to their TV.