Slashdot Mirror
TiVo To Brick All Remaining UK PVRs On June 1
handelaar writes "Perhaps in order to 'encourage' existing users of UK Tivo units to change their TV service to Virgin Media, pay £149 for a new 'Virgin TiVo' that they won't actually own, plus £34.50 per month in service charges, Tivo is to cancel all EPG data service to all the Tivos still in use in the country — and existing units will become basically nonfunctional at that time. The faithful aren't amused, having stuck by the company for several years, and mostly paying £120 per annum for service until now. 50% of UK residents aren't able to avail of this generous upgrade offer even if they want to — the cable company in question only covers about half the country."
tivo must not like having customers
It might cost more up front, but in the long run it's much cheaper, and you get to control the recordings.
Although the BBC has been applying to be able to encrypt it's EPG data for HD channels - there was a large fuss made about it at the time but I've heard nothing since, so I presume they are sneaking it in the back door quietly.
What? Something is bricked because it is no longer served programming info now?
This is bad, TIVO sucks, their lifetime subscription doesn't cover the lifetime of the device, etc.
But stop fucking using the term brick unless the device is incapable of powering on.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
How exactly is punishing your loyal (and still paying) customers a good business move?
Not sure where you get that from, the Virgin V+ HD box is free (well, a once off £50 activation charge) for new customers, and as an existing customer I can get one for £70 including the activation charge.
Plus the "£34.50 per month" includes TV, phone (line rental and a fairly decent call package) and 10MB broadband.
Not saying that what Tivo are doing is acceptable (although they never promised eternal service in the UK, or did they? Since people are paying an annual service charge, I would guess not), but at least get stuff correct before ranting.
Maybe they learned from a successful business model from cupertino. Where you lock in, treat everyone like crap and make them pay a premium price is the winning ticket to huge stock price increase.
- Sent from my Iphone
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
What a horrible sensationalists headlineto many ‘bricked’, means kill. They are not bricking TiVo’s – they are just going to be cutting off the EPG data in 3.5 months. I gave up my TiVo’s last year when I moved from the US to the UAE, and man do I miss ‘em. In the UK, TiVo pulled out years ago - so it was nice of them to keep it going as long as they did. Hell, you'd thing in that amount of time (what, 9 years?) since they stopped selling them in the UK there would be something else, comparable or better on the market...but nope.
That I switched from Virgin Media to Sky, although the broadband was better on cable, the rest is junk, and Virgins customer service sucks (well it did for me), as for tivo, I've never used one, I've always had mythtv, and sky+ so i'm not short of recording from TV options, just my 2 pence worth :D
http://chimpbox.us
so does this mean nobody will mind if i install linux on it?
The monthly fee for the EPG service is £5/month if you're on the lower two TV packages, and free if you're on largest. Assuming they apply the same price when they switch to TiVo, it'll be half the price TiVo currently charges.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Tivo haven't actively sold the boxes in the UK for about 8-9 years now. This isn't a modern service being canned, it's effectively a legacy system.
When TiVo was first coming out on the scene, there was talk that there was, hidden deep in the code, a "boat-anchor" mode, which Tivo assured the faithful (which at the time were typically bleeding-edge technology hounds) that if TiVo ever went belly-up, their boxes wouldn't be useless, that there was a mode which they could push to all the units that essentially said "We're going off the air now, open yourself up for use however the owner wants", and that it would offer up some alternative options for shoving EPG data into it gathered from other sources.
It seems that maybe this is what TiVo should be doing with these UK Series1 units, even if they're not technically "going off the air".
Is the TiVo guide data format understood? The BBC offer free XML listings data for all UK channels (not just BBC channels) - it seems like it should be possible for motivated developers to convert this into usable TiVo format data.
Are you unable to read? They are stopping the subscription service that gave the Tivo guide data. The box will still power on, will still play your old recordings, will still act "vcr-style" for manual recordings (record wednesday from 5-6pm, etc), and will work 100% if you have an alternate method of getting guide data.
Commenting without reading the summary, let alone the article, and reacting based on a headline should be illegal.
Analogue TV is currently being shut down in the UK - last region(s) in about a year, so complaining that an analogue TV recorder is no longer usable is a little weird surely? May as well have a moan about the government turning off your TV while you're at it!
this is like Microsoft withdrawing support for Windows 98 or Internet Explorer 5 for home users... these things are a decade old and while they were unique back then, there are FreeSAT, Freeview, PVRs and other options now if the S1 owners aren't in Virgin areas. Most of the forum posters have said or suspected this was coming... no tea cups were rattled by this announcement - especially as most users have workarounds planned.
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
From TFS:
and existing units will become basically nonfunctional at that time
The OP did read the summary before commenting. (Note that I have not RTFA and make no claim as to the accuracy of that line)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
commenting without reading the summary or understanding another's post, let alone the article, and reacting like a moron out of ignorance, should be illegal.
this was what you have done. those units, will be only as good as bricks.
Read radical news here
TiVo likes having customers, but they've changed their mind as to who their customers are. They no longer focus on direct sales. Instead, they sell boxes to cable and satellite companies, who rebadge them and sell them on. This cuts their supply chain overhead and guarantees large number of sales, so it's more profitable.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Given that their UK customer base is microscopic, perhaps they do. They're positioning the Virgin movie as the official UK launch of TiVo, a product which actually hit the shelves about half a decade ago. That should give you some indication of the number of subscribers they have.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
What a total PR fail. TiVo used to have such a good reputation.
Presumably Virgin made this a condition of the contract and TiVo rolled over. Shame on both of you, avaricious, nasty, money-grubbers.
Remember folks (UK and US): don't buy a TiVo product, or a Virgin Media one, they will take your cash and then let you down.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Not saying that what Tivo are doing is acceptable (although they never promised eternal service in the UK, or did they?
Actually they did. You could pay a monthly fee, or pay a single fee of £250 for "lifetime updates". I expect the people who paid that are going to be a bit annoyed.
However, there was an unofficial "gentleman's agreement" that hackers wouldn't release any code that screenscrapes or otherwise downloads the EPG data over the net (using the ethernet card addon), and if anyone did that, then talk of it on the forums was banned. That agreement is now null and void, so there's a good chance that someone will finally release free code, if anyone still cares.
Two thoughts:
(1) This isn't "bricking" the Tivo. When ReplayTV stopped supplying guide data to my DVR, it still worked just fine but more like a VCR where you manually set everything. It sounds like Tivo is the same.
(2) How is this legal in the consumer-friendly EU? I would have thought purposely damaging consumer products is a criminal offense, just as Sony got in trouble for removing the "Install other OS" option in PS3.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
Canceling cable TV was one of the best things I ever did. It takes a while to adjust, but pretty soon you enjoy TV more, and life more, because you only watch stuff you really like, and you watch it whenever you like. You have to seek out shows and movies a little more because they're not being shoveled onto you, and you find the ones that you end up really cherishing. If you have a TiVo, you already admitted cable TV is broken. Just get off the pipe.
Maybe you should spend your time creating your own GPLv3 OS instead of telling other people what to do with their works. It would be far more helpful.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
So since my netbook wont play BLOPs it is bricked and I will ask for a manufacturer replacement of a device capable of what I think it should do.
Well, with Tivo you didn't buy their EPG. You bought the box but in order for it to be any use you subscribed to the EPG. Which might mean they'd get away with it - were it not for the fact that they offered one-off lifetime subscriptions for £120.
Having said all that, they're a business. And almost all business decisions can be boiled down to money.
Were I in Tivo's shoes, I'd have worked the arithmetic something like this:
Worst case scenario: Customer(s) take us to court, win, we're obliged to refund some proportion of their lifetime subscription. This isn't the US where you can sue for the loss at £120 then the "hurt feelings" at £1,000,000.
The only customers who are likely to make a fuss are those still using a lifetime subscription.
So, how many people with lifetime subscriptions are still using them? Should be easy enough to figure out, the boxes phone home every night to download their EPG. Which means there must be some means of authenticating the box or how else would you know that it was associated with a lifetime sub? Once you've worked out this number, let's call it N
Multiply N by the cost of the subscription (£120) and you've got an idea of the worst-case you'd be paying out - excluding legal fees. I would be astonished if that number is much more than, say, £120,000 - Tivo pulled out of the UK years ago, the only boxes which are affected are going to be getting on a bit now.
Okay, so how much does it cost to maintain the EPG service - including a pool of dialin modems, the servers and the software? This would be a service which every other PVR in the country is getting straight from Freeview/Cable/Satellite system and so the cost of running it is exclusive to your old product. I bet you anything you like it's expensive enough that even with the worst-case payout, it's still cheaper within three years to cancel the service.
I'm having a hard time drumming up an excess of sympathy for people who bought TIVOs. They are and have always been a highly proprietary device... AND subscription service to boot. There is nothing open, standardized, modular, or off-the-shelf about them, and that was quite intentional. It is a closed device precisely because that was intended to maximize corporate profits. As such they are open to whatever manner of megalomaniacal mischief [say that fast seven times] that corporation feels it can manage to inflict on its vict... err, customers... without inciting a full riot/boycott.
Sounds like they're certainly inviting that riot with this tactic, but the victims of it were most certainly amply warned, and chose the convenience-store solution anyway. They got exactly what they paid for.
Can they be jailbroken? Can one do anything interesting with the very cheap mini-computers that are about to flood the market?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Wierd. I know of two lifetime replay TV units that are still getting data. I need to ask my friends how that are doing that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Tivo service contracts list "lifetime" as the lifetime of the unit. and they can end the lifetime of a unit at any time.
Only a fool ever paid for the lifetime service with Tivo, they could and had a history of screwing over people that paid for lifetime subscriptions.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It has lost functionality. It's other functions still, in fact, function. It is not bricked.
I used to work for TiVo, and while most of the company is very serious about taking care of existing customers and improving the TiVo device and service, its the big decision makers that are the problem. It isn't the current subscriber that they care about, but the potential one. In the eyes of a few execs at TiVo, losing "a few petulant customers" is perfectly acceptable if it means they can lure in a handful of new customers. The problem is, those "few petulant customers" usually ends up being a pretty big group, and TiVo isn't able to bring in enough new customers to make up for those lost. Not only that, but TiVo is more interested in *cooperating* with everyone, and refuses to realize that the companies they are playing nice with are the *competition*, and those companies are NOT playing nice with TiVo. But look at TiVo's earnings reports. The only quarter they have ever been in the black was the quarter they won that lawsuit against Dish Network--every other quarter in 10 years has been as red as it gets.
What was the alternative? The TiVo box relies on the TiVo service, which surely the customers must have been aware of. If the service is shut down, then the boxes no longer operate. The only alternative is to never shut the service down, ever, until the end of time, which is patently ridiculous.
The only thing that's stopped is the EPG service, if I read it correctly. Grab another EPG type service, convert if necessary to the format the Tivo needs, and point the Tivo to your new service and voila - you should be ready to go. If you need authentication/keys, sniff the current stream and you may have to do a little more work depending on what's there. I'm actually considering this for another service I'm using as I don't particularly like the one it wants me to use.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I know at least with Satellite DVRs you still are encouraged to let them phone home in order to, I assume, send your viewing habits back to the company. If the box can't phone home it will definitely bug you about it, and I've heard there may even be a charge.
This must be a real bummer for all 7 people in the UK that own a TiVo rather than the one of the many different other PVRs that don't charge you a fee to use the device that you have paid for and own.
(2) How is this legal in the consumer-friendly EU? I would have thought purposely damaging consumer products is a criminal offense, just as Sony got in trouble for removing the "Install other OS" option in PS3.
The boxes haven't been on sale for nine years. Any argument would probably depend on what a normal person thought "lifetime" means in this context, and how you paid for the service (do you buy the box, or buy the subscription, or both?).
IANAL.
Basically, the Series 1 boxes are 9-10 years old and have DIAL UP modems. Most likely what happened was there where not enough paying customers left for Tivo to justify the cost for a bank of dialup modems. They are allowing current users FREE dialup access to the programing guild until the cutoff date. In addition they are not (as of yet) releasing a update that completely bricks the box or removes say the ability to record shows (which can still be done manually after the cut off date.) I am sure someone from the Tivo UK community will be releasing an alternative way to get programming data on these boxes.
As one of the "fools" who paid for lifetime service I'd like to inject some facts here. I paid something like $300 for lifetime, and used that service for almost ten years before the box failed from hardware issues. Had I not purchased the lifetime service I would have paid somewhere around $1200 for that service during the same time. In fact I could still repair the box and keep using it if I chose. So please explain to me where it was foolish to pay $300 rather than $1200?
So to the cloud we go:
"TiVoWebPlus – This third party application requires the TiVo to have been hacked. Hacking will void any warranty and may be grounds for TiVo to cancel a service contract without remuneration, so it should be done with care. For a correctly hacked TiVo, this application turns the TiVo into a web server. In addition to the standard functions of all web servers, this allow users to program the TiVo over the internet, a useful feature that does not currently exist on the TiVo, despite the fact that most TiVos are fully internet integrated."
No, because your netbook was never advertised to play BLOPs and you'd have to be really, really misinformed (or yes, dumb) to seriously think so.
I had service with TiVo for a little over a year. When I finally canceled, they double charged me the cancellation fee. I called and made them aware of this fact. When they finally returned my money they gave me everything back minus $8 for taxes. I know it was only $8, but it was the principle behind the issue and I explained to them that since it was THEIR fault that I was double charged that THEY should be the ones out $8. The guy I spoke to on the phone about this was a complete prick about it and basically told me that I had to talk to the state tax department if I wanted my $8.
Now I tell everyone who mentions TiVo about this story hoping to cause them a lot more than $8 in damage to their image. If they had only given me a measly $8 out of their own pocket then this all could have been avoided.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
why are you posting from BOTH of your accounts in the same story? Or is one of the commodore accounts an impersonator?
V+ is £50 for the box, plus £30 setup if you have to pay it.... at least it was for me. Or does Tivo do something else I'#m not aware of?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
You could have bought a copy of SageTV for $90, installed in on a PC that cost $500 complete with dual TV Tuners, and not had to pay for a subscription to EPG data, because it comes for free with the service.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
10 years ago when I bought the Tivo, SageTV if it was even available yet was in its infancy. Regardless I believe I paid less than $300 dollars for the Tivo box so your $590 solution wouldn't have been much of a savings if any. Also, I've got to say that myTivo has far outlasted any PC I've ever owned. It took almost 10 years to fail, and I think the only problem is with the modem. But I've moved on to Roku rather than repair it.
anybody remember VCRs? Those were awesome in their own way. You buy one, and it belongs to you. You don't need anybody's permission to record*, you don't have to pay a subscription fee, and the total package costs less than a low-end PC. (Granted, you can have a cheap Tivo with a subscription fee, or an expensive one without).
So why is homebrewed mythTV the only open Tivo alternative available now?
* MPAA, I can't hear you...NA NA NA!
You must have been paying month to month? My lifetime ReplayTV is still going strong, and is still being supposed by schedule data from ReplayTV. Though I think you can work around it these days (Schedules Direct via WiRNS).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I can't even lecture you on the time-value of money, because you would have had to earn over 40% or so on that $300 in order to be better off investing it.
Of course, that makes you wonder what sort of beverage the TiVo financial guys were ingesting when they came up with the "lifetime" plan...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Exactly, as a UK resident I have only ever heard of Tivo on places like slashdot, I don't recall ever seeing it advertised for sale here.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Has ReplayTV stopped supplying guide data? I disconnected my ReplayTV last April when I cancellede my Satellite service. At that time they were still supplying the EPG.
It seems to be very hard to do that. Tivo has been very good at keeping the hackers off when it comes to guide data. Tivo and their communities seem to think it is theft of service to use non-tivo guide data.
..I recently upgraded to Sky HD+, but other than that my Tivo was still perfectly usable (and very, very useful) after about 10 years of usage. Very, very rarely crashed - less than once per year and a much better UI than my new Sky box.
TBH, it's one of the most reliable pieces of hardware I've ever owned. I wish my PC, Phone, etc could be as reliable.
Or you could pay a premium price for a premium product that Just Fucking Works.
I tried building a DVR back in the early days. What a mess. The software sucked in ways that were so bad that it felt like the suckage must have been intentional because they couldn't have made it that bad by accident. After about a week of dicking around trying to make it somewhat functional, I gave up and bought a Tivo. No dicking around. No crappy, unreliable software. It just worked. It did everything that was promised and it did those things well. PC-based products are starting to catch up but it's taken nearly a decade and the new Tivos can be had for as little as $100. And how are you going to deal with cablecards and SDV with your Sage system? Good luck with that. Sure, you pay $13-20/month for the Tivo service but most cable companies charge $15/month for DVRs that are terrible.
Some folks would rather pay a bit more to get a product and service that isn't aggravating.
The existing TiVo userbase is a (small) competitor to the new Virgin TiVo box
"Small" is putting it mildly. There were *very* few Tivo units sold in the UK in the first place (35,000 over the 18 months it was sold here according to Wikipedia, it was a pretty big flop). And it was withdrawn from the market 9 years ago.
AFAIK, those boxes only worked directly with analogue transmissions (*) which have already been discontinued in many areas and are due for imminent discontinuation in the rest of the UK, and only ever gave 5 channels in the vast majority of cases.
And I suspect that a large proportion of them will have broken down by now (hard drive most likely), or not be in use. Of the remainder, anyone interested in what Virgin could offer probably would have moved on by now. In short, the number of potential customers Virgin/Tivo might get by pressurising the existing Tivo userbase is probably negligible. In fact, it's just as likely that Tivo doesn't want to have to support a technologically obsolete service for the sake of a very small number of remaining users.
(*) I don't know if and how it worked with satellite services like (e.g.) Sky, IIRC there was some slightly convoluted way of recording Sky by connecting the Tivo to the Sky digibox's analogue output. And the current UK terrestrial standard, DVB-T, wasn't even used for freely-available transmissions at the time Tivo was being sold, only for the flop "ITV Digital" pay service that went bankrupt, so I doubt it supported that- and hence current "Freeview" DVB-T transmissions- directly.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Less by the end of the movie.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
My Panasonic RTV2000 gets updates on a regular basis. The listings could be more accurate (it usually cuts the last 30 seconds or so of each program) but they're still going strong. AFAIK DirecTV owns what's left of RTV now.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
From what I remember with Dish Network, if you don't have a phone line hooked up, it will eventually send/receive updates/viewing habits through the satellite feed and they will charge you $5.00 to do so.
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
Only a fool ever paid for the lifetime service with Tivo, they could and had a history of screwing over people that paid for lifetime subscriptions.
I'm not aware of this storied history of their screwing lifetime subscription holders. The break-even point is usually a few years or so.
Seems like a good deal to me.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Any argument would probably depend on what a normal person thought "lifetime" means in this context, and how you paid for the service (do you buy the box, or buy the subscription, or both?).
IANAL.
Why? "Lifetime" is defined in the contract as the life of the TiVO hardware. Who gives a shit what a reasonable person thought "lifetime" meant?
I haven't read their US contract, and certainly not their UK contract, but it probably gives them some type of way out. Maybe they owe remaining users a some money.
Maybe not. Anyhow, that's what "lifetime" means in this context.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Well, these were customers a decade ago. Not any more. Most of them paid for the lifetime subscription. Tivo isn't making any money from them.
do you buy the box, or buy the subscription, or both?
Both. The box was available with or without the subscription and a lifetime subscription available afterwards.
Punitive damages are really a bit of a nasty patch. Sure, it makes sense that fundamentally anti-social behaviour should be punished, but if we're going to punish rather than balance, then shouldn't the standard be beyond reasonable doubt? And why should the victim get more than restoration (assuming that includes covering the cost and inconvenience of having to file a lawsuit)?
What kind of math is that?
I calculate that $300 invested over 10 years at 15% is $1,213.67, which is close to the $1,200 that the grandparent poster said he would have had to pay. Where do you get your 40%?
That is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard.
They are still customers, They paid for LIFETIME memberships. To say that just because they are not currently send TIVO money makes them NOT customers, is like saying When you go to Mcdonalds and order food and pay for it your a customer, But if you pull away from the drive thru your not.
They paid for LIFETIME service, they are customers who should be getting what they paid for , for the duration that was decided by both parties at the time of the sale.
Where do you get your 40%?
Because you have to pull 10/mo out of the 300 principle :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
In that case, why would they like having customers? The customers are just a cost these days.
The only alternative is to never shut the service down, ever, until the end of time, which is patently ridiculous.
Of course it's ridiculous- even if they were to meet their promises to every Tivo owner, the boxes won't last forever. And anyway, past a certain point, they could probably afford to refund the very few remaining owners their subscription fees (and possibly the cost of the box) in full. I doubt any court- or indeed reasonable person- would consider Tivo obliged to do any more than that, at most.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
When a customer is sold on a product with term such as lifetime I'm sure Tivo know exactly how the customer will perceive that yet their happy to craft their terms of use in the fine print to give them an out.
The Tivo is primarily a consumer item, and the UK consumer laws are reasonably strong. IANAL, but from what I vaguely(!!) recollect, if that were true and (e.g.) they relied on that definition being obscurely and unintelligibly hidden away while they prominently sold the service on being "LIFETIME!" (knowing full well how most consumers would interpret that) the court may rule based on what an average person's reasonable interpretation of the deal presented was- i.e. lifetime of the box- taking this into account.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
And I just use my VCR. Tapes are quite cheap and I can use a tape more than once if I do not want to keep what I have recorded. I also do not have to pay any monthly subscription fee.
..you're going to get shat on. I regret all occasions on which people are ripped off by media companies, but imo they stepped over the line by voluntarily having anything to do with pay TV in the first place.