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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.
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- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
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
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.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.