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."
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.
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 -
But stop fucking using the term brick unless the device is incapable of powering on.
There are plenty of ways of bricking something and not being able to even power something on is only one of those. Like for example a gaming console: if you hit the power button and it goes on, but nothing else happens, then it clearly is bricked.
Basically bricked means the device no longer useable for the purposes it was actually originally made for and getting it to functional state requires tools not even a regular geek has at his or her disposal. It is not bricked if returning it to functional state is sufficiently doable, or if it doesn't do what you want it to do but still serves the purposes it was sold under.
When they'll remain loyal and pay more than enough to compensate for the ones that leave.
Who ordered that?
See Oztivo where they've hacked the series 1 frimware to get it's updates over the Internet from a community run guide service. I'm in NZ and using the New Zealand variant on an English Series 1 TiVo (the kind we're discussing here) to good effect. TiVo have resisted people doing this in countries where they're selling the guide service - perhaps now is the time for the community to have a go?
I would say that your definiton of "bricked" is close. My definition of "bricked" is "the unit in question has the functionality of a brick." It may turn on, but it does nothing useful. If you can recover it without opening the case, you should not use the term "bricked". If someone else can recover it, you may use the term "bricked", but they should not.
In the case of this story on this board, the term "bricked" is completely inappropiate. It seems that you will still be able to manually program these to record programs, you just will no longer receive scheduling data which will allow the unit to automatically record shows for you. Not only that, but I would think that a good portion of slashdot readers would be able to hack one of these to obtain programming data from an alternate source (I'm not familiar enough with Tivos to know how difficult that might be, it may be more difficult than I imagine).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison