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TiVo Says It Will Discontinue Support For Dial-up Service Later This Month (betanews.com)
BrianFagioli writes: Surprisingly, TiVo still offered dial-up access to some of its users, allowing them to download program guide information. Sadly, this week, the company started alerting those users that it will be discontinuing dial-up connectivity later this month -- the end of an era. TiVo sent the following email message Tuesday evening. "TiVo will be discontinuing our dial-up service on September 30, 2018. According to our records you may still have one or more TiVo devices connecting to the TiVo Service via dial-up. Your TiVo box will still be able to receive program guide data from the TiVo service via dial-up modem until September 30, 2018. Following September 30, 2018, your current subscription plan will remain active even if you are not using the TiVo Service. If you would like to continue using the TiVo Service, we have outlined several options for you below." Comically, the company suggests two alternatives -- use Ethernet or buy a Wi-Fi adapter. Look, while those are technically accurate options, if someone is still using dial-up connectivity with their TiVo in 2018, they probably don't have broadband access.
To bring back the BBS's... I think I am going to start providing Dial Up access to my own web site.
I used to have a router with a dialup "backup" line for if the main line goes down. Windows even supports creating a "hotspot" to share an existing connection which would presumably include sharing a modem. Granted, you would need a dialup account but the one nice thing about dialup is that the ISP could literally be on the other side of the world and it should still work.
Tivo is probably assuming that even the people using the dialup option, most of them have some sort of internet whether it be satellite, cellular, or something else.
I honestly had assumed that TiVo had dropped dead years ago.
Holy hell, getting program guides from TiVo over dialup .. and TiVo is too stupid to realise that nobody is doing that by choice. I can see they don't want to maintain dialup stuff, but I bet they're going to lose customers who don't have the choice.
Oh well, they'll just lose more customers and continue fading into obscurity like I thought they already had.
...Comically, the company suggests two alternatives -- use Ethernet or buy a Wi-Fi adapter. Look, while those are technically accurate options, if someone is still using dial-up connectivity with their TiVo in 2018, they probably don't have broadband access. ...
The summary writer, in an effort to try to make himself look knowledgeable, overlooks an important aspect --- the TiVo customer may still be using dial-up instead of the Internet access available in the house because of one simple reason --- dial-up works and has worked. It just worked, so why fix it by switching it over to the Internet?
You can't dial into Tivo if you don't have a phone line. AT&T is already discontinuing landlines in almost 1/2 of the US:
https://www.moneytalksnews.com...
Or... their TiVo is so old it doesn't have built-in ethernet or wifi. The big "problem" with TiVo in the beginning was that it required a phone line near your TV! I remember hacking my Series 1 TiVo with an PCI ethernet card; not everyone was capable of doing that. I'm not even sure they had USB back then. If people simply replaced an old Series 1 TiVo with one that supported digital TV, they may very well have simply moved over the phone line! My Series 3 HD supported MOCA and ethernet, but required an external dongle for WiFi... My Bolt has WiFi, MOCA and Ethernet built in, but MOCA is mostly useless with antenna, and I don't have Ethernet near my TV.
So, it's not out of the realm of possibility that people were still using modems.
Thanks to the way any house over ten years old is wired, many rooms have telephone lines built in.And many Tivo's didn't ship with built in wi-fi, but sold separate, Tivo-branded dongles(read: markup). Given the small amount of data Tivos require, and the infrequency with which they did, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people weren't still using the telephone option, even when they have broadband.
if someone is still using dial-up connectivity with their TiVo in 2018, they probably don't have broadband access.
Honestly, I'm really getting tired of people who choose to live in the boondocks and then don't want to accept the reality of those decisions. It's probably not worth the cost to support the 100 or fewer people who still use dial up and have a TiVo. At some point the economics just don't make sense any more for TiVo to continue to support this old technology.
Legacy technologies don't disappear overnight, they stay on for years as people hang on, often until the user or the hardware literally dies. Thanks to the opponents of net neutrality, dial up is here to stay. People will just hook their Tivos into a router that connects via dial up. In 30 years time when the 60 year-olds using dialup are in their 90s, we will still be surprised why there is dial up users, and we still won't have net neutrality either.
It's not the most common case, but if you still use antenna / analog cable, you probably can't or won't get broadband in that place. Just like Netflix still has a DVD rental service that serves its customer fine. Tech giants are only interested in growth markets, but there is still a lot of money to be made for long time in non-growth markets. Maybe not for S&P 500 company, but enough to put food on someone's table.
I am confused. I thought dial-up TiVos still downloaded their programming information over the internet? That you had to enter your ISP account information into the TiVo, which would then connect to your ISP, and from there download the programming information from TiVo over the internet?
I think I still have my old ethernet card I bought for my series 1. That Turbonet card was awesome.
This isn't dial-up Internet service. Why is everyone complaining that users should use broadband instead of dial-up?
Tivo came along before broadband was popular so the method of getting program data was to dial-up directly to Tivo to download that data. This was the only method on the first Tivos (series 1) which stopped being supported in 2016 when they changed the guide data. Your Tivo would dial a Tivo number in the middle of the night and download program data.
This announcement is mostly applicable to series 2 Tivos which could fetch program data over the Internet or by dial-up directly to Tivo. I'm sure they have so few of these things connecting that it will not affect many people. These Tivos are old. They can't even do 1080p and had analog tuners. The owners of these have been told you can still get program data you just have to do it over the Internet now.
I was notified even though my series2 has not fetched data for 10 years. It has a lifetime subscription so Tivo notified me just in case. Tivo is one company that actually supports really old hardware. They are not any Computer company that that tell your your computer is not supported after 3 years or a handset manufacturer who tells you that you can't get updates to android after two years.
They dropped their tivo quite a few years ago, but when they still had it, it was connected to their phone line because that just worked. The tivo didn't have wifi so they'd have had to spend more money to hook it to the network and there was nothing to be gained from doing that.
Even if you are relegated to dial-up internet (a VERY rare situation today, even in extremely rural areas)
First, because of zoning laws in most cities, the food you eat was probably grown in one of these "extremely rural areas". Some have gone so far as to threaten city dwellers who grow a vegetable garden with months in jail. Consider Oak Park, Michigan, which dropped misdemeanor charges against Julie Bass only after the city's threat against her victory garden made national news. Second, some on fixed incomes may choose dial-up over broadband because the latter is so much more expensive per year, particularly when "broadband" means satellite or fixed cellular Internet.
you can still have wifi and/or ethernet for the LAN.
What's a good brand of dial-up modem that supports Ethernet for use with a wired or Wi-Fi router?
will tivo push for QAM 4k or push for cable card like laws for cable iptv? Or just rollover and make cable iptv be cable co rent only with outlet fees per tv?
Will have to call Lightning Fast VCR repair to help with this.
there are some analog only cable systems still out there
dish and directv have dumped the phone line from the newer boxes.
Remember having an old TiVo with only dialup interface. There were hacks to add Ethernet. There were hacks for a lot of things. This was the nice thing about TiVo.
Thing about TiVo model is the subscriptions. Many people didn't get lifetime deal and pay a monthly fee so there is always financial incentive to take seriously keeping old systems going as long as possible. They even retroactively added H264 to the now ancient HD series when Comcast switched.
My opinion of TiVo soured after waking up one day and noticing all video podcasts I had configured to record to my play list were gone. Not only unilaterally pulled the plug on video podcast feature they left a ransom note telling me to buy a new TiVo if I wanted my podcasts back. All they were doing is providing a shell with URLs to other peoples servers.
Eventually moved on to TVH which is more useful than TiVo and best of all TVH doesn't record everything you do and upload it to other peoples servers.
I'm surprised they were still provide dialup service.
I used to have an original Series 1 TiVO with a lifetime subscription. It didn't offer an Ethernet connection so I used dialup. It worked OK for several years, but then it started to get slow, wasn't reliable, and they started changing the local dialup number every month or so. It became tedious to keep up with. I found some online resources that showed how to configure the TiVO for SLIP using its serial port and connected it to a serial interface on my Linux firewall. The SLIP connection was faster and more reliable than dialup ever was. I continued to use that TiVO until my cable provider stopped delivering analog television.
The WiFi adapter is actually not a bad way to go, even without broadband. I gave my Grandmother my old Tivo a few years ago. She has no, nor wants any, internet service, so she used the dial up service. However, a lightning strike took out the modem on the Tivo. So, an old Tivo WiFi adapter was hooked up, and when my mother is over each week to take her shopping, she turns on the hot spot on her phone and has the Tivo update its data. Takes a few minutes and works like a charm.
if someone is still using dial-up connectivity with their TiVo in 2018, they probably don't have broadband access
What do "ethernet" or "wi-fi" have to do with broadband? I wired my house for ethernet when I was still using dial-up.
I just got a 56k modem!