The Trouble With TiVo 369
BobCratchit writes "Multichannel News has an interesting take on TiVo: The DVR company has incredible mindshare but is totally dependent on cable providers to survive. Cable does not have many good reasons to let TiVo thrive. As a result, TiVo is destined to fade away unless it can carve out a niche as the cool kids' DVR (a la Macintosh) with products like the $299 HD DVR it just announced. From the article: 'TiVo has long been a darling of consumer-tech reviewers -- check out, for example, these happy hosannas from BusinessWeek, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. These guys are constantly befuddled that TiVo hasn't been more successful. Yes, TiVos make cute little popping noises when you click the remote. And they definitely provide cool features, like suggesting shows you might be interested in. But the cognoscenti enamored with TiVo's whizziness ignore a certain reality. It's easier to get a DVR from your cable company. And most people prefer to rent, not own, a set-top.'"
Re:DVR (Score:5, Informative)
Re:TiVo Over Cable (Score:4, Informative)
Except for the few-times-a-year offer where you can get a Series 3, and transfer the lifetime sub to it. Everyone knew about the one that ended Jan 1, 2007, but since then, I have seen at least 2 more (one that ended last week, too!).
Basically, if you have a Series 2 with lifetime, they will for $200 let you transfer it to a Series 3. Bonus - the old Series 2 gets 3 years of prepaid service (nominally $300). So your old TiVo still gets service, and lifetime is moved to your shiny new Series 3.
The reason that Tivo is better than they think. (Score:3, Informative)
Program data? Tive has a warehouse full of monkeys that contact the networks directly and enter in all the data, or they contract with someone who does, or they have an agreement with the networks to pass xml files back and forth. This is not an issue.
Cable company DVR boxes? These things are pieces of shit. They consistently disable and fail to provide features that people want, and who's to say that cable companies won't just delete your programs remotely if they feel like it, by which I mean, if Fox nicely asks them to delete your episodes of 24 right before the DVD comes out or something.
Sure, Tivo is about to license their software interface to Comcast for their DVR boxes, but it's going to take a serious about face on the part of cable companies if their DVRs are ever going to be what people actually want and not some weirdo solution that tries to please content providers, cable company stiffs, and lastly consumers, and fails to please any of them.
Re:DVR (Score:5, Informative)
Re:DVR (Score:3, Informative)
That's what Hauppauge [hauppauge.com] cards are for: Hardware MPEG-2.
DirecTV and Tivo (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Shouda stayed with DirecTV (Score:3, Informative)
Everything I have read said that once News Corp / Murdoch came into the picture, they were either going to lowball Tivo's cut of the subscription fees or move to the DVR product that News Corp owned (thus keeping all the $$ for themselves). Considering the fact that Tivo never made a profit during that time, and have only briefly been in the black, I tend to think it was more of an attempt to keep his business running than greed.
Another plausible theory expressed at the time was that News Corp tried to take a larger stake in Tivo (they already owned 10%) and were denied, because Tivo feared it would eliminate their possibility of working with cable companies.
Now that News Corp is selling off (has sold?) their stake in DirecTV, there are rumors of renewing the Tivo relationship:
http://www.tvpredictions.com/tivo060507.htm [tvpredictions.com] That clearly points to it being a News Corp issue.
Re:Makes sense to me (Score:3, Informative)
If I rent my DVR from the cable company, I know I can just swap out for a new unit when new tech comes out. (Though admittedly, it's far less often when dealing with cable company tech. Not that Tivo is on the cutting edge either mind you.)
Personally I switched from TiVo to nothing and finally to my Time Warner DVR. TiVo is nice and all but recommended shows was the first feature I turned off. And my current DVR does exactly what I need it to, record the 5 or 6 TV shows I like and that's it. And it does it in HD, a long time before TiVo started saying, "Give me $800 and $17/month and I can do the same thing but easier."
Re:TiVo Over Cable (Score:3, Informative)
If you have more than one box, they knock $6 off the monthly fee for the additional boxes bringing it down to $6.95 per month. It's not $3, but still not bad. When you consider the rental charge on the cable company's box, the difference for a Tivo is really just the up front $300. That's not so bad, in my view, considering you end up with a much better experience.
TiVo's future: a content provider of their own? (Score:3, Informative)
I think that what TiVo needs is greater TV/Net integration. So far, TiVo partners with Unbox to deliver movies over the Net, and you can use Home Network Applications to do things like browse Flickr, listen to podcasts, et cetera. This is neat (except that HNA is awfully slow on S2 units), but it is mostly a nifty but unessential toy. Nobody says, "Hey, I've gotten have a TiVo so I can run the Hot or Not Browser HNA application!"
Like many other TiVo owners, I find that I rarely, if ever, watch live television. What TiVo ought to be doing is direct competition with On-Demand offerings, by partnering directly with NBC, ABC, Fox, et cetera. These networks already offer their shows to be streamed over the Internet -- why not allow a TiVo to download shows directly? Then the ability to integrate other Web features seamlessly becomes really cool.
For example, right now you can already set up Wishlists by actor or director. But with Internet On-Demand, they could take it a step further: say you're watching an episode of Law and Order, and there's this guest star that you know you've seen before, but just can't place, and it's driving you nuts. You pause the show, bring up the show information which lists the cast, move the cursor to that actor's name, click, and you get something like an IMDB biography including other things the actor has done. And if those other things are available as downloads, you can choose to get them and watch them. Or perhaps you're watching an old rerun of Leave It To Beaver on TVLand? They could serve up interesting trivia about the show (maybe via "Pop-Up Trivia" that can be enabled or disabled at will by the viewer), or link to a documentary about it.
Networks worried about DVR customers skipping commercials? Change the way advertising is done, perhaps by providing a list of products seen on the show with links to further information about them. (Anything but making ads unskippable, which would basically be a poison pill for consumer acceptance.)
Now, make standard TV downloads free of charge (the way On-Demand usually is) and recoup the costs through a higher subscription cost. Make subscription costs per household, not per unit, and make show transfers between units trivial or transparent. They can still charge for On-Demand PPV offerings, which would probably be used more often since people could say "Hey, I liked Christopher Walken in this movie -- hey, the TiVo says he's in this other one, so I think I'll purchase that movie too!"
There are plenty of other things they could do too. They need to take a page from Apple's book: the goal is not just to provide neat services, but to make those services as easy to understand and use as possible. They could set up "TiVo Addresses" for subscribers that let them pass home videos and photos between each other as simply as possible (i.e. "Grandma-friendly interface"). Since customers won't be watching live television anymore, they could partner with the National Weather Service (or The Weather Channel, or Intellicast, or whomever) to provide on-screen weather alerts, or even CNN/MSNBC/etc. for big news alerts if people so chose. (Consider: a "Press Thumbs Up for more" that took you to a radar screen, or a short video clip about a news event, and then let you seamlessly return to what you were watching when you're done.)
This is what I'd love to see TiVo evolve into. This sort of thing could turn TiVo into a cable, satellite, or hell, IPTV killer, by making them the sole delivery mech
Re:Renting == Future Model (Score:3, Informative)
Re:TiVo Lite versus DIY (Score:1, Informative)
Re:DVR (Score:5, Informative)
Have you looked at any of TiVo's features in the last, oh, 7 years? TiVo can do a large subset of what you can do with a MythTV box, "Media Center-ish" PC (whatever that means), and has a service to download stuff. With a TiVo, you can use it as a DVR, transfer recordings to your PC, play your own music, play music on the internet, play purchased movies that are downloaded to your TiVo, check traffic, check weather, check movie listings, buy movie tickets, and that's just using their out-of-the-box supported features. They have an open API for application development that makes the possibilities nearly endless.
And as a bonus, since it's "done right", people like me can watch TV without worrying about my guide data provider vanishing, or my wife calling me because the damn front-end needs restarting.
Based on every cable company's DVR I've seen, they better be looking elsewhere for lunch.
Re:DVR (Score:4, Informative)
Plus, they aren't really 'gone' like the other poster said.
Re:TiVo Lite versus DIY (Score:3, Informative)
Even if there was a hack, there is no open source solution for TV listings anymore. zap2it is discontinuing their free service, so XMLTV doesn't have a read source of listings any longer.
People need to start figuring out how to grab the listings off of the satellite or cable companies' streams, like their own DVRs do. CableCard standardization is supposed to prevent this vendor lock-in, and should make this simple. Then Tivo could sell their boxes with no subscription, or rent them out for $10/mo like the low-end rip offs.
Re:DVR (Score:3, Informative)
First, Zap2it.com regularly changed their format and broke XMLTV a number of times. Just my luck, they did that right as I was trying to set-up MythTV my first time... D'oh.
Second, you haven't been to XMLTV's website lately. They have plans to start their own listings website. http://schedulesdirect.org/ [schedulesdirect.org] Two of the MythTV developers are involved.
Re:DVR (Score:5, Informative)
With the right (TiVo-provided) software, you can tell your TiVo where on the local network it may find your MP3s and photographs, which you may then play or browse at you leisure. (That feature is at least three years old.) Dunno about video on your local network. However, I can check that out this evening.
In the mean time, if the cable companies "eat TiVo's lunch", we won't get a better TiVo. TiVo will be gone, and we'll be stuck with mediocre, cable company DVRs and over-priced HTPCs. And AppleTV, which isn't the same thing at all. Well, and ReplayTV, but I can't recall the last time I actually saw one of those in a store.
You can crack open your TiVo and upgrade its hard drive right now. Takes some know-how, but not that much more than doing the same thing to a PC, from what I recall. There have been versions which included built-in DVD burners (they were $$$, so didn't sell so great, IIRC, ca 2004, when DVD recorders were $$$). And it's easy to use. It may not be a general computer, but there's really no good excuse for making it one, either.
Re:DVR (Score:2, Informative)
Re:DVR (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cox DVR + eSATA = OK (Score:3, Informative)
See this [phil-schwartz.com], or this [davehitt.com], or this [lincolnsblog.com], or this [tivocommunity.com], or this [deepjiveinterests.com] for some reviews of the steaming pile that SA calls a DVR. And in two months, let me know how that 8300HD is working for you.
Re:DVR (Score:1, Informative)
What are you talking about? Cable companies are LEGALLY REQUIRED by the FCC to give you CableCards to use with your Tivo. (Plus, you only need CableCards if you want to use encrypted channels... or you can use a pre-series 3 Tivo to hokily control a cable box via an IR blaster or sometimes serial control.)
Re:TiVo Lite versus DIY (Score:3, Informative)