TiVo Will Die

Espectr0 writes "Yahoo! News has a PC Magazine-reprinted story about why they think the TiVo will die because of rising competition. From the article: 'It's always hard to write an obituary, especially when the subject is still alive. It's especially hard for me, because I love the little guy like a brother. But, alas, TiVo will die. I was one of the first reviewers to get my hands on an early TiVo box. I compared TiVo with ReplayTV, and although I really wanted to like ReplayTV, TiVo won my heart over.'"

The DirecTiVo is the cheapest PVR out there...

[LostCluster]

The present "street price" of a "DirecTV DVR with TiVo Serivce" is only $99, with only a $4.95 per household DVR service fee that is waived for subscribers to DirecTV's highest programming plan and is not charged multiple times if there is more than one DirecTiVo in the same household. There is of course a one year committment required to avoid a $300 early cancelation fee, but that's standard for all new DirecTV units.

So, let's not compare apples to oranges. The standalone TiVo risks getting priced out of the market, and the HD TiVo is not yet ready for mass distribution, but the DirecTV model is flying off the shelves. The Moxi product isn't available to consumers outside of limited testing markets yet, and News Corp's yet to release a US-aimed PVR or even say they're going to do so so all that product has is speculation by pundits. When your biggest competitors are pure vaporware, I'd say your company is doing pretty good.

Re:Too expensive...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you take it to a TiVO repair center, they will transfer your lifetime subscription to a new TiVo.

more bad info from PC mag...

[microcars]

from the article:

"...And now the guys who make digital cable set-top boxes have gotten into the game. Motorola and Scientific Atlanta both make combo receiver/recorders for cable. And they're cheap, too: Viewers can't buy them but can typically rent a box for just $6 a month. That's half the cost of TiVo's monthly service charge after you've bought a TiVo unit for $300 or so."

He's got his numbers all screwed up.

I just got a DirecTv w/Tivo box and it cost $99 and the service is $4.95 per month.

TiVOToGO

[RGautier]

TiVO has a new product called TiVoToGo. It should be a Media Center killer, since it will give you the added flexibility you need without having to have yet another crashing Windows box in your house. Here's the press release: "from TiVO [tivo.com]. I think this new product will give users what they really want, which is more flexibility for managing their content, and having a 'library' capability that doesn't fall short at the size of the TiVO box. Rich

$299 for lifetime, not 400

[way2trivial]

and with some models, basic 3 day service is included

Re:Too expensive...

[bruce_the_moose]

Lifetime fee is $300 [tivo.com], not $400.

Excitedness Ensues...

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

I just saw a commercial late last night on my cable box from Adelphia (my cable provider) that stated that there is either available now, or coming soon, a PVR (TIVO-like device) for my digital cable.

Although I will hate giving my cable company another $10 a month to rent this thing, if I were a betting man I'd say it a lock.

*Can't wait to waste more of my life watching the TV shows I can't stay awake to see*

Adult Swim, Monty Python episodes, and all the Comedy Central shows I can handle!!! WOO!

Re:Too expensive...

[some2]

That is, I was including the Home media option [tivo.com], which is $100 more. It allows you to play MP3s, remote schedule recordings (record stuff from the office, if you find a show you want to see mid-day), and other cool stuff.

Re:more bad info from PC mag...

[ilsie]

Non-DirecTiVo units cost more and have a monthly service fee of $13.

Where patent law is good

[mveloso]

TiVo won't die because they have patents on the whole DVR idea.

This is one case where patents are good. TiVo, and DVRs in general, aren't really that obvious - VCRs and such aren't really prior art.

Now that everyone and their brothers are making DVRs, well, TiVo owns the IP behind all of it. They can go off and sue/license the technology to anyone, and they'll be hard to stop. Plus they learned from Apple's mistakes and filed the right kinds of patents.

There you go - patents aren't all bad.

Tivo's are alive and kick'n in the UK

[Andy Davies]

The Tivo service is still available and while you can't buy a new one, they sell on ebay for more than they cost new!!!

So dead I don't think so, but not as alive as I'd like them to be.

Re:Oh well.....

[iminplaya]

Hey, come on... A real geek fixes his own VCR. Replace the brakes and idler, clean the guides(carefully!), grease the gears, and maybe cheange the upper drum(at least, clean it). Good as new (1982 JVC). Fry a cap? Radio Shack can be your friend. You can do it with a computer tied behind your back.

Re:TiVo needs two tuners

[el_gordo101]

There is a workaround [tivo.com] to this problem. It won't let you record two shows, but you can watch one while you record another. Basically, you set up a second connection to the TV from your cable box or antenna that by-passes the TiVo unit altogether. It also won't work on channels that need to be de-scrambled by your cable box like HBO or Showtime, but at least you can watch one and record another.

Re:Sheesh!

[dameron]

pretty much the only web browser was something you would install on a UNIX shell, then use SLIP to access.

Very anachronistic for 1985. Nobody was installing web browsers on unix shells (whatever that's supposed to mean) in 1985. 14.4 modems??? Think blazing 2400 baud modems. Maybe you're thinking more like 1991 and the old SlipKnot proggy...

-dameron

Will TiVo Die?

[dougthonus]

First, PVRs aren't going to die, does anyone really care if they are getting their service from TiVo, ReplayTV, DirecTV, Dish, comcast, or whomever might decide to put the box together and package it with software? Assuming the software is good and the box works correctly it doesn't matter to me at all.

Second, as to whether or not the cable companies squeeze out TiVo, it will be interesting, but TiVo would survive easily on just the DirecTV customers. They probably wouldn't be as big, but the company wouldn't die. They also may end up cutting deals with cable companies in the future as well.

Third, HDTV ruining the game? This is purely ridiculous. If the DirecTV HD Tivo box costs $1000 than most of the price has to be in the components used to supply HDTV or temporary inflation because someone wants gigantic profit margins. The only thing different about the TiVo is that it will require a bigger HD, but you can get a 200 gig drive now for near $100, so there's no reason that the price should inflate that dramatically based on the TiVos requirements. If the cost of the HD equipment is that much more it will hinder HD not the TiVo, and the expense will be more for anyone switching to HD, since the TiVo cost of it only needs to be about $100 (at most) than a non TiVo HD player. Also, the idea that HDTV is going to rule 2004 seems pretty ridiculous to me. Sorry, I think I'm going to need more than about 5% of my channels to broadcast in HD before I could claim HD rules TV. While higher quality HD TV has it's benefits, and it will eventually take over, there are relatively few things that I care enough to spend big money on products to watch in HD. Most TV (news, sitcoms, tv dramas etc) plays out fine in non HDTV. If there's a high premium to buy an HD decoder box (for cable or DTV) I'm not going to buy one regardless of whether or not it has TiVo in it. I also think I'm the only one left who detests the widescreen format. (who here has a TV in their house that's bounded by horizontal space more so than vertical space? You get the extra height for free because you run out of width, so you might as well get the 4-3). Also, if I see one more idiot with a widescreen TV who stretches out the picture and tells me how good it looks I'm going to kill them. You just took a non HD broadcast, stretched the picture to make everyone look fat, and then brag about how great your TV is. Brilliant. (sorry for the rant)

Finally, I will agree that TiVo will be in big trouble if it can't keep it's deal with DirecTV. The points above are only worth mentioning if it has the deal with DTV in place. I do think that integrated PVRs are going to be the future. No one wants extra boxes, and there is no advantage to having your box and your PVR seperate, so getting into contracts with places to do digital is the way to go.

Re:Sheesh!

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK, the first web browser (Nexus / WorldWideWeb) didn't pop up until 1990, and Mosaic didn't debut until three years later.

As for modems, 2400 baud modems were brand new on retailers' shelves in 1985. 14.4? A pipedream.

Re:Sheesh!

[rk]

There was no web in 1985, period. A connection capable of more than 2400bps was almost the exclusive province of leased line holders. SLIP was an informal pseudo standard that nobody would even think to write up as an RFC for another 3 years.

I think you may mean 1995, which really at that time was the first big year of things internet. Netscape version 1 was already out. This new C++ like web applet language called Java had just come out. The world you describe is what the net was like more c. 1993 than 1995.

Said so many times before

[shmigget]

Enough with the crying "Wolf!" already. First, the difficulty of explaining a PVR was going to kill TiVo, then copyright zealots were going to kill TiVo (remember when Dvorack said using TiVo was "theft"?), then Microsoft's UltimateTV was going to kill TiVo, then Replay's ability to file swap was going to kill TiVo, then negative press was going to kill TiVo (such as when Advertising Age Magazine published an article claiming that more U.S. households had outhouses then had TiVos), then new competition from settop boxes was going to kill TiVo. When TiVo was a smaller company people said that its small size would kill it, and then when it grew larger they said that its larger size would kill it.

Since TiVo gets press everytime somebody thinks up a new reason for it to die, that must mean that a lot of people love it and care to read news and rumors relating to it, and based on that I'll make my prediction. I predict that TiVo will die when people stop wondering about when it will die.

Re:Sheesh!

[Gunzour]

It's a DirecTV set top box with Tivo service built-in. Sorry I didn't make that more clear in the last message.

If you consider "Tivo" to be a standalone box then I agree that Tivo will die. The future of Tivo is integration with cable/satellite boxes. The DirecTV boxes are great -- two tuners, no MPEG compression (well, DirecTV sends an already compressed MPEG stream from satellite, much better quality than end-user mpeg compression), no channel-change delay, and dolby digital sound on some (although admittedly not much) programming.

Re:Sheesh!

[DaveJay]

The DirecTiVo unit is a combination DirecTV receiver and TiVo unit. You can hack it up (I dropped in a second hard drive for 104 hours recording time total), the picture quality is as good as DirecTV's feed (because it just records the pre-compressed signal that DirecTV sends down) and best of all, if you run two coax lines from your dish you can record two shows at once -- all for $9.95 a month. Oh, and you can get the unit right now from Circuit City for $99.

And people wonder why I love my TiVo...

Re:Sheesh!

[inkydoo]

It didn't die anymore than I died because I was so different in 1985. It grew up, just like everyone else. Beyond that, you seem to have some misinformation there.

Let's see, the Web (http) wasn't invented until 1991. While SLIP existed in 1985, the RFC wasn't written until 1988, and even then, it was something available primarily on commercial unix equipment. I think perhaps you meant gopher sites instead of finger sites (or maybe you meant finger servers, cause I've never heard of "finger sites" nor does the phrase make any sense). Even gopher didn't exist until the early 90's (maybe UMN was using it before that, but I doubt anyone else was).

As another poster pointed out, I would place this description of the Internet in the 1991-1993 time period, not 1985. Perhaps Hobbes' Internet timeline would help clear things up.
http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/ [zakon.org]

Re:Sheesh!

[pilgrim23]

One thing on the Hobbes time-line: The focus here is on the development of Internet via ARPA. well and good and this is indeed the antecendents of today's networks but, one thing missed on such, and mainly because of the focus of the researcher: There was a parallel network structure of the time: Mainframe Nets. Going back to the days of the IBM OS/360 and continuing on through the 370 series machines, mainframes were networked all over the country. Banks, Insurance companys, and your government at work, loved to share data about all us good boys and girls even back then and to do so, networkign databases was used. Several dodges were used for this that predates the OSI/ISO model and any modern protocols. One common connection was a "Channel to Channel Switch" which was direct to the BUS connection between machines. Another was the "Remote Job Entry" or RJE station. The Hobbes timeline (to site one example of the oversite here) points to 1972 as the date for the very first computer "Chat". I know for a fact that long before this, chat sessions were taking place between computer operators on mainframes. Some of these were even conducted from punch cards. iirc the command in old OS/HASP for sending a line of text to another op (limited to 80 columns, or one card) was $DMR1,'THIS IS THE TEXT OF THE MESSAGE',LOG=N which would send the message to Remote station number 1 and supress log entrys of the remark. I remember a gal who ran the Engineering Dept RJE on line 3 at the University where I worked during the early 70s: $DRMR3,'HEY SALLY! HOW ABOUT LUNCH AT THE FRONTIER RESTRAUNT?',LOG=N. For anyone interested in the networks of that time, I would actually suggest reading a novel: THE ADOLESCENCE OF P1 by Thomas J. Ryan -Highly recomended.

Re:Sheesh!

[pll178]

Actually, DirecTiVo service is $4.99.

Re:Oh well.....

[iminplaya]

Damn trick questions :-) Working at the TV station made things pretty easy for me, with all the good connections to Sony and JVC, etc. If you know any techs at one, or a lot of the places that sell and rent professional equipment should be able to hook you up. I used to buy some stuff from a really great used electronics store that sold and stills sells parts for everything including 1975 Beta machines. But that doesn't help you any. Try this: ("used electronics" vcr -ebay)or("used electronics" "vcr parts" -ebay) on Google to see if that helps. I didn't check to see if it leads to any "brick and morter" places, but it should be a start.