Has TiVo's Fate Been Sealed? 364
ChipGuy writes "Things are getting bleak for TiVo, reports the New York Times, and adds that TiVo blew a major opportunity to team up with Comcast. And that might have cost CEO Michael Ramsey the job. Om Malik writes that 'The fate of TiVo also highlights the dilemma facing a lot of "exploding TV" start-ups. The technology does not necessarily translate into profits and a business,' and breaks down the financials -- over half a billion dollars in losses so far. PVRBlog adds that 'When the story of TiVo is written, this Comcast negotiation could be the point when the company's outcome was decided.' More reactions here."
Re:So how much is a MythTV? (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, a MythTV box could in theory do so much more: reencode stuff you want to keep in divx in the background, playback any sort of content you want, play games, stream both live tv and content to other clients, put as many tuners in it as there are PCI slots.
I wouldn't compare MythTV to TiVo, I'd be inclined to compare it to Windows MCE. Of course, like all things linux, it's all flexible.
I've been playing with Myth quite a bit, looking to replace my TiVo. I just cant get used to paying 14 bucks a month for the same TV listings I can get for free. That's all their service provides. The fact TiVo won't work without it, is completely artificial.
Re:So it goes... (Score:2, Informative)
Apparently, everyone in New Jersey and Oregon [yahoo.com].
Re:Netcraft confirms (Score:1, Informative)
You're right, you just don't get the joke yet. ( It's certainly not informative. )
If you browse at -1, you'll see this is a clever rehash of some troll's constant attempts to claim '*BSD is dying.' ( Not that I recommend browsing at -1, there are some really offensive posts down there. If you're faint of heart, just trust me -- most of them deserve deletion rather than simple mod-1. )
The real mystery to me is why the trolls bother continuing to post this crap. Have they no jobs, no lives, no girlfriends, nothing to do but lurk on websites that don't want them but have no effective way to rid themselves of them? Personally, I can't imagine a more pathetic existance, but I suppose if you're allergic to humanity you gotta find something to do...
Re:Ce La Vie (in bad accent) (Score:5, Informative)
Right on schedule? (Score:3, Informative)
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=tivo [slashdot.org]
Re:Ce La Vie (in bad accent) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And more on the way... (Score:3, Informative)
Early TiVos were notorious for being shipped with flaky modems. But what really screws people over is the fact that the software upgrade process isn't failsafe. That is, software upgrades often fail, leaving the system nonfunctional, or nearly so, with no way to back things out. Hackers can re-image the system on their own, but most customers don't have that kind of skill. And you don't even have to option of refusing an upgrade!
Re:Tivo couldn't keep up (Score:1, Informative)
Use the select-play-select-3-0-select "hack" to enable 30 second skip, and there ya go.
Re:So how much is a MythTV? (Score:5, Informative)
- $30 case
- $70 motherboard (Shuttle MN31N)
- $80 cpu (AMD Athlon XP 2500+)
- $90 512 meg ram
- $50 40 gig harddrive
- $120 250 gig harddrive
- $180 Hauppauge PVR-350
- $80 DVD burner (not necessary, but nice to have)
- Many, many hours getting the right combination of drivers, etc compiled
Now, before anybody jumps all over me and says I could have saved $x here or there, I should point out that I originally built the computer to be a linux workstation, and then decided to try my hand at building a DVR. Originally, I spent $335, including shipping, to put together a decent box to run SuSE 9.1. I went for the Shuttle mobo so I wouldn't have to buy a seperate graphics card or sound card. This board has a twin VGA nVidia GeForce4 MX with shared memory, Realtek ALC650 audio, and onboard 1394 and USB 2.0. It is capable of digital audio out with the addition of a $30 header board. I went with the AMD processor because I wanted good performance, without spending too much. The board supports anything from a Duron 700 up to an Athlon XP3000+ (or possibly higher, I think that's all that was out when the documentation was printed).So, if you wanted to trim the price down further, you could find a motherboard with integrated graphics that has S-Video out, and then get the cheaper Hauppauge PVR-250 or another capture card. This will give up some quality, as the PVR-350's video out is allegedly much better than other graphics cards, but it's a trade-off for price. You could get by with a lot slower processor than mine. You can get buy with a lot less memory than I have. You could probably find a case for free or close to it.
Another possible route would be to start with a Shuttle bare bones system, and add a Hauppauge or other capture card into the one PCI slot. I hope to add more capture cards to my system, so I ended up ruling out this solution.
As far as the time I put into it, I consider that to be an education. Without a reason, I wouldn't normally get my hands so deep into the o/s internals. I learned a lot about kernel modules and how they work on this project.
If you decide to do this, I highly recommend it. But don't go into it thinking it's a way to get cheap TiVo. It's a way to have fun building a cool project that you will (hopefully) enjoy long after the building is done. I still take a lot of pride in my system, and really enjoy showing it off to guests. And it does a whole lot more than TiVo, I should add.
Re:Very True (Score:2, Informative)
still, mine is hooked through a little 802.11 USB thing and works fin.
Crap TIVO units must have drained them badly (Score:3, Informative)
My impression has been that the TIVO boxes are rather poorly constructed. I've had intermitten color problems (screen goes to black and white) with all three of my DirecTivo units, and one completely died in the year since I first jumped onto the TIVO bandwagon. I've heard alot about overheating problems and modem issues from other users as well. I imagine if they're selling the boxes at a loss of over $100 each. The service plans run $80 at Best Buy, which is a dumb buy relative to the price of the box. So almost every unit that breaks down means that they eat a fat loss when the customer buys a replacement unit. The dumbest part is that the warranty is only 90 days labor, 1 year parts. The labor is by far the most expensive portion ($90 minimum, plus shipping costs each way), so the customer is disinclined to even try to get the unit repaired after the first 3 months.
It's not the comcast deal that kills them, it's the money spent on replacing shoddy equipment.
Re:Half-a-Billion Smackers? (Score:5, Informative)
They're half a billion in debt, but are currently making a profit. Frankly, the link to the "half billion" figure is to some jackass "Business 2.0" staff writer's personal weblog. This "Om Malik" guy doesn't really impress me [gigaom.com]. He's a lower-tier writer with questionable opinions. Frankly, anyone who looks only at debt while ignoring profits is a dunce. The /. article lapping it up is the typical misunderstanding of the world of finance. Nobody seems to understand the difference between "defecit" and "debt".
Re:TiVo has two things going for it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What TiVo needs to do. (Score:2, Informative)
Basically they have a webserver running on the tivo box that allows you to down load shows. Once downloaded you can use freely available tools along with your media key (available in your account information) to put your show in the format you want.
Waiting for my software update to try it out.
Re:No one has mentioned the VOIP effect (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Maybe something like ... (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, Mac Mini does allow you to connect Firewire and USB hard disks, and even chain them ('Quiet, cute external hard-drives could be added and daisy-chained.'.), burn CD's and DVD's and comes with 802.11g and BlueTooth if desired and supports all the formats you could reasonably want thanks to Mplayer, the VLAN client and QuickTime.
And with reference to Sell a quiet, stylish set-top computer with TV and stereo out, remote control, and wireless. both a cheap TV out (S-Video) and Remote Control are suggested as options when you buy one via the US Online Apple Store. Oh and it has a 'bootable network card' too, FWIW.
Some of these are avalible on all models (like CD/VCD burning) and some are options (like 802.11g and DVD burning) but your asked to specify each option when your order online so it's not as if you can 'miss' them when ordering.
Another good option that meets the description for a thin client (with video, stereo and 100 Mb Ethernet, but not native wireless) is the Sun Ray platform (which I have two), which now supports Linux x86 as well as Solaris SPARC as server platform, but it's somewhat complex to configure and has heft price tag for for multiple clients (not for the hardware, which is very cheap, but for the software licences, though technically it runs fine with out the little bits of paper *cough*).
A slew of cheap thin client devices (DVD support, wireless access to multiple video formats from a PC over a network share) are actually in development now, performance is not all that great and they have a lot of issues though (like poor quality video playback over wireless as they play the entire MPEG 2/4 file from hard disk file share, rather than as truley streamed video).