Can TiVo be Saved?

ChipGuy writes "TiVo's death watch has begun. The company is having a tough time finding traction in the marketplace, as more and more competitors rush into the market, most of them deep pocketed satellite and cable companies. But is all lost? What if the company went private and became the anti-cable, letting us download, store, organize, and serve media from both cable and -- this is the important part -- the internet. Others believe that TiVo should get into the content aggregation business."

ChipGuy

[kngthdn]

Whoever this ChipGuy fellow is, he sure hates Tivo! Not only is this story a dupe, but ChipGuy submitted both of them. I wonder how many were rejected. ; )

Here's the original [slashdot.org].

Cue the haters

[jargoone]

Pick your poison:

1. "My cable company's DVR works just fine, why should I pay extra for a TiVO?"
2. "I don't watch TV, why do I want a TiVo?"
3. "My MythTV box only took me 3 weeks to get working, and I will probably only have to mess with the guide data stream a few times a year, and the hardware only cost twice as much as a TiVo."

We've heard them all before...

Re:About TiVo

[Anonymous Coward]

...have a DVR that can record duel channels

You can record duel channels? Can you send me the Aaron Burr clip? Thanks.

This just in: Tivo passes 3 million subscribers

[EulerX07]

Kinda funny that I finish reading an article on news.com about them exceeding 3 million subscribers [com.com], to find out on slashdot that it's dying.

Is it dying faster or slower then Apple and BSD?

Disclaimer: Not a Tivo subscriber. I'd like to, but you can't get some of that in Canada.

TV Needs To Die

[kiwidefunkt]

After all, TV cancelled Firefly and Family Guy. Wait, just Fox. Just Fox needs to die.

Re:Cue the haters

[Entropy_ajb]

You forgot:
4. Messed with MythTV for a month trying to get it to actually work and be usefull, and then ditched it for Windows MCE.

Re:About TiVo

[FireFury03]

Here in the UK the opposite is completely true - I used to have cable from NTL [ntl.com] but I gave up in the end because they were so bad:

1. In August 2000 I phoned NTL to arrange an installation of telephone and cable TV. The wiring was already in from the previous owner of my flat but I was told that they couldn't do the installation for 6 weeks (first sign I should have given up right there). I also checked on the availability of a cable modem and was told that the current service was analogue but they were upgrading the whole network in my area to digital in November 2000 so it'd be available then. They also refused to do the installation on a weekend so I had to take half a day off work (I didn't really see this as a huge problem at the time).

2. On the arranged installation date the engineer showed up, plugged the analogue cable decoder into the existing wire (that worked ok), tested the phone line and told me he was just going down the the multiplexer to reconnect it. He never returned (second sign I shoudl have given up). I phoned up their support line, waiting in the queue for 90 minutes before being told that my phone line hadn't been connected because they needed to upgrade the multiplexer first (they had already had 6 weeks notice that they were installing the line!). They said it would be 3 months until they did the upgrade! (third sign)

3. Eventually the phone line was connected (they tried to make me take anouther day off work for that but I managed to convince them that they *would* do a weekend install), but the network upgrade to digital never happened and I eventually decided to save money by switching my Demon dialup internet connection to an NTL one since they did unmetered dialup. I was told that this wasn't available in my area.

4. Whenever you needed to phone them you would end up having to wait in the phone queue for 60 - 90 minutes and 75% of the time they would then just hang up the call (I have since been told by people who work in NTL call centres that the line-managers do that when the calls aren't being answered quickly enough, since if they don't meet their quota of answered calls they lose their bonus pay - picking up and immediately dropping a call counds as an answered call).

5. The cable TV connection would break for several hours at a time not infrequently.

6. The analogue cable TV connection broadcast everything in 4:3 ratio - if it was a 16:9 channel they chopped the sides off the picture. I have a 16:9 TV so I'm left with a choice: chop the top and bottom off to make it 16:9 again (you lose way too much of the picture), squash the picture to make it 16:9 (ugh, distortion) or live with it in 4:3 ratio and big black bars down the side of the screen.

6. Eventually in 2002 (well over a year after the promised digital upgrade) I gave up, dropped the NTL phone line and TV and switched to Sky Digital [sky.com] satellite TV, a BT [bt.com] phone line and a PlusNet [plus.net] DSL internet connection. BT connected the phone line within 12 hours.

7. Sky only very rarely goes out (usually due to bad weather - happens maybe once a year for a few minutes)

8. If I need to phone Sky, BT or PlusNet they pick up the phone almost immediately

9. PlusNet's service is almost flawless (I know many people who use NTL cable modems and they are always having outages). I also get a subnet of real IP addresses and am allowed to run services on my DSL connection with PlusNet's blessing (NTL won't give you a static IP and their AUP explicitly disallows you from running services on it). The DSL connection almost never goes down.

10. In 2004 (i.e. almost 4 years after the promised digital upgrade), NTL came canvassing the area to say they now had digital services. They asked me what kind of internet connection I had and I replied "DSL