The Sad History and (Possibly) Bright Future of TiVo 490
gjt writes "For the couch-potato geek, one name typically comes to mind: TiVo — the company that invented the DVR, and with it, timeshifting. TiVo has been around for more than 10 years now. And TiVo fans (like myself) tend to love TiVo. Yet, despite being well-loved and despite having been around longer than the Apple iPod, TiVo comes nowhere close to the iPod/iPhone's success. Apple sells more iPod and iPhone products in a single quarter than TiVo has sold in the entire lifetime of the company. At its peak, TiVo had only 4.4 million active users — that was over three years ago. Now TiVo the number is about 2.7 million. So I wanted to find out why TiVo hasn't been more successful — especially with a seeming lack of competition on store shelves. I did some research and posted my finding about TiVo's past, present, and future. The key takeaway seems to be that TiVo is a victim of cable industry collusion, loopholes in FCC regulations, and, of course, plenty of their own mistakes."
No Tivo for me (Score:3, Informative)
>> I wanted to find out why TiVo hasn't been more successful
I'm very happy with my Mythtv box. It does way more than a Tivo does, I can customise it, and it has no monthly fees. (Although I do subscribe to Schedules Direct for listings, but that's only $20 per year ).
Why are markets for (Score:3, Informative)
As long as cable box manufacturers are selling boxes to cable companies, instead of to consumers, I'm not sure how things will get better. I guess this is a difference between the "end-to-end" model of the Internet and other networks such as the cable network.
Everyone I have discussed CableCards with has basically come to the same conclusion: the cable companies wanted it to fail. I think this stems from their desire to keep control out of the hands of consumers; anything that breaks that principle must be marginalized as much as possible. You see the same deal with locked handsets from the mobile phone companies... they take a perfectly decent piece of hardware, flash their shitty branded firmware on it that actually disables features built in to the phone, then try to sell those features back to you (or in my case, don't offer them).
Re:Simple reason (Score:4, Informative)
With Comcast, the CableCard was free, and I'm paying $4.95 for my CC with FIOS. As for the monthly fees, they're about $8/mo if you pre pay for 3 years. In addition, there's built in access to Netflix, Amazon, Youtube, etc.
As for the Cable-provided set top boxes, yuck. None have the flexibility of what the Tivo can do, including the ability to transfer some shows to your PC. Not much access to anything outside what the Cable provider decides you should have, which is usually the on demand stuff and..uhm..that's it.
My Tivo HD is almost 3 years old and it's working well so far (well enough I'm considering upgrading the internal disk). I'm looking forward to the next box to see what its capabilities are.
DVR in Europe and South Africa (Score:2, Informative)
In South Africa I had digital satelite TV which had about 70 channels. Later they came out with a DVR with time shifting. After moving to the Netherlands I expected a way-better service (being "1st world") and everything. Not so: the UPC digital cable service was pretty much the same and in the same order of price. It also had about the same number of channels but there are many Dutch language channels that I don't watch. Major differences are the prevalence of sub-titles in the Dutch service on all English channels except for things like Euro news and CNN, CNBC etc. Also less film info on the film channels (the SA film info always had date of film, directory and leads). Film channels are a premium extra. And no BBC food channel - *sigh*.
Re:We stopped using TiVo (Score:3, Informative)
Tivos have been able to use Wifi instead of telephone lines for years now. In fact, you have to if you want to use their Netflix or Amazon movie download service.
Re:We stopped using TiVo (Score:3, Informative)
Tivo hasn't required a phone line for Tivo since the Series 2 came out... what, six or seven years ago?
With the Series 1, you had to hack it to go phone-free, but I have not had a phone line hooked to a Tivo in probably pushing eight years.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure who actually did it "first." But no licensing deals were struck, so it seems that the patents either had already expired or there were none to begin with due to prior art.
Bill
Re:Lousy marketing? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure there is any DVR that is better than a Tivo. I say this as someone who has used MythTV, Tivo, and 3 different cable company's DVRs. When it comes right down to it, anyone can use Tivo. The cable company DVR's are not smart enough, MythTV (admittedly a long ass time ago) was hard to use and difficult to setup.
As for faster, a Series 2 Tivo that is upgraded and starts to have a lot of things on the drive can be a bit slot responding to the remote. This is no longer true with my series 3 HD XL. The speed is great no matter if the drive has 300 items recorded.
Cheaper: yes and no. the $700 price tag I paid for my upgrade ($900 for someone without a previous Tivo to get a discount) is the top of the line Tivo with lifetime service. My last Tivo was $300 and $250 for the lifetime subscription (Yes, I got it that long ago). It is still going strong at my brothers house (I sold it to him for $200 to help me pay for my new Tivo). Even ignoring the $200 I got from selling it, I got it August of 2002. 90 months divided by $550 = $6/month. Well under the Cable company price for a DVR. I did upgrade the hard drive in the Tivo with 2 160GB drives part way through it's life. Both were taken out of service from PC upgrades, but figure an average hard drive price of $100 that gets you up to $750, or $8.33/month. I unfortunately do not know how they fare against each other in power usage, so I honestly can't add in the possible differences between those.
In order for my new $700 Tivo to be more economical than the cable company offering (And assuming I will be tossing a 2GB external drive on it to expand it Figure $100 for the drive, $30 for the enclosure I already have that I plan on using and that makes it $830. 55 months to be same price as the cable DVR. Just over 4 and a half years.
It is a gamble that it will last that long, but if I win that gamble it is just savings at that point.
As for looks, I've not seen a DVR interface that is prettier than Tivo. Would love for someone to show me. It really *IS* as good as Tivo fans make it out to be.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:2, Informative)
I very seldom record and watch later using my HD Tivo, but do a lot of watching streams and my dvds on my HD Tivo. PyTivo works great to let you send your vob files to the Tivo but I also use Galleon, Streambaby and hme-vlc. Series 1 tivo were great in their time because they were so easily hacked. It seemed like Tivo wanted their users to hack their Tivos because many added and beta tested new features to their Tivos, many of the added features even got incorporated into Tivo. However, as time went on the competitors decided they could not have that with Tivo, oh no they claimed, some guy might copy something to his Tivo that was illegal , no we need to protect the copyrights better, we need to limit how much the user can do. After all the Tivo users were having a bal,l while the other companies were struggling to come up with a product. Eventually the others caught up, even "borrowed" from the Tivo and as more and more copied the Tivo technology they produced cheaper alternatives and at the same time stripped Tivo legally of it's greatest resource, the Tivo owners that constantly hacked their Tivos to develop better features. It was a great strategy, use laws to hold back the competition but copy the competitors products - then if Tivo file suit for stealing , they can use their power to limit the damages.
Re:Simple reason (Score:4, Informative)
I've got one more, which was the final straw for me before I switched to TiVo: the Comcast-provided box had such poor quality Comcast-provided software that it crashed all of the time, wiping out both my existing recordings and all of my schedules. A DVR is really not worth very much if it can only be reliably used to pause live TV.
Re:Simple reason (Score:3, Informative)
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:1, Informative)
As I recall, ReplayTV was the first one to make/sell anything - I remember waiting and WAITING for that damned thing to be available - only to see them sued into oblivion while #2 (TiVo) managed to survive.
Re:Simple reason (Score:1, Informative)
Most content providers encrypt the QAM streams for all but local over-the-air channels so the computer card is no longer really an option.
Re:Never Mind That; "Tivo Geek" ?? (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair, there's quite a TiVo hacking community. I think these people qualify as TiVo geeks:
- Whoever worked out how to fit an Ethernet card in a Series 1 TiVo
- Whoever worked out which bytes to poke in the encoder chip driver to enable it to record in the undocumented higher res Mode 0, without the distracting offset.
- The authors of TiVoWeb - an open source web interface to TiVo scheduling etc.
- The creators of the cachecard - an ethernet card with some on-board RAM, plus drivers which cause the TiVo to cache its program DB on there, for speed.
Confessions of a former TIvo owner (Score:4, Informative)
I used to have a Tivo. I had two in fact, including my personal favorite DVR of all-time, the Humax Tivo (to my knowledge, the only stand-alone DVR to date that allows you to burn your recordings to DVD). Tivo had great features, one-of-a-kind abilities (like the aforementioned burning to DVD option), and the best user interface in the DVR business. There were some downsides (a lousy 30 minute recording queue, sluggish menu performance on some of the models, etc.). But for the most part it was *the* superior DVR.
So why did I give it up? Two reasons: digital cable and HD. Tivo lagged way behind my cableco's native DVR on implementing both. Cablecards took a while to come out, and were buggy and a pain in the ass to install. Their HD models were expensive and, again, lagged behind my cableco. And when my cableco went to Switched Digital Video (SDV) even the cablecard stopped working for many of the newer HD channels. It just got tiring having to constantly wrestle with my cableco over my rogue DVR. It was a lot easier for me to just pay the $9 a month and get the cableco's native DVR (which is actually pretty good, though certainly no Tivo). That's probably what the cableco intended all along, I'm sure--but I'm not going to spend a fortune and put up with missing channels just to tell them to go to hell.
Tivo's collapse as DVR leader can basically be traced to one thing: their failure to license their technology to or reach an agreement with the cable companies. Without the official support of the Time-Warners and Comcasts of the world, they've essentially condemned themselves to forever being the outsider in the digital TV world. So they will always lag behind with kludgy solutions like buggy cablecards and hit-or-miss SDV adapters (don't get me started on those things). And, even for a pretty dedicated videophile and TV addict like myself, the native cableco DVR is just too tempting an alternative.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:3, Informative)
>>>should also consider the phonograph and the human memory cortex timeshifters as well.
The term "timeshifting" was invented with the VCR (another popular term was tape-delayed), because it allowed people to make their own schedules, rather than being shackled to the TV Guide. I know with my VCR I almost never watch anything live - it tapes at night and I "timeshift" to the next afternoon when I get home from work.
The photograph was typically called by 1800s observers as "capturing time" because it froze a moment forever.
Monthly Fee + Corporate Farkwads (Score:5, Informative)
listings for mythTv from SchedulesDirect: $20 PER YEAR
listings for Tivo: $16 PER MONTH.
No reason for guide data for tivo to cost so frakking much. And then there is the idea they think that if you hack your box - YOUR BOX, you bought it - to get listings somewhere else that you are stealing service from them.
No, getting listings from them without paying would be theft of services. Getting your listings from somewhere else is not.
TiVo is run by a bunch of corporate farkwads.
Re:Simple reason (Score:3, Informative)
"and probably 4 out of 5 times, fast-forwarding or rewinding will desync the audio"
Sorry to say it, but an HD TiVo might not improve anything there.
Why? Because just like the TW box, the HD TiVos directly record the digital transport stream rather than encode the analog video signal in realtime. The streams themselves are broken from TW, not the playback/recording device. (Some worse than others - TWC's re-feed of CBS in my area is AWFUL. I have to perform a lossless transcode of every CBS recording in MythTV to fix CBS streams. Other channels are fine to play back even with direct recording.)
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:3, Informative)
but it's obvious to anyone with knowledge in the arts. Tivo just got to the patent office first with applying this idea to a video stream on a PC, and the PTO in its usual incredibly swift efficiency, granted them patents on obvious technologies.
The idea of reading data while still writing it to disk has been around since... well, the first or second hard drive.
Some corrections on Tivo vs Cable and DVRs (Score:4, Informative)
Tivo's monthly fee of about $10 is NOT saved by re-purposing an old computer into a DVR, because the old computer eats almost that much power every month (assuming 40 watts for a tivo and 200 watts for a computer, running 24/7).
Some people are saying "vs $15 for cable" and confusing people... they may mean $15 per month for a cable company DVR. OR, depending on context, they may also mean BASIC cable, which is sometimes given a different name by the cable company so the cable company can name their $50/month package "Basic," and thus sell it to callers who assume "Basic" means "cheapest." Cable companies are regulated and have to offer a service (they don't have to call it "basic") that is just the broadcast stations and local access for a regulated rate, about $15.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:1, Informative)
perhaps this is a quibbling point, but TiVo didn't invent timeshifting. the invention of the VCR was responsible for that. one should learn about history a bit more before attempting to romanticize it unnecessarily.
Two hour TV show starts at 8pm. At 9pm, I go to my TiVo and start watching the program from the begining. An hour after that, the show ends. You CANNOT do that with a VCR. You have to wait until 10pm when the show ends before you can rewind it and start watching it. A TiVo can timeshifting. A VCRs can simply record. BIG difference.
Re:Simple reason (Score:3, Informative)
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Confessions of a former TIvo owner (Score:1, Informative)
Right on the front of the TiVo, press the Format button and select a Fixed mode (480p/720p/1080i) and it'll send everything out in that format.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:3, Informative)
It's true that what a DVR does is different than what you could do with a VCR, but what you can do with a VCR is properly called time shifting [wikipedia.org]. In fact, that term became popular during the Betamax case. It was determined that "time shifting" was a legal use of VCRs, and since VCRs had legal uses, they couldn't be banned as copyright infringement devices.
Re:Monthly Fee (Score:2, Informative)
I dont see this whole monthly fee thing as an issue. DTV wanted to charge me $200 for their HD DVR PLUS (been a customer for over 10 years) another $10 per month for HD COntent PLUS I LEASE the receiver for another $5 PLUS $5 month 'warranty' or if it breaks, I buy a new one or go without. How is this any different thatn a Bring your own access Tivo?
Now, I talked them into giving me the DVR for nothing but I still pay $15 a month to use it. TiVo is less than that and you can get lifetime service and you can replace the HD when it dies with one off the shelf.