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."
TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Simple reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Tivo: $250 up-front + $7 / mo CableCard rental + $15 / mo Tivo Subscription fee
vs.
Cable: $15 / mo for something that works for most people.
(...and if your Tivo breaks, you get to buy another one.)
Cost and portability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh yeah! Well, my mother invented the creation of time by turning off the TV and demanding that we don't watch so much of that shit.
Now, only if she we're here to keep me off of internet discussion sites. I'd have all that time back.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Surely that depends on what type of "time shifting" you mean. If you're talking about "recording to watch later" then VCRs do it, but "live TV pausing" time-shifts are presumably new to newer technology like the TiVo.
It's hard to see how TiVo could really survive. (Score:5, Insightful)
With computers, there is room for the "more expensive but better user experience/interface" option, because all a computer has to do to interact with the internet is speak a few common networking protocols. Even if your ISP has never heard of mac or linux or whatever, that just means that their phone drones won't help you configure.
With cable, the cable companies rule with an iron fist, and have (largely successfully) resisted any efforts to change that. Cablecard is a clusterfuck. One can only assume that it was intended to fail(or, at least, those who wanted it to fail assigned it a task so difficult that no good faith implementation could possibly work properly). This gives first-party boxes a huge advantage over Tivos in all but cases of serious enthusiasts.
Re:Simple reason (Score:1, Insightful)
So you are saying it is $13/mo if you pre-pay for 3 years, plus you get to buy the hardware, and if the hardware breaks after the 365th day, you get to pay another $250 for a new box and another fee to move the subscription. Such a deal! Note that I went through three, count 'em, THREE S3 boxes in the first 21 days before I gave up on Tivo ... at the time, I had been a long time Tivo user and an early adopter (got my S1 in 1999).
Which is irrelevant to most people.
Which is irrelevant to most people.
Which is irrelevant to most people.
How many free on-demand TV shows and movies do you get with your Tivo? Because scanning through my OnDemand list, there are hundreds of free offerings including many of this weeks episodes of both broadcast and cable network shows. This is a feature that customers do use that, IIRC, is not available at all on Tivo (since Cablecards have no access to OnDemand).
Apples and Oranges (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree entirely - these are different markets, how is this comparison irrelvant? Were they just slow for today's obligitary daily Iphone mention?
One might as well say that the TiVo doesn't sell as much as Nokia, or Microsoft (both of whom have shipped far more than Apple - indeed, can we have an article on how Apple don't sell as many phones as most other phone companies, or how Macs don't sell as much as Windows PCs? Of course that would be viewed as flamebait...)
Lumping the Iphone with the Ipod also makes different sense - so the Tivo has to compete against two different families of products, not just one? Why not compare the Iphone to say, every product that Microsoft have ever released...
The comparison also makes no sense in that the Tivo is measured in terms of the number of current users, whilst figures for things like phones are usually total sales. What are the Tivo's total sales, ever?
Re:Streaming TV meets the DVR. (Score:3, Insightful)
Some of the Tivo's decline is attributable to the fact that they stopped evolving. Instead of
improving their product, they decided to sue potential competitors. They also decided to get in
bed with Big Cable. Once they were the only "authorized" 3rd party content channel they were in
a very precarious position.
They would have been much better off with an entire cabal of similar companies by their side.
Tivo was surpassed by Free Software and stymied by HDTV standards intended to allow for openness
but really only served as a means to lock out most of the market.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah time-shifting is nothing new. It has existed ever since the Sony Umatic VCR released circa 1969. That VCR was too expensive, so Sony went back and created the Betamax (anc JVC copied it to create VHS) in 1975. DVR is not even the first digital recording method - that was miniDV and Digital VHS in the early 1990s. ----- People have been time-shifting for decades. All the DVR did was replace the magnetic tape storage with magnetic disk storage. Nothing revolutionary... it was an evolutionary change.
As for why Tivo is not more popular? Because there are tons of other options. I have a Panasonic ReplayTV that has no subscription fees whatsoever. Ditto my Dish DTVpal which cost $250 flat and no subscription fees. It seemed a no-brainer to buy these DVRs rather than buy a Tivo with a monthly rental.
Perhaps if Tivo eliminated the monthly fee, then they'd takeoff like iPod, but most people simply don't see the need to throw-away money like that. They have to budget their spending, which means they choose options without the fees (like I did).
Re:No Tivo for me (Score:4, Insightful)
I love MythTV but, lets be honest, setting it up was a week's worth of intensive nerding...
While its quite friendly in day-to-day use and has really cool features (e.g. MythWeb, multiple front ends...) it all goes a bit pear shaped when it comes to configuration.
Tuning, in particular is a major hassle (thats in the UK with digital terrestrial - your mileage may vary). Partly, of course, that's because it supports so many standards and hardware alternatives.
Maybe, you answered your own question (Score:2, Insightful)
For the couch-potato geek, one name typically comes to mind: TiVo.
To become a success for the masses, a product has to appeal to the masses. The reason the iPod and iPhone were successful was not that they were the first or the most powerful phones, but because they were well marketed and are usable and appeal to your average non-geek.
The corporate history is full of the graves of the people who did not understand this. One example which comes to my mind is home automation, ten/twenty years ago people were hyped about this and promised that your home would be fully automated by AI and computers. Now we are in 2010 and your average home only has the basics of home automation, just because it is fairly expensive and does not appeal to the masses (I do not wake up in the morning and wonder how cool it would be to pay 20k to have my heating fulling automated). It may come in the future but when it will come, it will have been re-thought to appeal to a viable customer base (like Apple with the iPod has beaten the crap out of the Archos and other MP3 players).
Now you may argue that Archos was there before Apple, but the fact is that Apple understood how to market their iPod.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps if Tivo eliminated the monthly fee, then they'd takeoff like iPod, but most people simply don't see the need to throw-away money like that. They have to budget their spending, which means they choose options without the fees (like I did).
Yet people have no problems spending $80+/month so they can text and check sports scores on their phones, when 15 years ago nobody ever wanted, let alone needed to do those things.
I always thought the monthly Tivo fee was a bargain. It SAVED me tons of time, automatically recording my favorite shows, even if the time slot changed. Knowing that I could go away for a few days, come home, turn on the TV, and have my shows were there waiting for me is worth a lot more to me than being able to stay connected 24/7.
Re:way too expensive and no broadband support (Score:3, Insightful)
There were ways to connect the TiVo via broadband back then, they needed to make it supported, but it was as simple as plugging in an Ethernet adapter and putting codes in the dialing prefix.
Expense is another part, it has always been way more expensive to use TiVo than the cable company. TiVo should have focused on cost reduction more, without making it a light service. They probably could have indroduced ads earlier (Your cable company depends on ads) to make it cost competitive, but they were busy trying to deliver the best experience and weren't considering cost as a primary objective.
I think the DVR was a rather obvious technology at this time. I had spent a few hours here and there to get my computer to do exactly the same thing for a couple of years. I didn't have the resources to do it cost effectively or in a user friendly way. The fact that Replay and TiVo came out at the same time highlights that it was a matter of computing power catching up and normal technological evolution. Startups like TiVo and Replay are going to have a hard time competing with the big companies like Scientific Atlanta and Motorola when the barriers to entry are so low.
Re:Lousy marketing? (Score:3, Insightful)
I had Dish for a long time. I still like their implementation. I tried Tivo (admittedly for a relatively short period) and currently have AT&Ts horrid u-Verse box that's about to be tossed out the door. I've also had TW's box that I would barely call beta.
The thing I like least about the u-Verse and Tivo boxes are the auto recording features, especially when they bump the "older" recordings I actually cared about (Yes you can "lock" it on some systems). I personally dislike technology that thinks it's smarter than me and knows what I want despite me telling it otherwise.
The features that I want are decent search, and the ability to quickly set a recording with enough lead and follow time to cover the whole thing. A bonus would be if there was a methodology from the broadcaster to indicate delays, and maybe they'd be kind enough to definitively indicate commercials as well (Yes, I'm aware of the blank frame signal :)
Some people don't understand value. (Score:2, Insightful)
As in the value of a quality product. When your Tivo is set up, it Just Fucking Works. There's a lot of value in that. I've had a Tivo since the first generation with lifetime service that cost me around $250. I tried the cable company's box for a while before buying a new Tivo. $800 for the Tivo and a transfer of my lifetime service agreement or $15/month for the rental. You'd think the rental unit would be a no-brainer. But it's not. The cable company's box sucked ass. It regularly lost all guide data so I'd turn on the TV to find out that it hadn't recorded anything in days. It could hold a whopping 12 hours of HD content so 2 football games and a movie would max it out. And it stuttered if I tried to record 2 HD programs while playing back another program.
So, yeah, I could get a rental from the cable company for $15/month but I'd do just as well to toss $15 in the trash every month for all of the value I got out of the deal.
I decided to update my Tivo solution at significant expense ($600 for the Tivo, $200 for the lifetime service transfer, $400 for a 1tb drive) and don't regret it for a second. Because it Just Fucking Worked. And still does, over 3 years later. Heck, it works even better with the second 1tb drive added. The fact that it would take 8 years to "break even" is irrelevant because it wouldn't be "even". Comparing the cable company's DVR to an HD Tivo is like comparing a bicycle to a BMW.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:4, Insightful)
The service that they are providing is agreeing not to send the command that will brick your device so long as you keep paying.
That's why I will never buy one.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:3, Insightful)
really, mods? how is this even remotely interesting? it's kind of like telling someone they can save money on steaks by buying in bulk, and getting the reply "well i don't even like beef, so i fail to see how i'm saving money". if you don't want the thing we're talking about, your opinions on the pricing of said thing aren't required.
See you and I have different ideas of what a Tivo is. You appear to think that Tivo is a service that comes with hardware. I think that Tivo is hardware that comes with a service I don't want.