The Sad History and (Possibly) Bright Future of TiVo 490
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timothy
from the better-to-be-verbed-than-knighted dept.
from the better-to-be-verbed-than-knighted dept.
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."
Monthly Fee (Score:4, Interesting)
There is absolutely no reason to have a monthly fee on this piece of hardware. I understand there is a minor "service" they provide in getting schedules and being able to set up recording through an internet page, but in no way does that constitute the size of the monthly fee I remember seeing.
Also, I believe the device stopped working after you stopped paying the monthly fee. What? Why can't it work like an old-school VCR at that point where you have to manually program when it should record?
Please correct me if my history is off, or things have changed. I'd take a serious look at a TiVo if things are now different.
Lousy marketing? (Score:4, Interesting)
File away with 8-track, betamax and video disks
Yes (Score:3, Interesting)
Surely that depends on what type of "time shifting" you mean. If you're talking about "recording to watch later"
Yup. That's what time-shifting has meant since the term was coined.
In the '70s.
With the introduction of the VCR.
Why compare it to the iPod? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Why are you even comparing TiVo to the iPod. Why should it come close to the iPod/iPhone's success? They aren't competing products...Are you saying that a product is only successful if it sells the same number of units as an iPod or is as popular as an iPhone?
HD TiVo review... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lousy marketing? (Score:4, Interesting)
I had DirecTiVo for a while (DirecTV and TiVo had a joint product) and now I have Dish Network's product. Comparing the two, TiVo is really the much better DVR software. They have features that the others don't (and can't until patents expire in probably 10 more years). One of the ones that I miss is the Suggestions (aka keep my harddrive full) that will record shows during "down" time that match types and styles of shows you already record -- it's great when your normal shows aren't recording because of special events like The Winter Olympics. I never had an issue with shows recording multiple times (only record new, but the satellite picks up locals and shows them on 3 feeds [HD, local channel number, and 8000 channel number] so the DVR records the new episode on all three feeds because it's my highest ranked show). The TiVo interface is easier and better with groupings of shows into folders instead of just a list of everything recorded. All-in-all, the TiVo *IS* the best DVR available.
Other than DirecTiVo, there hasn't really been a single device that allowed you to have satellite and TiVo at the same time. Sure, the newer TiVo's have cablecard support, but it's not easy to get cablecards. The TiVo trying to operate the other box isn't the greatest solution either. Especially when your DVR is capable of recording multiple feeds (mine will record two satellite feeds plus OTA digital). The early TiVo's with analog cable were an easy implementation, but now that cable has gone digital, it's harder to have a TiVo.....but you wind up paying extra for the priviledge and in today's economy, the DVR from the provider is "good enough" that the TiVo becomes and expense that you live without. It's better, but is it "better enough" to justify the extra expense?
Tivo is not failing because of collusion (Score:2, Interesting)
Unlike the TiVo, my PVR doesn't spy on me... (Score:4, Interesting)
My LiteOn PVR has a simple timer for recording like a VCR.
It has user-replaceable parts.
It doesn't require a paid subscription.
LiteOn doesn't sell records of my viewing habits.
It hasn't got a partition allocated for ads.
It doesn't display ad-banners when I pause or fast forward.
It has editing features.
It has a built-in DVD burner.
Yeah, TiVo offers a few neat features, but I'd have to give up a lot of utility and a great deal of privacy to get them. F-k that. My next PVR will be a computer with a Hauppauge tuner.
Sky + (Score:3, Interesting)
My UK TiVo still has a little "As recommended by Sky" logo when it boots.
But Sky (Rupert Murdoch's satellite TV service) now has its own DVR.
It *really* annoys me when people coo about how clever their Sky+ is. "I can pause live TV! How awesome is that?", when TiVo had done it for years.
OTOH now you can get cheap DVRs from all kinds of manufacturers, so nobody's all that impressed any more, there's a free market, and that's all for the best.
I still think TiVo has the best UI over all.
Re:Simple reason (Score:4, Interesting)
The cost is the primary reason I don't have a Tivo anymore. When we bumped up to HD, the HD Tivo was something like $800, so we just went with TWC's DVR. I'm on the verge of going back to Tivo, though, because the box from TW is probably about the most useless pile of electronics you can possibly assemble and still legally refer to as a DVR. It sometimes just fails to record, and probably 4 out of 5 times, fast-forwarding or rewinding will desync the audio. Tivo was expensive, but it never had rookie problems like that.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:4, Interesting)
History doesn't begin at the VCR, and I think your definition of timershifter is off. I would argue that if you're going to consider a VCR a timeshifter, then you should also consider the phonograph and the human memory cortex timeshifters as well. I'm pretty sure that "recording device" is not the same thing as "timeshifter". A timeshifter allows you to view a stream of data at a point in time other than what it is also simultaneously chronicling. View and Chronicle are separate timelines. This is impossible with a VCR. It could probably be achieved with a complicated array of VCRs, but that invention does not exist.
Re:Monthly Fee (Score:3, Interesting)
Never paid a monthly fee. When the DVD writer broke I was astounded to see the same model selling at 1800$ in Ebay. I bought mine for some 450$. The only piece of electronic equipment that went up in value in three years. Market is sending strong signals. The greedy cable cos are not listening.
No choice for PVRs (Score:1, Interesting)
Up here in Canadia we don't have Tivo, but we do have PVRs and lord do they suck.
Depending on the carrier you chose, you're locked to a specific model (which costs 500$) with an interface circa 1995. It's slow as molasses to navigate and they don't all offer a lot of functionality (why doesn't my Videotron model allow me to hide channels that I'm not subscribed to?) and the interface is ugly as hell. For some reason (I suspect forced replacement), those devices also corrupt the HD after a few years of use and cannot be upgraded.
I can chose between 125+ different DVD players but I can't chose the device to watch tv with? Why is that?
Re:Why compare it to the iPod? (Score:2, Interesting)
Replay Was First, and Best (Score:2, Interesting)
At that CES, ReplayTV won "Best of Show". Ten years ago Replay was letting people share and stream their recorded shows over the internet, schedule shows via web over internet, and automatically blanking commercials. For all these wonderful abilities Replay was sued into extinction bu the TV/Movie companies. Tivo was always their bitch, and so they let it totter along to give the illusion of choice...
Apple TV should be TiVo (Score:2, Interesting)
I always thought Apple should buy TiVo's patents and tech and rebrand the failed AppleTV. Apple has the cash, marketing position, and design gurus to make an amazingly elegant, easy to use device integrated with beautiful TVs and screens, with all the backend apps to add value (iTunes integration, iMovie, etc.), and TiVo has the all the original patents that Apple could afford to defend. And Apple could turn into the big bullies themselves against the cable companies, especially if they can lobby for net neutrality legislation.
Seems like a perfect marriage to me.
Slow tech refresh and weak open access advocacy (Score:3, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I own 3 Tivos; a Series 2 standalone bought in 2002 that's going strong (albeit soon to be nearly obsoleted by Comcast's digital conversion), and two HD Tivos. It will be a sad day when I have to replace them with POS cable products or some Frankenstein
IMHO, what's hurt Tivo has been a couple of things. One is painfully slow technology refresh.
When I bought my Series 2 in 2002, most digital cable channels (HBO, Encore, etc) offered DD 5.1 audio on most or all programs. The Series 2 had no digital audio interface but even by 2002 standards should have been able to handle digital audio. It wasn't until the release of the Series 3 some 3? 4? years later, which required a CableCard (and thus the delay for CableCard) before digital audio was available.
What should have happened is a new unit (Series 2.5?) issued with digital audio capabilities to bridge that gap. HD would have still been an issue, but HD boxes would downcovert and we could have had digital audio. Other hardware items they should have been more aggressive about include external storage and DVD burning. They had a burner model but it was too little, too late.
Tivo also blew it on "open access" advocacy.
They should have made a lot more noise about CableCard and breaking the cable company digital encoding stranglehold. A much more public advocacy that made it plain that cable companies are really only interested in monopolies and bullshit upcharges for throwaway hardware paid for 10x over by rental fees.
PC integration has also been lame and crippled. Tivo 2 Go should have used TivoDesktop to generate burn-ready DVD ISOs and not required third party software or bullshit copy protection.
I still love my Tivos for what they do with elegance, simplicity and reliability, but wholly agree they just can't really get it together.
Re:Because its premise is flawed (Score:4, Interesting)
TiVo, in my humble opinion, is based on a fairly flimsy premise: that television is so important to watch that you are willing to spend time and money to make sure you get to watch all of some part of it. Really? Seriously, what is on television that you couldn't miss?
My answer to that it doesn't so much let you watch *more* TV, as improve the quality of what you do watch. Say I watch an hour of TV every day. I can use that time to watch whatever happens to be on, or I can use time shifting to watch something good.
At the quality end of the TV drama spectrum, you're really missing out if you don't watch all the episodes, in the right order. There's no way I'd want to see The Wire or Lost out of order.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've worked with a number of set top box hardware and firmware providers and they call the latter functionality (that is, pausing live TV and then playing it back whilst the programme is still being recorded) "chase play".
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:3, Interesting)
They have always (with the exception of a short period of about 4-6 months), offered the option of buying a "Lifetime Subscription" instead of a "Monthly Subscription". The cost of the Lifetime Subscription usually pays for itself after about 2-3 years, but there is no recurring expenses.
I keep seeing people say that a lifetime subscription to TiVo pays for itself after 2-3 years. Since I don't want the subscription, I don't see how paying an upfront fee for the subscription can pay for itself over time.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
The $80 is for voice service. No plan charges that much to add on text messaging and basic web access! Even an expensive smart phone data plan is $20 - $30.
Cell phones are a good thing to think about though. Expensive phones took off because you could get them for "free" with a contract and just pay the monthly price. Tivo charges a ridiculous amount for the hardware you get and then $12.95/month in addition!
$12.95 means you need to be providing a substantial service. I can get HBO and Showtime for $12.95/month. Tivo isn't giving me any additional service except a nicer interface to a DVR, which I already paid $500 for, and a suggestion service. It seriously makes no sense.
I predict that to be successful, they need to either eliminate the up front cost (like I believe they did with DirecTivo... my sister had one of those and it was included in the DirecTV installation iirc) or eliminate the monthly cost. What they should really do is get out of the hardware business and put their software and suggestion service on existing STBs.
Re:Apple TV should be TiVo (Score:3, Interesting)
I always thought Apple should buy TiVo's patents and tech and rebrand the failed AppleTV. Apple has the cash, marketing position, and design gurus to make an amazingly elegant, easy to use device integrated with beautiful TVs and screens, with all the backend apps to add value (iTunes integration, iMovie, etc.), and TiVo has the all the original patents that Apple could afford to defend. And Apple could turn into the big bullies themselves against the cable companies, especially if they can lobby for net neutrality legislation.
Seems like a perfect marriage to me.
That would be nice. But, unfortunately, Apple seems to perceive live TV as a competitor to the iTunes store's selection of movies and TV shows.
Re:Monthly Fee + Corporate Farkwads (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Simple reason (Score:2, Interesting)
Not true. I've never seen a Tivo lose sync on anything it's recorded -- which is what's being talked about: "fast-forwarding or rewinding". Even on an old S1 that couldn't keep up; it'll alter the audio playback speed and drop video frames to keep things in sync. (for normal shows, it's unnoticable. but for a concert, it's very annoying.)
If it were in the transmission stream, then it'd be out of sync during normal/live playback.
Re:TiVo invented timeshifting? (Score:3, Interesting)
It is possible that if I could buy the Tivo without the commitment to the feature you say is so wonderful, I would decide that "Yes, that would be worth the extra money. I'll sign up." But that is not an option. I'm not convinced that feature is worth anything to me and I believe that a lot of other people feel the same way.