What’s going to happen with TiVO? The pioneering Digital Video Recorder company is still in business with around a million subscribers and it has lately been settling patent infringement cases with big companies like Echostar and — just this week — with AT&T, but the longer term prospects for the company are dim. Yes, they’ll likely rake in hundreds of million more in settlements from companies including Verizon, but at the same time their subscriber base is dwindling and a point will come when their hardware will simply disappear as the company loses manufacturing economies of scale. That is unless they want to start shipping each new unit with a $100 bill attached — something public companies are generally loathe to do.
So I’m guessing a better end for TiVO would be to sell out, despite (or perhaps even because of) the recent court successes. They’ll find a buyer that covets the subscriber base, covets the IP portfolio, covets the revenue stream from recent and future settlements, and maybe sees buying TiVO as some masterstroke in a competitive industry.
There are only two logical buyers for TiVO in my view — Cisco and Motorola. As the two largest manufacturers of cable boxes either could use a kosher DVR implementation to its strategic advantage. I think Motorola is the more likely buyer because it is about to be flush with $12 billion GoogleBucks from the sale of its Motorola Mobility division and because Cisco has been pointedly concentrating lately on its enterprise businesses and might see buying TiVO as sending the wrong signal to Wall Street.
But none of this means a hill of beans to me. I’m not a TiVO subscriber, just an observer.
Any predictions on Boxee and Roku? TV manufacturers need to get their game together as the same thing that happened to mobiles happens to televisions.
Will the new smart TVs along side “smart” set-top boxes become a ubiquitous gaming platform?
Judging by the (non)service I got from Roku when my Soundbridge died, the device’s minimal green text interface 70s style interface, crappy mt-daapd abandonware streamer for my PC and Roku’s badly designed supporting website, it deserves to die. I would never recommend Roku to anybody.
I replaced it with a Squeezebox Touch and just wish I had bought that in the first place. The Touch is everything the Roku wasn’t. It has a good graphical interface via both touch screen and remote, regular updates, which actually add functionality, to both the Touch firmware and the streaming music server on my Linux box. It didn’t originally support BBC iPlayer: it does now.
To be honest, I’ve never used Roku (but the price point is hard to beat.)
Substitute Roku for another company or product trying to make television modern but has stronger software.
I love my tiny Roku box. Works flawlessly, constantly getting new channels, great picture and sound.
Best $99 I ever spent.
Bob,
Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions have been two separate companies since Jan 2011. The cable box division will also get transferred to Google since it’s an asset of Motorola Mobility (along with 3B+ in cash?)
Kinda screws up the entire prediction, no? Unless Bob substitutes Google for Motorola. Makes me wonder whether Apple might be a better fit if it really is an IP and interface buy.
I agree, Vu. According to an Oct 2011 Forbes Article:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethwoyke/2011/10/19/motorola-solutions-ceo-on-the-google-motorola-merger-patents-and-brand/
“Motorola Mobility was the other company created by Motorola, Inc.’s split. It took over the company’s consumer cellphone and set-top box divisions.”
While not often discussed, I envisioned that Google’s hidden agenda was to use the set-top box division to bolster their lagging (but steadily improving) Google TV business. It doesn’t make sense they’d bring in TiVo unless they’d cannibalize the patent portfoio and/or their talent pool.
And no fair trying to lump Motorola Solutions in under “Motorola” for this prediction. Motorola Solutions is heavily focused on government and enterprise markets. It doesn’t have much need for a provider of consumer set-top boxes; that’s why that division went with Motorola Mobility Holdings when the company split this time last year.
Wouldn’t it make more sense for Google itself to buy Tivo? If Google owned Tivo directly it would have more control to do what it wanted with the combination of Tivo and Motorola Mobility’s set-top box business. It would be strategically useful to them to have an internet device in as many homes as possible (that was possibly one of the reasons it bought Motorola, although not the main reason).
Google has not had a real stellar record with purchased companies. Amazon makes more sense.
Yeah, that purchase of Android went nowhere fast, didn’t it.
Oh, wait…
Cisco would completely screw up Tivo and shitcan it to the scrap heap, to put it not so delicately, like it shitcanned the Flip video cameras. OTOH, the prime candidate to acquire Tivo would be none other than Google. After the fiasco that is GoogleTV., what better way to reboot brand? GoogleTV becomes Google/Tivo. It can afford to buy, invest and implement Tivo with its long term goals while also acquiring those IP rights. The only people that’d be screaming to the FTC over such a deal would be Apple, Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft. This will happen probably in next couple of years.
Wasn’t Flip re-incarnated as Go Pro?
Flip cameras were more of a flop anyway. They were an unsustainable fad, albeit one that made the founders lots of $$$.
With smartphones filming in HD, there was no roadmap for Flip. Wish I’d ridden that gravy train. Founders won the lottery, right place, right time, lots of luck.
How about Amazon buys TiVo, makes the monthly service (essentially just a database of listing data) free and redesigns the interface to make The Amazon video storefront more prominent. Result would be a set-top version of the Kindle Fire. Customers get a good deal on useful hardware and Amazon gets more people milling through their virtual showroom.
Here’s a good question: Who’s going to by Best Buy?
Answer: Nobody. Best Buy is in a death spiral and there’s nothing anyone can do to save it.
Tivo was a disruptive technology, but in a poorly executed way. There’s nothing wrong with the way Tivo did their service. No one else could have done it better. However, the whole idea of trying to record a live broadcast is so 1990s. Tivo is a glorified VCR. Tivo uses a disk instead of a tape which allows it to take advantage of random access and storage size much the same way computers took advantage of floppies and hard disks over tape drives and punch tape. And, Tivo takes advantage of the smarter hardware and the commodization of computers to present a nicer interface. But in the end, it’s recording a show just like a VCR did back in 1990.
Why tape something if you can watch it at almost anytime? Netflix has the right idea: Streaming. Users look through a list of available shows, find what they want, and watch it when they want. No more planning in advance which humans are really, really bad at. People can’t plan their retirement. You think they can plan what shows they want to see tomorrow?
The problem is that Tivo made a technological bet that in the end will be a losing proposition. And, there’s not much they can do. I worked for Cado Computer. Heard of them? No? Well, Cado use to be a power in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the business computer market. Why by an IBM Datamaster 24 for over $50,000 when you can buy a Cado computer that’s way more powerful and at less than half the price. That’s right, for the price of a secretary’s annual salary, your business could be computerized!
To do this, Cado made a little bet: The price of hardware would be more significant than the price of software. The proprietary programming language that was attached to the hardware was very primitive. Cado didn’t even have a file system. We recorded where we placed files and programs on a piece of paper. However, it allowed Cado to offer cheap hardware which gave them a great price advantage. Imagine running four separate users on only 48K of memory.
For a while, Cado did very well until it lost its bet. The PC came out and the cost of hardware dropped significantly. Better hardware meant more sophisticated software and all the shortcuts that Cado took to get a sub-$20,000 mini-computer became burdens. As PCs became more ubiquitous software firms could write more powerful accounting software and sell it for a few hundred dollars because they could market it to a million PCs instead of a few thousand Cado computers. Now, instead of a $20,000 Cado, you could get a more powerful $5,000 PC with software that could do more.
By the way, that’s the genius of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, unlike Bill Gates, had no qualms of shifting Apple from a manufacturer of computers to a manufacturer of high end consumer technology. It didn’t matter that by 2005, Apple was the most profitable computer company. Jobs understood that didn’t matter if the computer market is going to go away. If someone was going to make his darling Macintosh computer irrelevant, it was going to be him.
But, Tivo? They make hardware that’s simply going to disappear by the end of the decade, and they have no real plans after that. To see what will happen to Tivo, take a look at Kodak. It’s a sad story, but you make the transition to the next technology, or you disappear.
That’s true. Steve Jobs famously said (paraphrasing here), “Don’t worry about cannibalizing sales. Someone will eventually cannibalize your sales so it had better be you.”
The Internet simply doesn’t yet have the bandwidth to accommodate streaming in place of time-shifted broadcast for more than a small fraction of viewers. In terms of efficient use of resources streaming the same few programs individually to a large number of users is insane.
Still, none of the mentioned companies has a great record with getting value out of their corporate purchases. Motorola or Cisco would just be the final resting place for TiVo. Google or Apple could be a good fit but neither likely sees any value in buying TiVo rather than just continuing to role their own.
The bandwidth will come. There’s no question about that. Give it time.
And, content providers will have to switch over too. They don’t like it because they like the fact they can sell the same thing multiple times: First original show, then DVD sales, then BlueRay, then streaming, etc. However, as fewer and fewer people watch broadcasts or buying DVDs and BluRay disks, streaming will become the main revenue source, and the content providers will have to switch over too.
The number of people who watch TV of any sort is way down. Broadcast TV is not very profitable, and cable channels broadcasters are having a harder and harder time making money. Even HBO is losing subscribers.
Don’t get me wrong. Tivo isn’t going to go under this year. And, they’ll be around next year too. The year after that? I wouldn’t take too many bets.
The problem is whether the content providers will understand, get smart, and move on. Or, try their best to hold on to dear life their current model which use to work so well.
We’ve been waiting for the bandwidth to come for a long time… it ain’t happening anytime soon. Look at all of Cringe’s articles about how much better broadband service is in many other countries besides the U.S.
As for “Why tape something if you can watch it at almost anytime?” – how about because there’s still a lot of programming on cable that you simply won’t be able to see at any time… maybe 30 days later on Hulu, maybe not at all if it is a pro sports game broadcast in HD.
TiVo has, hands down, the most user friendly interface of any DVR. Whomever owns Motorola’s cable boxes now, which seem to enjoy a large footprint across several different cable companies, should pick up TiVo if only for the software. Motorola’s interface looks and acts like software that was written by a hardware company.
Tivo when it came out was miles ahead of the lowly VCR. DVRs are still relevant today because current shows are not available on Netflix (at least in Canada) Also Hulu is not available at all so outside of the US there are less legal options.
We have a cable box that has a DVR built in which works well enough and there is no monthly subscription to buy.
I’m not sure what happened to Tivo. They sure didn’t make a big push into Canada even though they were supported. Around 2004 I read that Tivo was supported in Canada but you couldn’t buy the units here. So I bought a used one off Ebay and used it for a while. When the box died I got a replacement from Tivo but I had to get it shipped to a US address. Eventually I stopped the service because I didn’t think the monthly fee was worth it. To this day I am the only person I know in Canada that had a Tivo. I’ve heard that the new boxes are very slow and still don’t have built in WiFi.
A major problem in Canada, as I understand it, is that CableCard is not supported by cable providers in Canada. Because of this, it is not possible to record HD cable in Canada using a TiVo. This puts TiVo in a major disadvantage as compared to the cable companies’ own DVR offerings (as was no doubt the intent in not supporting CableCard). So TiVo never really had a chance in the long run in the Great White North, and any success it did have was basically living on borrowed time.
Huh? No WiFi? TV makes the most sophisticated DVRs out there. Yes WiFi/ethernet, records 4 shows at once, fast, hunrdeds of hours of HD capacity, THX certified, has Netflix, Amazon, Blockbuster, YouTube, Hulu Plus.
Support network based remotes. Has a bluetooth slider landscape QWERTY remote.
Not sure why playing Tivo 12.95 a month is any worse than paying some cable provider or Direct TV half that for those horrible set top boxes they provide. It is a little more but you are getting a top of the line experience.
The only problem with your statements is that nearly 80% of what I watch on my TiVo isn’t available for streaming, I either have to watch it as it’s broadcast or wait for it to come out on DVD/Blu-Ray. And as someone else pointed out, the Internet is not even remotely ready for hundreds of millions of people to get their television content through streaming. I’ve been using TiVo for nearly a decade now, and can see myself still using it for another decade.
The only reason why you can’t see everything on Netflix is that the industry is attempting to keep themselves relevant. If everything was on a streaming service like Netflix, who’d be crazy enough to watch TV?
But, change is coming. Look at what happened to the music industry. Sam Goody, Tower Records, and Virgin are all gone. CD sales have become irrelevant. Instead, it’s all streaming or MP3s.
The same change will come to the video side as it did with the music industry. Hulu is a feeble attempt to both move forward and keep change from happening. You can stream shows from Hulu. However, the networks refuse to put on their most popular shows, want to charge you more than Netflix, and still get to force you to watch commercials. No wonder why Hulu never took off.
But people are leaving TV in droves. Broadcast network viewership is way down, and although cable subscriber-ship is up, the number of people paying for premium channels have gone down. Even HBO, the most successful cable network has lost subscribers. In fact, I’m trying to find out how many of those cable subscribers actually have cable TV and how many simply have Internet only.
Tivo won’t go bankrupt this year, but I doubt I’ll be seeing them around by 2020.
Comcast wouldn’t even allow me to have data-only service. I imagine there are plenty more people in the group of “data subscribers forced to buy bundled unused basic TV service”. I was among them until I moved to a location where I could buy from a smaller, better, less hostile competitor that would sell me a better, cheaper, data-only service.
I’ve never been a fan of on-demand Internet streaming video. The user experience is inconsistent, flaky and insufficiently transparent, and the whole principle of streaming depends on promises the Internet can’t and doesn’t make. If I have to wait a minute for the video to prebuffer, that’s not much better than waiting an hour for the complete low-quality download, which is about what it would take to leave the house and visit a Redbox or a Ballbuster Video store, or a day or three to torrent the ISO, which is still better than Qwikflix’s turnaround.
And they expect people to pay to ride the streaming bus? Have they the brainworms?
Heh, a friend of mine married the daughter of one of Cado’s CEOs. When he (the CEO) got canned, he got the “Here’s a box for your stuff, a security guard will show you the way out” treatment. Classy organization.
The honsety of your posting is there for all to see
Motorola always show how lost they are. They had a massive market share with only a couple of products from their mobile line at one point. But lost it because they didn’t bring anything fresh. They were the ones who should have done the iPhone, and they knew their biggest weakness was the UI. If they’d had any sense at all they’d have figured that one out!
Semiconductors they’ve had to sell off in two goes, On Semi and FreeScale. After giving other parts away!
TiVo is the only device I’ve ever bought one year and sold it for double the next. Even after it was effectively dead in the UK. Just can’t believe my luck on that one!
But I’d have thought a purchase by someone wanting to make in-roads to the AV streaming market would be more suitable? Amazon perhaps?
It’s ironic that the Motorola ROKR candy bar phone with iTunes integration likely provided the eureka moment for Steve Jobs as he saw that the traditional handset makers were utterly clueless about smartphones. Also makes me wonder if the ROKR was not a sly attempt by Apple to keep Motorola on their path to oblivion.
The ROKR E1 has been a very sore spot at what is now Motorola Mobility ever since Steve Jobs introduced the iPod Nano on the very same day Motorola unveiled the ROKR (guess which device Steve spent more time extolling?). Though I’ve never heard it confirmed by anyone in the upper management of either company, the feeling in the lower ranks of Mobility at the time was that ROKR was intended as a learning experience for Apple, and that it already had something else in mind. Eighteen months and an estimated $150 million of NRE costs later, Apple publicly unveiled the iPhone. That’s a *very* short period of time to design a cell phone AND build the necessary RF testing infrastructure needed for ongoing development unless one knows *exactly* what’s needed.
Motorola Mobility owns the cable box line. It would definitely be interesting if Googlorola were to buy TiVO.
A Motorola purchase of Tivo is exactly the sort of pointless churn I would expect from Motorola’s “leadership”.
Tivo is a cash cow technology without a future? Check.
Tivo has a large stream of IP royalty and settlement revenue? Check.
Tivo is a technology related to set-top boxes? Check.
Tivo has already done all the engineering work to bring the technology to maturity, so Motorola won’t have to take any risks or do any real engineering itself? Check.
Tivo is an opportunity for the political warriors at Motorola to engage in acquisition activity and carve out more turf with the funding and cover of Google? Check.
“How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished.” Motorola is a pale shade of its former self. Stripped of its semiconductors, its auto controls, its radio business, its computer group, its government work, its satellite business, and shorn of leadership or nerve, the only action the remaining executives know how to play is internal politics, feasting on the dead carcass of past renown. This from a company that helped put man on the moon and talk to him there.
geez, you mean Wall Street shenanigans and 6-sigma programs aren’t the ultimate win-win-win?
Talk from the moon?
Sorry, that was Collins Radio.
Sorry, no offense meant to Collins, nor any intention to detract from their radios in Apollo. I was referencing the semiconductors made here in Arizona by Motorola for the space program.
Motorola provided the “up data link” (how is that for a close-but-no-cigar phrase?).
https://www.motorola.com/staticfiles/Consumers/Corporate/US-EN/History/_Documents/history-1969-Apollo-Moon.pdf
AMEN!
From my consumer perspective, I could see a Motorola-TiVo marriage as nice….if Motorola took advantage of some of the things TiVo did well.
I resisted digital cable for several years. My home is filled with old-time cable-ready TVs and (for a while) VCRs. For me, TiVo was a much less expensive DVR alternative to the cable company’s DVRs (even with TiVo’s subscription fees). Without Hi Def TVs and eschewing the digital tier of channels, I was quite happy with my 5 TiVo’s in the house.
I have seen the cable company DVRs (all Motorola brand) in friends’ homes. They work great for my friends that have one, maybe two DVRs.
However, it has given me the ability to compare experiences.
I find the TiVo software to be of better design. Easier to use, more appealing visually, and more functional. TiVo’s “drop back” of a few seconds after fast forwarding is far more effective than the cable company’s DVR.
Add to that TiVo’s in-home networking and the ability to transfer recorded shows from one room to another, and I love TiVo.
However, I have Series 2 TiVo’s. I am put off by the upgrade cost of moving 5 TVs to Hi Def TiVo’s in order to get Hi Def capability. I have heard bad things about the reliability of CableCard (plus the rent on those babies in addition to the TiVo fees), and it still doesn’t give access to on-demand/interactive services (if I understand correctly). As a result, I’ve been stuck in analog purgatory.
This fall I finally knuckled under and bought a Hi Def TV for my family room. Another at Thanksgiving for my bedroom. I was virtually forced to give in to a cable company DVR for those two TVs.
The Hi Def is great, and I now have access to on-demand/interactive cable servicesO The cable company DVR is acceptable, but I am not thrilled with the software/interface. The remote control responds slowly when I try to stop fast forwarding, and I can’t transfer recorded shows from the family room to the bedroom (even though there is a network jack on the device, which I know is used only for loading their software).
Don’t get me started on the whole house DVR. It’s a nice idea, but appears to have a good 3-5 years of refinement to go before it is truly attractive.
So, take TiVo’s superior software, and the in-home networking, combine that with Motorola’s hardware, and the cooperation with cable companies regarding access to true 2-way interactivity, and now you’re talking about a sweet combination that I would find very attractive (particularly if Motorola would wake up to hard drive prices and put 1TB drives in there for huge hi def recording capacity).
Just my little soap box on the topic.
“As a result, I’ve been stuck in analog purgatory.” Great choice of words. As you point out, now that you’ve managed to get out of purgatory and enter HD heaven, you still have the problem of moving the recording to another room, as we can easily do with tape and VCRs. So some of us see no easy way to escape do to the way prime time programming is scheduled, so it’s effectively analog hell.
10 years ago TiVo was awesome. Then they got arrogant & complacent, their prices remained high in spite of the competition (who did they think they were – Apple?) and worse, their software quality dropped once they fired lots of the U.S. & European development staff & outsourced development overseas. Crashing, missed recordings, frozen playback, broken connectivity between PC application and unit, etc.
The hardware is commodity, and now everyone’s computer can double has a HTPC. Tivo’s “guide” feature & intelligence was touted as its advantage, but that is gone.
Clearly, TiVo is on fumes. Except for their patents, this company would be buried 6 ft in the ground.
If Motorola buys this turd, the CEO should be run out on rails
Well, I wouldn’t mind Moto buying TiVo, because then maybe my cable box (supplied by Motorola) could get rid of what I consider to be a crappy software stack (Microsoft). I loved my TiVo, but had to say buh-bye to it when we went with digital cable from our local provider (Surewest, which is essentially the same service as AT&T with the same hardware but over Fiber).
I just cannot stand the Microsoft interface. It is less intuitive than it should be, and like all things Microsoft, tries to hide its deficiencies with a bunch of useless eye-candy (look, ma, I can do transparencies without blue screening!)
Would the gov’t let Echostar buy Tivo? Ergen could probably just write a(nother) check.
I was a TiVo subscriber for almost ten years, mainly because the user interface was way better than what was being put on the Motorola boxes from the cable company. Two things happened that began to diminish the utility of TiVo: the forced move to the CableCard system, which was never and still isn’t supported properly by the cable companies, and the spurning of the hard-core user/hacker community. The original TiVo series 1 was open and very hackable, with lots of add-ons available to the less skittish users. I upgraded my hard drives and added an ethernet card to my original Philips unit. The series 2 built-in the ethernet NIC, and started adding signed bootcode which left it pretty closed to the tinkerers. I was able to upgrade the hard drives, but little else. The DirecTV TiVo was even less hackable, but was at least light years ahead of what DirecTV had available. The biggest problem was that TiVo stopped supporting DirecTV, so a huge chunk of the user base that was on satellite had to migrate over to DirecTV’s own boxes. 4 years after I returned to DirecTV, I was able to get on the beta test list for the new DirecTiVo, and I’m left completely underwhelmed. It doesn’t work with the rest of the DirecTV boxes, so Whole Home Viewing is out. In the meantime, the DirecTV DVR’s have improved so much, about the only thing I can think of that TiVo has over them is the Suggestions feature, which will auto record stuff it thinks you like based on your viewing pattern, which I can live without, and the enhanced search function, which allows you to search based on actors, genres, etc, which I wish the DirecTV DVR’s had. Since TiVo won’t work with the rest of the DirecTV boces already deployed in my home, I see no point in it. Yes, the interface is better, but the version of DirecTiVo I have is not very snappy on the HR22 it’s based on. DirecTV is in the process of rolling out a new, enhanced HD user interface, that will get it closer to the TiVo experience. TiVo is losing its relevance. Perhaps a Google buyout would inject some much-needed oxygen into the product. Making the TiVo experience open-source, or at least API-friendly, would allow the tinkerers to take another look and perhaps add some excitement to it again. As it is now, TiVo has a hard time giving their Premier boxes away for $99, a third of the price of the original. It’s too much of a hassle to have your cable company technician come out and try to set up the CableCards properly, if you’re a Dish satellite subscriber, you are entirely out of luck, and if you’re a DirecTV, FiOS or Uverse subscriber, why bother?
Well, as others have stated, Motorola Mobility would be the one interested in buying up TiVo since it own the set-top box side of Motorola.
That said, it would make an interesting purchase for Google/Motorola Mobility as it would be a prime move to putting Android/GoogleTV into the hands of millions very quickly – just upgrade all those TiVos to version of Android/GoogleTV. The TiVo’s already run Linux, so there wouldn’t be any driver issues – it’s just a matter of how compatible and capable the existing hardware is for running Android; if it’s not, then the next generation would be re-targeted as such and it’ll happen as the devices turn-over.
Cisco could do a good job with the unit, provided they treat it more like they do Linksys than their other acquisitions where they normally integrate the products into their main product lines and mess everything up doing so because it’s just a quick’n dirty solution instead of being done right.
Silly question: Does it make any sense for Netflix to buy TiVO? Or for a merger of sorts? Seems to me that streaming and time-shifting are complimentary services, and Netflix can have a definitive reference hardware platform to stream to, which they control.
I have a TiVO Series 3 HD unit. A couple of years ago TiVO offered a deal to $12.95/month subscribers: For only $99, I was offered and bought a lifetime subscription. So I was “under water” on if for only 8 months. I wonder how many of TiVO’s subscribers are like me–no monthly revenue and every reason to hold onto my existing machine until it dies.
For those viewers who insist on time shifting their TV and/or watch worldwide sports (e.g. Formula 1 racing) TiVO is by far the best user interface out there even though the machinery is nothing special. I suspect the only value they have is in the IP for their service. I hope they are purchased by a company offering a box compatible with Comcast.
Err, Mr Cringley, Tivo recently reversed the trend of loosing subs, started gaining subs. Please read up on it before you join the “Tivo is dead” crowd who have always been proven wrong, since around 2002.
One more thing Mr Cringely, why would Motorola buy Tivo having just agreed to sell it’s Set Top Box division to Google?
Cisco has had some severe indigestion in recent years, I doubt it has the stomach for even a small bite such as Tivo.
There is a Fool who thinks MSFT may be after Tivo
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/01/05/is-microsoft-gunning-for-tivo.aspx
The article says “However, if television is the game that the tech giants are playing, it probably pays to warm up to the company that owns the playbook.” That sounds reasonable except the company that owns the playbook has their hands and feet tied and are also blindfolded by the MPA which owns Congess. So the needed move for any company wanting to get into the “TiVo” business would be to buy the IP and Congess on behalf of the people.
I’ve been a TIVO user for 9 years, starting with lifetime subs from S1, then S2, then S3 HD and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience of getting free entertainment from 80 or so over-the-air stations in Southern California. .. But in September I bought a Google TV device and soon realized that TIVO’s days are numbered.
60% of the programming which I record on TIVO can be found on the internet and can be streamed to GTV. Why have a PVR when the web can be everyone’s DVR? I cancelled many of my TIVO Season Pass.
The remaining 40% consist of sport and first-run shows which the networks resist putting on their website immediately. This will happen in time when the networks realize the the internet is just another delivery mechanism to allow them to reach end consumers and figure out a way to monetize. For now, I still need a DVR.
A couple weeks ago, I downloaded PLEX client to my GTV and PLEX server to my PC and soon realized that my PC/GTV can take care of the remaining 40% and put my TIVO out of a job. PLEX allows me to stream content from my PC to GTV. If I install a tuner and put my lazy PC to work, I can retire my TIVO and use my PC as a whole-house DVR and stream recordings to GTVs connected to each TV. This DVR setup will someday go away too.
… and that’s not all! The internet provides me with … not 80, not 200, not 500, but an almost endless number channels. Sites pop up which provide content (Netflix, Hulu, youtube ..) or catalog the web’s watchable content. It isn’t there yet, but companies such as Google is organizing the web’s content and providing programming guide to the web while others provide content. I now find that I spend 70% of my time in front TV viewing web content and only 30% on watching TIVO recording.
TIVO had a headstart to great technology and a prime spot in our living room for years and has done nothing and its market share has eroded. Internet content is coming and will soon make TIVO obsolete. RIP my sweet TIVO.
“If I install a tuner and put my lazy PC to work, I can retire my TIVO and use my PC as a whole-house DVR and stream recordings to GTVs connected to each TV. This DVR setup will someday go away too.”
Luckily for Tivo there are a lot of people out there who do not know/want to install a tuner on their PC. Nor do they want to search the web for programs they want to watch. They their Tivo do the searching and recording what they want. Also note Tivo has Netflix, Hulu and YuoTube integrated. You can watch content from those sources right on your Tivo.
“TIVO had a headstart to great technology and a prime spot in our living room for years and has done nothing and its market share has eroded. Internet content is coming and will soon make TIVO obsolete. RIP my sweet TIVO.”
YATIDC. DVR is not dead, Tivo is not going away anytime soon. The number of DVRs is still on the rise and will continue to rise until the MSOs replace them with something new. Until then Tivo DVR will reign supreme. If Tivo does not keep up and innovate when the DVR numbers start declining Tivo may start to shrink, but as it is Tivo is growing it’s subs again and has a lot of cash to fight thieves who have stolen Tivo’s technology.
@DrDVR
Setting up the PC to become a DVR is only a temporary step. Content is moving to the internet rapidly . The web will soon become our DVR with archives of these content. Hulu, Netflix, ESPN3, PBS, etc. already contain vast content archives … and more is coming. Smart TVs will enable access to this content from our living room, obliviating the need to record shows.
It is true more content will be available (already there is a wast selection) on the Internet, but that does not mean DVRs will go extinct over night. Like I said, number of DVRs is still rising and it is just getting started worldwide. Tivo has partnerships in US and abroad. You are predicting Tivo’s death, and I am saying not so fast. Look at the facts, not just your own use of DVR functionality. I have been reading about death of Tivo since 2002. People have been proven wrong and this time they are wrong again. DVR is not going to vanish overnight.
News for anyone that buys Tivo “for its subscribers”. Keep supporting and supplying the Tivo hardware or you’ll lose those subscribers.
Replace it with some trashy Moto box with a Tivo badge on it and just watch em flee.
So what is Google going to do with SageTV (the DVR they bought?)
I love Tivo, but its retail side is nearly dead – it’s all deals with cable companies now.
The latest Tivo DVR is only for digital cable (no analog cable or over-the-air tuner)
Since I’m over-the-air only I’ve just bought a cheap net-top to experiment with as a HTPC.
I can’t stream (too slow) in HD, but I can buy commercial-free HD shows via Amazon (BTW, free content online is almost always SD, you pay if you want HD)
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