TiVo, DVRs and the future of television
November 27th, 2009, 3:41pm by JakeFollow-on for the discussion we’ve been having about TiVo’s market situation, prompted in part by this article about TiVo being dead. The premise of the article is silly– TiVo has been on the Engadget deathwatch for about 5 years and still has a marginally profitable business supplemented by an immensely profitable patent litigation wing, and nearly-as-good DVRs have been around at least 5 years. But, TiVo does continue to struggle, and what gets me is that the monthly fee is, at this point, often less than what Cablecos charge– a brand new TiVo HD DVR costs $550 today w/ 3 years of service (lifetime for $650), only $15/month. If you buy a new HD today, add an HD TiVo w/ lifetime for $500 and you pay $10/month for 4 years.
But good enough + easy are winning this war, even as the early cableco price advantage (at one time only $5/month for DVR) wanes. Even as TiVo strikes deals with the cable companies, their boxes are far from ubiquitous, although upcoming deals w/ DirecTV and Virgin (in Britain) could change that. What are your thoughts?
November 28th, 2009 at 12:44 am
Let me just say that I think $16 is too much to pay for dvr service from any provider. Seems to me that there’s got to be someone out there charging a reasonable price for dvr– satellite charges $6 so they seem to get it. I’ve never paid more than $5/mo (DirecTiVo and Comcast), which was just under the pain threshold. ‘course, I have to factor in the upfront $99 I paid for my DirecTiVo, but considering I still have it 8 years later, that’s probably negligible :).
When you can get most tv programs free after broadcast, either cable OnDemand or on the internet, all dvr really adds is the “to do” list organization and bookmarking your place. Not worth $16, imo. Could buy 8 shows on iTunes for that and cancel cable entirely.
November 28th, 2009 at 6:13 am
Have you guys been following the developments with Pirate Bay closing down and Mininova supposedly hosting only legal torrents? Of course it’ll still be possible to find whatever you want to download, but it might be getting a little harder to go the torrent route.
November 28th, 2009 at 10:49 am
@Mike TPB, the site, hasn’t closed down, just their tracker. They are still indexing warez with the use of magnet files (a decentralized method for finding torrent files).