My Anti-TiVo Rant
January 15th, 2011, 10:39pm by JakePosted this to their support contact address. Doubt I’ll ever hear a thing. Color me stupid for buying a half-baked product expecting that they’d actually fix it.
For the 3rd time in a month, I’ve had to painstakingly re-enter my Amazon account info. Email address, username & passwords. Total disaster, takes 10 minutes each time. Ditto YouTube. Not to mention the quality on YouTube is beyond horrendous, playlists are non functional and features are arbitrary. The way video podcasts are handled makes them all but useless, since I need to actively delete older entries to actually see new stuff. There is no real ability to browse Netflix titles.
I’ve been a TiVo user for 10 years. But I really don’t know why at this point. The much touted “One Box” turned out to be just so much marketing nonsense, and nearly every aspect of internet video on the TiVo is terrible in some way. It’s neither simple nor powerful. I just don’t get it.
I used to encourage my friends to buy TiVos, and some did. Now, I regret that decision and in the future I will steer them to other solutions as the platform is stale. No new feature rolled out in the last 10 years has been fully baked, and obvious candidates for integration such as Flickr are ignored. I’m a lifetime sub on 2 devices, but I’m almost ready to sell ’em both and find a better solution.
Fix your online video functions. Video podcasts, Netflix, YouTube & Amazon are all riddled with obvious flaws that should have been fixed before launch, not still causing issues years later. I give up. As one of my friends just tweeted, “@jakerome wow, @TiVo really had to work hard to lose you. You used to love it. That’s not the kind of hard work that’s good for biz.”
January 16th, 2011 at 2:10 am
Very timely, I was tempted to get one when you posted their $65 deal on Woot, but now i’m glad I didn’t. On the other hand, all the ways I currently access Netflix, Youtube, Amazon and Video Podcasts are also flawed in some way too, so I actually might find Tivo to be an improvement. Not to mention having a 4th and 5th OTA tuner :).
January 16th, 2011 at 2:30 am
It’s a fine DVR. Integrated search works well enough. But man, if you don’t have the keyboard remote it’s completely useless for ‘net video.
January 16th, 2011 at 2:37 am
It can’t be as bad as trying to input text by waving helplessly at the kinect sensor :). But at least that’s “cutting edge!”
January 16th, 2011 at 8:19 am
Do you think TiVo will scrap the subscription model anytime soon? If they could compete on more equal pricing footing with Roku, Boxee, and the even cheaper alternatives, they could really pump the DVR function as a great differentiating feature — and supposedly dvr is their bread and butter. I can’t imagine that they’re selling the boxes at a huge loss, so raise the initial price a bit, scrap the subscription, sell on dvr features. They’re no worse than anybody else at Internet video.
January 16th, 2011 at 12:37 pm
They’ve gone in the opposite direction… free @ $20/month. They’re supposed to embed their internet video stuff into a range of Best Buy TVs, but I haven’t seen it. I think if they could sell it for $300 lifetime, they’d have a lot of buyers, but I don’t think that’s profitable for TiVo.
Once can only presume that the reason TiVo has left so many features half-baked (video podcasts, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, no Flickr integration, no apps yet) is they don’t think it sells units besides checking off a box. Maybe I should have realized that a year ago?
January 16th, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Ha, I say the exact same thing about webOS (“must have” features are there, but they are all substandard).
Anyway, online video features have sold a million AppleTVs and a million Roku boxes, so there is a market for them, but certainly not for $400 or whatever TiVo costs now. Maybe TiVo should try for a trojan horse approach– sell itself as a $150 Roku competitor that let’s you *unlock* the DVR functionality with a $5/mo subscription? It’d be like the Comcast cable box that Derrick had (and never activated).
January 16th, 2011 at 11:11 pm
Difference is that while webOS features are substandard, they are good enough (other than lagginess across apps). The TiVo net video apps aren’t really good enough.
January 16th, 2011 at 11:11 pm
I’m also happy to report the iTunes syncing still works just fine for the Palm Pre.
January 17th, 2011 at 11:17 pm
My complaints are getting a bit of traction.
http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?p=8331847
January 18th, 2011 at 8:50 am
Had to post something just to see my post count. Surprised that I’d only had 2 other posts in ten years of membership. I do miss TivoCommunity… The dorks at TheGreenButton were nowhere near as knowledgeable!
January 18th, 2011 at 8:55 am
BTW I just re-read the TiVO Premiere review on engadget. They didn’t really review the online experience, but it was pretty lukewarm nonetheless. Did TiVo ever enable the 2nd processor core and does it speed things up? And did they *really* get rid of the 30 second skip?
January 18th, 2011 at 11:02 am
30 second skip is now automatic (no secret codes), but it doesn’t skip anymore. It fast-forwards 30x speed, 30 seconds for each click. That’s a direct gift to advertisers, since even high-speed ads work a bit. Don’t know why TiVo bothered, not like advertisers are going to reward for the consumer-hostile update.
Not a huge deal, works well enough, helpful at times annoying at times. All in all, I preferred the old way.
January 18th, 2011 at 11:32 am
Most of your messages are likely found in the archives, which doesn’t get included in your post count, Steve.
http://archive.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?s=6f1da2c77605062b99a5f367a3ef8ad0&threadid=19014&highlight=sbono13