Tivo ups and downs

Tivo is in the news quite a bit lately, and as always, it elicits strong opinions. The NYTimes has an article entitled How Do I Love Thee, TiVo? in which several Tivo users evangelise about their box of tricks, including the revealing father who says

"Before we got the TiVo, my son was getting C's and D's in school because he was staying up late to watch his shows and going to school half-awake," said Mr. Cambron, a television engineer in Kansas City, Mo. Now that the Cambrons can time-shift programs, his son is getting enough sleep and his grades have risen to A's and B's.

Presumably there's no watershed in the USA - I remember the days when I couldn't watch The Sweeney because it was on after 9pm!

Things aren't so cosy in the mind of PC Magazine's Jim Louderback, who predicts TiVo Will Die because the technology is getting cheaper, HDTV is coming and competition from Murdoch's DirecTV. Tivo's crown jewels has to be their superbly usable software, and I wonder if they made more of their licensing, they could weather this storm. Somewhat more worryingly, Jim notes

Of course, I should have seen this coming. Over the years I've observed that the more arrogant and less responsive a company gets, the more likely it's about to fail. Oddly, when the going gets tough, most companies don't do a gut check and rededicate themselves to service. Instead, they circle the wagons and go into a preventive defense—and search for someone to sue.

In the early years of TiVo, I'd get instant service. TiVo even gave me the name of a special ambassador—a strategy meant to ensure that the company got a fair hearing in the press, on the Web, and in other public forums. Today my inquiries go unanswered—or even worse, I never receive a promised response. Hold times on the help lines are interminable: It took me over half an hour last week to determine why the company had charged me $14. And I'll wager that Dish Network is not the first company or the last to be sued for IP rustling.

It's surely not the product designers' fault. They've built a great new category and an incredibly useful and usable product. But a few dumb decisions, coupled with intransigent corporate arrogance and overweening lawyers, have doomed TiVo to death. I'll surely miss the poor guy when he's gone.

Kottke.org are running a survey: Who doesn't like TiVo?. Despite worrying that they'd be preaching to the converted, there's a lot of interesting replies as to why people find certain things a problem, including the very telling

I don't like Tivo itself, I like my Tivo but in blighty we can't get Tivo2 or even new tivo 1's so when they die we have to use inferior alternatives (am hoping rumors of apple pvr device are true otherwise will probably have to be PSX.). So i have Tivo 1 but when the harddrive platters spin off into the sunset. The problem here was how they sold tivo : i sold about 10 to friends after they saw it but adverts with dogs are a hard sell for such a device. Their UK website hasn't seen an update in years and its all too depressing.

I remember one of my friends getting TiVo: I'd never heard of it, but once I'd seen it in action, I went right out and bought one, along with several other of my friends. I have gone on to demo it to others who have gone right out and got one. Until supplies dried up, of course. Now even my girlfriend wants one, and she's not a gadgety person at all. If only TiVo would re-enter the UK market. *sigh*.