Tivo Premier Fail, Series 4… sorry 3.1 announced.
Lets make no mistake I have always been a fan of the beloved Tivo.
We purchased our first one on Fathers Day 2001, Chris wanted nothing to do with the thing and thought it was a complete waste of money.
Skip forward almost 10 years, we own 2 of the devices and have owned all the “Series” so far in fact the only reason we left DirecTV was because our Tivo’s were failing and they were not releasing new ones.
We own a Series 3 now, it works like it’s supposed to for the most part however the clunky “Cable Card” integration with Cox records some grey screens for us from time to time. We have longed for the “On Demand” features that we simply can’t get and we have tried the Cox DVR… it’s not Tivo.
So when Tivo was having a big announcement of a new product we were all ears, the excitement was bigger than ever! Tivo had announced a COUPLE YEARS AGO that the DirecTV relationship was a alive and a new unit was around the corner.
Well the “Series 3.1″ was announced and it simply is a software upgrade we should have got anyway. I mean really you have people paying $13.99/mo for these things stuff like the new features should be in software, not a whole new box. They are introducing a new remote that is cool… works on bluetooth which none of the current models have.
Tivo’s subscriber base at one point consisted of over 50% DirecTV subscribers, considering none of their current units are compatible with the new satellites I doubt that number is there. Tivo is bleeding customers to cable and other DVR platforms but can’t get the basics.
The new unit also still has no native WiFi support? Come on my PS3, Wii, ipod heck even my cell phone does WiFi! They want $90 for a WiFi adapter? Who wrote this business plan?
My favorite part of the new boxes is the integration with Amazon and Netflix, the features are intended to get you to SPEND MORE MONEY on downloads they most definitely will get a cut of… so why would this not be a simple software upgrade for current owners? Then again we can do this now, it’s just crappy software that keeps us from doing it. (IE Purchases, the recording features rock)
There is nothing premier about this product and no reason to buy it. Tivo is just like a Jeep, when they say it’s a Jeep thing & the core customers are being shafted and will be jumping ship to other options. They keep supporting this technology like CableCards that only 1/2 way work, don’t natively support tru-2-way (the next standard) and no DirecTV it’s a box that can’t get what most people watch, cable TV.
Needless to say this is the end of Tivo, they announce their new product on Facebook and over 1/2 the comments are asking where the DirecTV Tivo is.
If you own Tivo stock get out, it’s over. My new DirecTV DVR’s will be installed tomorrow morning.
It was stated on Gizmodo that the new interface is based on Flash. That’s a dubious technical choice IMHO, but, once that choice is made, it is indubitable that the old CPU doesn’t have enough oomph to execute the new UI with reasonable response. The new box has a dual-core CPU. I think you would HATE the new UI running on the old hardware!
The new box has the nice feature of a disk (SATA) port so the homeowner can stick on a bigger external drive without opening the case. (That’ll hurt the likes of Weaknees!) And I believe it does have an Ethernet jack so if you don’t mind stringing Cat-5 wire to your modem you can have probably better bandwidth for those downloads than the wifi would give you anyway.
I have been giving this some more thought and I will more than likely make another post with “What Tivo Should Have Done”. I agree about the processor but my concern was they focused their efforts in the wrong place. The currnet box (s3) has a SATA port and Ethernet already, this box looses one of the CableCard slots so if your Cable Co don’t support multistream your out of luck.