Bashing TiVo

Yeah, I know. I’m the ulti­mate TiVo evan­ge­list. I love TiVo. Peo­ple who know me know the praises I have sung about TiVo. And yet… and yet. This past week I have come to dis­like TiVo, the company.

Let me be clear, lest there be any mis­un­der­stand­ing. Time-shifting tele­vi­sion has changed my life, and for the bet­ter. The con­cept, the inter­face, the sim­plic­ity with which TiVo pre­sented this com­plex idea, was remark­able. Still is. There’s noth­ing like it in the mar­ket­place. There are com­peti­tors, sure. There are HD com­peti­tors, and free com­peti­tors, and hack­acble com­peti­tors… but none of them approach the ease-of-use, the inter­face, the sim­plic­ity of what TiVo hath wrought.

That said, this is for the search engines: TiVo sucks! The com­pany, that is.

As you may or may not know, I have a new TiVo. A Series 2 TiVo, which is bet­ter than my old one in a cou­ple of ways. First, it is blessed to receive the lat­est TiVo soft­ware update, which added some cool stuff like folder orga­ni­za­tion in my Now Play­ing list. (All of Aidan’s Mr. Rogers episodes are lumped together in a folder! Yay!) Sec­ond, this new Series 2 TiVo has Inter­net capa­bil­i­ties. You can hook it up to the Inter­net so that it can get sched­ule updates, so that you can sched­ule shows remotely, so that you can con­nect two TiVos (if you have two) in your home, so that you can see pho­tos and lis­ten to music from your home com­puter, and finally, so that you can save (and even­tu­ally receive?) movies to/from the Internet/your com­puter. It is an Internets-connected-glorious-potentiality.

Or not.

To con­nect to the Inter­net, you have to buy some addi­tional hard­ware (because in their wis­dom they added a USB port to the Series 2. Not an Eth­er­net port. A USB port. For which there is exactly one use, attach­ing a USB to Eth­er­net adapter. Hello?). $20 for a wire­less adapter if you have a wire­less net­work at home, or $25 for a wired one, if you have an eth­er­net jack nearby. Of course, if you go with the wire­less option, you’d best be run­ning either no secu­rity on your net­work, or the easy-to-crack WEP scheme, because the very secure WPA scheme is not sup­ported by TiVo. And if you go with the wired option, be sure to buy only one of the two tested and approved adapters, one of which is no longer made (be sure to find the ver­sion 1 adapter, because the cur­rent ver­sion 2 is not compatible!).

Should you actu­ally get con­nected (and to be fair, many peo­ple have) you’ll then dis­cover that the cool movie saving/sharing fea­ture (called TiV­o­ToGo) is not avail­able for Mac­in­tosh com­put­ers. Actu­ally, the whole photo and music shar­ing thing is not either, as TiVo points out that the required soft­ware is not com­pat­i­ble with the lat­est ver­sion of Mac OS X (Tiger). It works, with an error or two, some of the time, and there’s a hack you can down­load to get it to work more reli­ably, but you have to run it each time you want to share music/photos. Oh, and TiVo Online Sched­ul­ing? I was expect­ing to be able to log into my TiVo and manip­u­late it remotely, but that is not the case. What you *can* do is pick a show from an online list and tell your TiVo at home to record it. You can’t change its pri­or­ity, you can’t see if it will con­flict with any­thing else, it is purely a one-way transaction.

So.

I pay my monthly fee (and TiVo has now added a “ser­vice con­tract” whereby if you can­cel ser­vice within one year of sign­ing up, you owe them like, $100, all that on top of the $12 monthly), and I get my ser­vice. But part of that ser­vice includes the cool TiVo Home Media Fea­tures: music and photo shar­ing, TiV­o­ToGo, etc. I can’t get at those fea­tures with­out pony­ing up another $20 for an adapter. And even then, I per­son­ally can’t get them, because of my plat­form choice.

How much of my monthly fee do you think goes towards these ser­vices? Some of the TiVosi would sug­gest that these are free, because you used to have to pay extra for them, and now they just come with the sys­tem, at no extra charge. That seems disin­gen­u­ous at best, and inten­tion­ally decep­tive at worst.

I find I am ter­ri­bly frus­trated, dis­ap­pointed, and even angry at TiVo for what I have to endure as a cus­tomer. It should just work. The orig­i­nal TiVo did. You plugged it in, and it just worked. It was glo­ri­ous. This new box does every­thing the old one did, with­out a hitch. But all these new things, these new cool things… you have to pay extra, jump through hoops, pray and fid­dle to even get it to sort of work. That’s not the way it should be.

In the end, I feel betrayed. I find I don’t care about the com­pany any­more. I feel like they don’t care about me. The rela­tion­ship between us is now just about money and ser­vice, like the way I feel about my cell phone com­pany, or my cable tele­vi­sion com­pany. And to that end, I would be inter­ested in some way to recoup my fees, since it is TiVo’s fault I can­not access these ser­vices they pro­moted to me. Any­one else interested?