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serynApparently TiVo has come up with something new. *yawn*
I'm still using mine, but it irritates me regularly because the whole thing is fucking plastered with ads. I paid for a subscription to their "service" where they rebrand schedule data from somewhere else (and are thus completely "not responsible" for the quality of said data and the data often sucks.) and for service updates which seem to be just pre-caching of gigantic video ads. In the beginning it was a starred item in the main menu one could look at optionally. Now every time you pause a popular show, there's an ad. [And the ads are offensive. Cooking shows have ads for gastric band surgery.]
But the worst part is that the whole thing is worthless unless you have cable because it can't cleanly access online content. There is a special add-on service for that which requires a computer on your LAN to serve the data up. Oh yeah, and that's another thing, TiVo boxes didn't come with ethernet or wireless connectors. Maybe the newest ones do now, but for years after you bought the hundreds of dollars device (when DVD players were $25 and VCRs were free at any garage sale) you still had to buy an additional thingy for $30-50. It was a trivial item that couldn't have cost more than $5 if you could buy them from a store that wasn't interested in shafting you, or if they were included on the device to start with, but oh no, TiVo needed you to pay retail from someone else.
It's a damned good device, the Season Pass and Wishlist features are awesome. But this is technology from 10 years ago and even today's announcement doesn't change that profoundly. It still requires you to have your own data feed (via cable or satellite), it still requires you to have a LAN set up, your access to internet content is still restricted and filtered through their special program that costs extra, and they're still reselling schedule data from a provider who doesn't give a crap about the quality. So what if it now supports 1080p... Yesterday there were 3D TVs announced... TiVo's barely keeping up with HD. Can you imagine? They've had HD TiVos out for years now and they didn't support 1080p. What were they supporting then?
I said yesterday that I'd be happier paying Hulu than my cable company (fewer commercials, no giant cable box that randomly changes the channel while it's recording and which acts like a space heater in my living room)... I'm on that year promotional price with the cable company. When it ends, we're canceling. Ready for what the brand new TiVo supports? YouTube videos.
Maybe someday the TiVo people will find their mojo again and actually invent something before that technology is outdated. Losers.
I'm still using mine, but it irritates me regularly because the whole thing is fucking plastered with ads. I paid for a subscription to their "service" where they rebrand schedule data from somewhere else (and are thus completely "not responsible" for the quality of said data and the data often sucks.) and for service updates which seem to be just pre-caching of gigantic video ads. In the beginning it was a starred item in the main menu one could look at optionally. Now every time you pause a popular show, there's an ad. [And the ads are offensive. Cooking shows have ads for gastric band surgery.]
But the worst part is that the whole thing is worthless unless you have cable because it can't cleanly access online content. There is a special add-on service for that which requires a computer on your LAN to serve the data up. Oh yeah, and that's another thing, TiVo boxes didn't come with ethernet or wireless connectors. Maybe the newest ones do now, but for years after you bought the hundreds of dollars device (when DVD players were $25 and VCRs were free at any garage sale) you still had to buy an additional thingy for $30-50. It was a trivial item that couldn't have cost more than $5 if you could buy them from a store that wasn't interested in shafting you, or if they were included on the device to start with, but oh no, TiVo needed you to pay retail from someone else.
It's a damned good device, the Season Pass and Wishlist features are awesome. But this is technology from 10 years ago and even today's announcement doesn't change that profoundly. It still requires you to have your own data feed (via cable or satellite), it still requires you to have a LAN set up, your access to internet content is still restricted and filtered through their special program that costs extra, and they're still reselling schedule data from a provider who doesn't give a crap about the quality. So what if it now supports 1080p... Yesterday there were 3D TVs announced... TiVo's barely keeping up with HD. Can you imagine? They've had HD TiVos out for years now and they didn't support 1080p. What were they supporting then?
I said yesterday that I'd be happier paying Hulu than my cable company (fewer commercials, no giant cable box that randomly changes the channel while it's recording and which acts like a space heater in my living room)... I'm on that year promotional price with the cable company. When it ends, we're canceling. Ready for what the brand new TiVo supports? YouTube videos.
Maybe someday the TiVo people will find their mojo again and actually invent something before that technology is outdated. Losers.
