TiVo dives into pile of cash, steely eyed investors don't blink TiVo came out with its strongest set of figures this week, including underlying TiVo service subscribers, as well as bundling in the results of its patents settlements with Cisco and Motorola, and yet its enterprise value could not be lower, showing that investors still have no confidence in its long-term business. TiVo has …
For me it's a bit bizarre how well TiVo are doing, given how archaic their platform is for the user. The UI is unbelievably slow. 9 seconds to redraw a screen. Scrolling through menus, it can't keep up with button clicks. It's also flakey; roughly one time in four the EPG won't give programme details are allow me to request a new recording. Some of the UI is in HD and some isn't. TiVo has its own app platform, but they live in a separate ghetto off the main menu which is rarely visited, and they don't integrate into the TV experience.
This standard may have been acceptable 11 years ago when I got my Series 1, but is shocking if you compare it to the experience from a modern smartphone. (Speaking of which, they've been promising us an Android app for years, but it's still not available.) Now we see the XBox One can snap its apps over the TV feed, it just rubs in how far TiVo is from what it could be.
It was with huge sadness that I retired my two lifetime subscription TiVos when they withdrew the standalone service in the UK after they launched on Virgin. Switching to Sky+ seemed like a huge step backwards.
The degree of control that Sky are allowed over access to their sevivce has been hugely detrimental to consumers. They should have been required to provide a CAM so that third parties could integrate the Sky service into their own devices. Then we could have had a proper Sky-based TiVo which would have made a huge difference to their early penetration into the UK market. As it stands, TiVo is only available if you are on Virgin cable, an option not available to a large proportion of the population.
It seems to me that Sky needs to be separated into two companies, one supplying content and one supplying the infrastructure, in the same way that local-loop unbundling has been applied to BT. That would potentially open up the market to other satellite service vendors could put their own packages together by direct negotiation with individual channel providers, and develop or license their own receiver systems.
I loved my original TiVo a lot, it was easy to use, it caught a lot of films and TV progs I may have missed and was very good at handling wishlists and so on.
I extended the life of the unit by installing a beefier hard drive (40Gb ont he original units was a bit small), installed a network card to do updates over broadband rather than dial up and when Sky closed the EPG updates, switched to AltEPG so that it is still useful today.
What finally drove the nail intot he coffin was the requirement for an external freeview box that it could control over the IR wands and the lack of HD support. so I;ve now switched to a Pi running XBMC as my DVR of choice although it doesn't have the excellent wishlist capability that TiVo had.
If TiVo had the sense to release an updated box with HD support, network capability built in and a Freeview option I would snap it up. Instead they've tied themselves to a Virgin exclusive contract leaving all of us in non cabled areas out in the cold.
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