It's not that TiVo is hemmoraging cash, per se, but that they're blowing a huge amount of what would otherwise be profits on incentives. The clear intent is to drum up as many new subscribers as possible, and bank on the monthly service fees.

As a case study, I offer up my father. I tried to sell him on a TiVo. He wasn't interested, despite the fact that neither he nor my mom could really wrap their brains around the necessary effort to get their Dish receiver and VCR to work together. I suggested that Dad investigate the DIsh-brand PVR. They sent it to him for *free*, with I believe a $5 monthly fee, although he was complaining that it doesn't support dual tuner. Nonetheless, he and mom apparently love the thing.

It's hard to compete with free.

(Caveat: I hold a bunch of TiVo stock. I first bought a year ago at $7.50, was smugly satisfied as it went up to $12, then watched it descent downward. I bought again at $4.89, figuring it had to go up. It's not been a pretty ride, but I'm still long on the stock. I may sell before year's end to get the tax writeoff.)

The problem Tivo has is the old free DVRs from the cable company.
I just upgraded regular SA-DVR8000 to the HiDef DVR8350 for free.

Not as nice as Tivo in most respects but you get what you pay for

Still, my Myth-TV box is starting to take shape now.......

This all explains how desperately Tivo clung onto my subscription. I wanted to sell my SA Tivo to my old roommate who has been hurting since I took it with me. According to their website, the only way I could do that was to cancel my subscription, then he'll sign up with the box himself as a new subscriber.

So I called up Tivo and told them what I wanted to do. After a couple minutes of talking to the rep, he put me on hold for what seemed like around 10 minutes. When he came back, he said "So how's this, we'll lower your monthly fee to $6.99."

Well, I knew my old roommate wasn't sure if he would want to pay the $13, so I said OK

All I had to do was go into my online account, and change my details with him one by one (first contact info, then credit card, etc), ending with having him change his password. It's like I no longer owned the Tivo!

I know 2 families who settle for the kluge that is Comcast-provided DVR.. only because it's 4 or 5 dollars a month.

both admit its awkward and would probably enjoy the tivo experience over the half-baked copied-garbage that is being rented to them at the moment..

But I notice that the glory days are coming to an end for tivo- they're now pumping their own adverts when you skip recordings' adverts?

watch out for that slippery slope :-\ i'm glad i built a mythtv box a year ago when I looked at tivo. didnt want another monthly bill considering how little i watched tv. but having a PVR has changed that.. i enjoy tv now. I can queue, record and play back later @ my PC, in the bedroom on the xbox, in the movie room on the tv.. so many options for myth frontends and you can also http://mythtv from any PC in the house to queue an item. or stream one too. just need a small interface so its useful on my zaurus w/wifi

I haven't looked at a Tivo financial statement in a while. A year ago, my read is that they'd be profitable this year. Instead, they cranked out these massive incentive programs. If you want to try a thought experiment, just look at their total number of subscribers and multiply by the service fees, and you'll get an impressive amount of inbound money.

In many ways, Tivo is trying to avoid being the next Apple. They're aggressively looking to license their software to the Japanese and Korean box builders -- a very sound strategy that could pay out in the years to come. Still, in the short term, Tivo is clearly being hammered by every announcement that satellite and cable vendors are giving DVRs away for close to free. Another long term gamble might be Tivo's patent portfolio. I believe they're suing Dish right now over patent infringement. These lawsuits take years to go anywhere, but the payout could be quite significant, particularly because, if they survive unscathed, they'd be able to twist everybody else's arms for royalties.

Another follow-up on the high def Tivo...

I had heard the thing had four tuners- two over-the-air tuners, and two satellite tuners.

So when I'd programmed it to tape Wednesday's West Wing on over-the-air NBC highdef, and "The House of Sand and Fog" on HBO highdef satellite, I figured it still had two tuners free and I could watch some live TV while it grabbed those shows.

Nope. Turns out that it can only use two of those tuners at any given time. So I was unable to watch live TV while those two things taped.

Not a particularly huge problem or anything (just the fact that it can tape two high-def things at the same time is bloody awesome to begin with), I just wanted to make sure that anyone reading this thread understood that there was a limitation to the four-tuner thing.

Yeah, I went searching for that information before the Tivo got to me, because it seemed too good to be true. It was. It makes sense, though. I can't imagine the strain it would cause to be viewing and recording four HD sources, although the fact that it can record two and play a third is pretty amazing.

Isn't it tough to throw those huge files around, though? I know my desktop, though it isn't optimized for such a thing, takes a lot of CPU to merely play the feed from my HD card, let alone record it.

Don't know about the Hi Def but the standalone ones have dedicated hardware to do encoding and decoding. There shouldn't be any significant difference between a digital stream and an analog signal in this respect unless they use different bitrates. Digital -> Analog conversion is also all done by hardware.

Major bottlenecks would be HD speed and IO bus speed really.