PVRblog

The complete oral history of TiVo and TiVo's core problem

A couple weeks ago, I did an hour long interview with the writer of "The Definitive Oral History of TiVo" and he used a few quotes of mine in the storytelling. It's a very good and long read, and one of the things that was new to me was hearing they were deliberate in how they gave away so many early TiVos to celebrities and even online nerds like me who blogged a lot. I kinda wish they had a few more voices like Margret Smith to get more info on how they drilled down on the design that really won over early users like me.

The one thing the writer missed was my comments on why TiVo didn't end up in every household and I think it was (and continues to be) their core marketing problem. I remember having this conversation many times over from 2000-2007 with friends. They'd say to me, how great is a TiVo? And I'd say that it was definitely life changing, that it let you become untethered to TV schedules and you could watch sports replays all you wanted, and you'd never miss your favorite shows. Simply put, it made TV good again.

And then they'd ask, how do I get started? And I'd have to answer:

1. Go buy a ~$300 box at Best Buy
2. Bring it home and hook it up to your TV, your A/V unit, and the phone line you must have near your TV (get a new phone jack installed if need be)
3. Sign on to a monthly plan or pony up loads of money for a lifetime subscription even though you don't know how well you'll even like it yet
4. Use the simple, well-designed, and amazing remote to enter dozens of shows you love, one letter at a time using the remote.
5. Wait a week or two for the TiVo to start grabbing your shows
6. A few weeks later, you get to enjoy your TiVo! 

In software company speak, their onboarding process was atrocious. In hindsight many years later, TiVo should have relentlessly worked on every one of these barriers to lessen the number of steps and cost to consumers so they could get to that final step of loving their TiVo and TV much easier.

The box was too expensive, and the monthly costs were hard to swallow on top of your cable bill. They didn't add ethernet and wifi until much later, and they didn't let you add shows to your TiVo via your keyboard and mouse on their website until maybe 2010 or so. 

TiVo was and continues to be incredible, but I think they'd be in a much different place today if getting new customers up and running was much easier, much earlier on in their company history.

TiVo at 20

TiVo turns 20 this week! A look at how far the DVR has come in 20 years (and a look at our first commercial from Y2K 🙀).

— TiVo (@TiVo) March 28, 2019

TiVo is now 20, and looking back I realize I've had one for 19 years, getting my first TiVo in March of 2000 through a contest on their site. I used that TiVo for the next several years, adding and upgrading hard drives and doing it all from the Linux command line until later, I got the DirecTV with its early pre-HD DirecTiVo box which I loved (it recorded digital streams natively, no compression artifacts). Then a Series 2 TiVo, then every new version that followed after that. The only TiVo model I haven't owned is the new Bolt since my 4-year-old Roamio seems to do it all just fine.

For the last two years I've asked myself why I feel no need to buy a TiVo Bolt, and it's mostly because of Apple TV. I try out a lot of gear and I've owned every version of the Apple TV since its launch. In the early days, I hacked mine to mirror browser video and any downloaded movies I had. Later, it was the easiest way to use loads of video streaming apps like Netflix and Hulu.

Eventually, every app ended up on every device (with varying quality of experience), but Apple TV continues to boot up faster, fly through menus, and play video faster and smoother than other platforms. About the only thing wrong with Apple TV is the dreadful remote control. A year or two ago, I noticed that I watch stuff on Apple TV about 50% of the time, with 50% of the time spent browsing shows on my TiVo when I have time to sit down and watch some shows.

As streaming TV offerings have matured, that ratio has slid into the solid 80% Apple TV/20% TiVo range these days. Most shows I record on my TiVo can be found on Hulu. I have dedicated apps for the NBA and MotorTrend, and have slowly transitioned to watching most network shows on Hulu instead of my TiVo.

The kicker to all this is my home internet connection is a fiber optic cable, installed in 2007 with a couple hundred HD channels and 100Mbps internet, both of which were revolutionary at the time. But in 2019, that same fiber line delivers HD television that is still 720p and my internet caps out at 200Mbps. I know my fiber line has so much more capacity, but not much has changed in 12 years.

I've never been a stickler for resolutions. I used to think 720p and 1080p were nearly indiscernible in most living room setups, but as my TV has gotten bigger and become OLED and 4K and gotten properly closer to my sofa, I really notice it now, especially with 4K streaming films available. A few months ago, my TiVo missed recording an episode of Brooklyn-9-9 after a football game, so I caught it on Hulu and realized it looks way, way better there. And with my commercial-free Hulu option, there aren't even ads to skip. The experience was light years ahead of the one on my TiVo. I tapped two buttons and Hulu tracked every new episode for me, and now Apple dutifully notifies me when there's a new episode ready to watch.

I'm an early adopter to a lot of technology, but it's mostly in the mindset of "try anything and everything to see what works best." I don't typically make rash decisions about technology (I had a landline up until 2012 in my house). And though I have friends who were cord-cutters over ten years ago that seemed too drastic back then, since I'd miss out on a lot of casual TV programming, and have to run a PC next to my television that wouldn't have a good (or easy) user experience. These days I'm frequently the only person I know in a group of people that still has cable TV.

But I have to be honest and look at the writing on the wall. My cable company charges me about $90 per month for their biggest HD package, and yet, most of the same shows are available on apps in higher resolution completely free of commercials. I'm not a huge sports fan and only rarely watch live TV at all, but if I was in a pinch and was throwing a party where people expected it, I could grab a YouTubeTV subscription to watch the Oscars or the Super Bowl or any other event live on the major networks.

Today I realize I have no need for a TiVo Bolt, and frankly, have no need for cable. Hulu plus Netflix plus Amazon Video plus HBO plus Showtime plus Motortrend plus YouTube give me about 90% of what I watch, do it cheaper, and do it at a higher resolution than cable. I don't expect my cable TV provider to offer up 4K streams any time soon, and I don't feel good about the future of TiVo given it is hitched firmly to a declining technology like cable TV.

I don't know what TiVo's next 20 years are going to look like, and as much as I love their product, they need to aggressively seek out other options, maybe pitch themselves as a killer device for over-the-air TV and embrace cord-cutters wholeheartedly because simply being a premium experience for recorded TV isn't enough of a market anymore when cable TV remains a stagnant, expensive product that each day feels more and more like an anachronism for customers.

Amazon Fire TV first impressions

Yesterday my Amazon Fire TV and game controller arrived via UPS, and after spending a few hours with it, I wanted to write up my first impressions of the device.

The Setup

First off the packaging is nicely minimal and unboxing went smoothly and was quite easy. Then I realized they could pull that off because Amazon designed the device, the service it runs, the site I bought it from, and finally the packing and shipping of the item. The people at UPS were the only only non-Amazon hands that ever touched my device (and Amazon drones could have prevented it :). That kind of complete end-to-end control from soup-to-nuts on devices is something very few companies on earth can do, so it's worth mentioning that Amazon capitalized on it by making some nice simple packaging that was easy to get into and get rid of.

Setup was a cinch, with just a plugged in cable from an existing HDMI port on my A/V unit. The first thing it needed to do was connect to my WiFi network, and then we were off. It was a bit of a downer to see even though the device was less than 48 hours past the announcement/launch, it required a lengthy software update as soon as I powered it up. It took about 15 minutes on my very fast fiber line to download a patch and then install it. Following the install, a nice little animated how-to video played to teach you how the controller worked and how Voice Search operated. Voice search works a lot like Siri on an iPhone and tested well.

Convenience, at a price?

The most surprising aspect to me during setup was I didn't have to tell the device who I was by logging into Amazon (which is a pain since I use a password manager and would have to look up and enter a 20-digit mis-mash of characters). All my recent Prime Video plays were shown, and I checked the Settings screen to see that in fact the Fire TV knew I was Matt Haughey and I was already logged into my account and it knew I already had Amazon Prime. I'm flat-out impressed that the device shipped to me with me logged in already.

During setup, I was asked about "Parental Controls" on purchasing (it would require a PIN) and I skipped it, not thinking much about it, until later when testing out purchasing, I noticed buying a show/game is the most painless true one-click experience. It just says something may cost "$4.99" and you click it, and it is downloading. No confirmation, no "are you sure?" just one click and sold. Now I understand why Parental Controls were presented earlier. It's easy to imagine my young daughter accidentally clicking any show she wants without realizing she is racking up a bill for me, as my AppleTV requires a confirmation even if you store your password permanently on it.

The Content

As you can guess, the content that is offered for free Amazon Prime streaming is a hodge-podge of various shows and movies that are mostly older and reminds me of the first time I logged into a new Netflix account and couldn't find any recent movies I wanted to see. Despite trying out nearly every set-top and streaming device, I've never owned a recent Roku device so this is the first easy way I have on my TV to watch Amazon Video, which is why I purchased this device. I usually only search for things on Amazon Prime Video when I'm sure they can't be streamed on Netflix or Hulu Plus.

 

The biggest failing is that end users (that's us!) don't get a truly Universal Search. If you search for "Bob's Burgers" (arguably the best network animated comedy show today) on Amazon's Fire TV, you get results that you can buy any single episode from their 4 season run for $1.99 each or a full season for $29.99. I'm a member of Hulu Plus and Netflix as well, and installed the apps on the Fire TV, but there's no mention of them in the search results or even after clicking the "more ways to watch" button. On Netflix, you can stream the first couple seasons of Bob's Burgers for free. On Hulu, you can watch the latest episodes from the current fourth season for free as well.

Now, I know Amazon is in the business of making money and would of course want you to buy the episodes from them, but Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos got famous for putting a customer's needs first (The Bezos Doctrine) before profits. Of course, Apple doesn't offer this kind of search on AppleTV either, but if anyone would have been crazy enough to give free streaming options before paid downloads, I would have hoped that Amazon Fire TV could be the first, but sadly it's not.

The Gaming

I was curious enough to see what Amazon Fire TV's gaming was going to be like that I sprang for the extra $40 controller to find out. Overall after having played just a handful of games I'd say it's a pretty nice port of an Android game store to a TV. It's fast and fun and reminds me of the Ouya gaming device, but much more slick and faster to buy, download, and play. You can use the default remote on simple games and it worked fine for turn-based board games that only require a button and direction input. I played a few rounds of the racing game Asphalt 8 and was impressed with the speed, graphics, and playback. There was no stuttering and the graphics look and feel as good as maybe a Playstation 2 game from several years ago. The controller is pretty close to a Xbox360 controller, with plenty of buttons (almost too many) and there's no lag on the controller or the screen.

Does it Blend?

Overall, it's a pretty slick, simple device that I'll use to stream stuff when I can't find it anywhere but Amazon Prime streaming video, but I wish it were a little cheaper and I'm frankly a bit surprised it wasn't priced way below AppleTV or similar Roku devices. I'll probably try out the games a bit more, but I can't see it becoming a huge platform I'd play for hours at a time.

Google Fiber TV and TiVo

Google Fiber, which is Google's insanely fast gigabit network recently announced they're potentially expanding to a few more markets. I have a friend in Kansas City that got connected to it last Summer and he says the speed is really incredible, with no delays on streaming HD video instantly from almost any site. 

This being PVRblog, and me being near Portland, Oregon, I was happy to hear it might be expanding to my area soon. In addition to the blistering network speeds, I'm happy to see a cheap HD TV alternative to cable being offering for just $50 more. I pay more to Frontier for a slower fiber connection with fewer channels.

The Verge published a hands-on with the hardware early during the development of Google Fiber TV, but the system sounds pretty powerful. It's all network based, with storage for 500 hours of HD, 8 tuners that can record simultaneously, along with a free Nexus 7 tablet that can be used as a remote.

My first question was whether or not Google Fiber TV supports the CableCARD standard, so I can continue using my Roamio if I were to ever get this system at home, but unfortunately, due to the FCC rules around cable, it sounds like Google Fiber TV technically doesn't have to follow digital cable rules (being delivered over the network pipes instead), so that means no, you can't use a TiVo and you'll have to stick with Google's Fiber TV DVR hardware.

TiVo's new Roamio pixelation/macroblocking bug on Verizon FiOS

I just picked up a new Roamio 6-tuner TiVo in order to test out and post a review of soon. It is my 7th or 8th TiVo I've ever owned, but this one has proven problematic on setup due to a bug with Verizon FiOS, CableCARDs, and pay channels.

The problem looks like this on any channel that isn't a major TV network:

I went through a couple back and forths with Verizon tech support (who insisted this was a bad coax or HDMI cable issue) and eventually @brennokbob on Twitter pointed me to a thread on the TiVo Community forum where a user reported similar issues with HBO not working on their new Roamio TiVo on FiOS. Design VP of TiVo Margret Schmidt pointed out the issue is with CableCARDs that aren't the latest and greatest version.

My own multistream CableCARD is two years old (shown below), and carries one of the "bad" serial numbers listed in those posts, so I'm getting scrambled cable on my new TiVo until a technician can help me replace it.

Hopefully anyone else with a similar problem stumbles onto this post and can get it remedied.

TiVo Series 5 rumors at zatznotfunny

Dave Zatz has been compiling all sorts of rumored information found in FCC filings, TiVo bulletin boards, and internet chatter on what the next version of TiVo hardware will look like.

The above image is reportedly what the lower end models will look like, and the specs on new models have been bumped up impressively, with two different 4 tuner models and one 6 tuner top end recorder. The hard drive sizes look like they will go from 1Tb to 3Tb in size, both of which are ample recording capacity for HD. Rumored release looks to be in the Fall of this year.

It sounds like updated chipsets will offer a lot more processing power for better software functionality, streaming possibilities, and (finally) built-in WiFi. Personally, this might be the first TiVo box I don't pre-order on day one (as I have with previous versions going all the way back to the series 2 box) since my 4-tuner, 1Tb TiVo XL Premiere is pretty rock solid and working fine for my needs. But if the added computing power makes for more interesting applications and uses for the box, I could be convinced to try the upcoming iterations out.

Why Did TiVo Fail at Quora

Pretty interesting little thread at Quora I stumbled upon asking Why Did TiVo Fail? The best answer so far is from a former TiVo employee that makes it clear TiVo didn't completely fail (heck, it's going on 15 years old now) but did miss a ton of opportunites and he describes that he describes one by one.

Google Chromecast released

 

Google released the Chromecast today for just $35, a small item that connects via HDMI and runs a virtual AirPlay-like service, allowing you to send video from apps and Chrome browsers to your TV. Getting video from the Internet to your TV isn't the easiest problem to solve (I can do it in one of three somewhat clunky ways), but a simple plug 'n play option for $35 seems like a great solution. The video above shows a few common uses.

I've ordered one myself and I'm curious how useful it will be, and I expect to post a review in a few weeks after I get it up and running. Last year's kickstarter PocketTV was also a HDMI smart tv adapter that I haven't heard much about ever since it got funded, so it might be an uphill battle for Google Chromecast.

Boxee sold to Samsung (plus a download of the old Mac Boxee software)

Boxee is one of my favorite video apps in my home theater and I'm actually glad to hear they've been acquired by Samsung. The software Boxee created looks and works great, and is simple to use (here's my old review of the Boxee box). Samsung's own connected TV apps are another story entirely. 

Samsung's software design is mostly poor, buggy, and hard to use, while Boxee's team comes from the world of nice looking easy-to-use websites and I have high hopes that they can make a bunch of user interface improvements on Samsung apps/devices as a result. In my perfect world, Samsung would scrap their SmartTV apps and instead let you run an instance of Boxee on every new Samsung TV. Boxee is really great for managing downloaded video, running various web video apps to watch stuff on your TV, and for browsing the web on your TV.

Boxee Software for the Mac

In early 2012, Boxee stopped developing their Mac/PC app when the Boxee box by D-Link took off. They also quietly removed it from their site, which annoyed me because I found the D-Link Boxee box eventually stopped working reliably for me and I replaced it with an old Mac mini. I tracked down the last release version of the Mac OS X software when I set up my Mac mini, and have been running it ever since. Now that Boxee has been acquired, I'm providing a link here in case anyone else needs a copy of this old software to run on home theater connected Macs:

Boxee 1.5.0.23596 (87 Mb .dmg)

(Google Code has this version and others for Linux and Windows here)

Good CES coverage out there

I've noticed that bloggers descending on CES this year is a bigger thing than ever, but most of them are going for quantity over quality. Right now I'm checking The Verge's CES coverage once a day for highlights (they are posting about 100 items a day during CES so it is best to scan), and I'm also enjoying the Wired Gadget Blog's take on CES since it's half joking, and I'm most enjoying Dave Zatz blogging just the few things that interest him each day instead of trying to go all Engadget and just blog every single thing there.

Overall, most of the home theater news seems to be 4K resolution TVs coming from every manufacturer (ignoring of course there is currently no real sources of 4K content to watch on them), every company releasing some sort of iPad app functionality for their existing product, and general home automation products coming out. At the end of this week, I'll make a post of my favorite things I've seen on these and other CES coverage blogs.