A Slew of Screeds

Sitting up in Joe’s Crab Shack (right across from Bushman’s favorite haunt), you can observe his prowess without being prone to his requests for donations. It’s a good time. And the crab ain’t bad, either.

TiVo is Hurting Itself

Much has been made of the demise of TiVo. Granted, they have and will continue to have a hard time competing with cable-company and satellite TV company offerings, despite the constant complaints about those knock-off interfaces and feature sets being sub-par. Users will put up with a lot of crud for the sake of convenience.

But there are things that TiVo could do to help itself, and it seems to me that they aren’t doing them.

For one thing, they move slow. I would expect the behemoth cable companies to be playing catch-up to TiVo, but I haven’t seen that to be the case. How long did it take TiVo to get a unit out that could record HD? And when it did come out, they priced it at an insane $800 MSRP. Whew.

And don’t even get me started on Mac support for the TiVo2Go software/feature. After “working hard” on the issue for like two years, we get this back in January and then nothing for nine months. Look, it takes less time to fabricate a human being than it’s taken to even see a beta of this product. Come on.

What really frustrates me is the simple things. TiVo’s features should be fairly easily updatable and yet there are so few service upgrades getting pushed out to users it’s kind of criminal. Take a look at this list of requested enhancements. Most of those are very reasonable requests, especially stuff like complete boolean capabilities for Wish Lists. I can’t tell you how badly I want to have my “49ERS” season pass not pick up junk like “49ers Preview Show” and “49ers Total Access” and “49ers Playbook.” I want the game, not the rest of the junk. But 49ers games show up on a title search as the generic “NFL Football” so I can’t just get a Season Pass to that or I’d get the stupid Jets vs. Dolphins games and stuff, probably at the expense of Niners games or at the very least at the expense of something else I’d rather watch. If I could say “Title = ‘NFL Football’ AND Description CONTAINS (‘San Francisco’ OR ’49ERS’)” I would be golden.

This has been a problem since the Series1 TiVos, so what’s the holdup? In the meantime I end up juggling my Season Pass list constantly, trying to find a happy medium. For example, I want Sharks games almost all the time. But sometimes it depends on when the game starts and what else is playing. I can put it below something like Lost or Heroes and know that the Sharks game will always be pre-empted for those shows, but what frustrates me is that if the Sharks game starts at 5:30 and a show I don’t want to miss will start at 8:00, I’d rather have the first two and a half hours of the game and then switch over to the show. I thought that was what the clipping feature was supposed to do but unless I’m doing something wrong it doesn’t work like that.

At the time it hardly matters, I’d rather have my TiVo than not and I don’t really qualify (what with our freakish cable situation) for any other options. But eventually we’ll move out of this apartment and when Comcast comes knocking on my door offering me a $9.99 additional fee for dual-tuner DVR functionality with a higher capacity than I have now my loyalty to TiVo is going to be tested because I just don’t feel like TiVo is working hard enough to keep me loyal.

So what do you say, TiVo? How ’bout you step it up and keep a once-happy customer?

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