# When did TiVo go from begin great to being crap?



## dbpropp (Dec 8, 2009)

I've used Tivos for decades. Had them on all of my TVs, upgraded whenever a new model came out, up to the Bolt. Loved it, got a lot of friends to buy them too. New wife wanted AT&T/Direct TV, so switched to that for a few months.

Then bought 3 TiVo Edge units - and they are TERRIBLE! Very few streaming apps, and most of the ones I use aren't even available in their app store. Frequent errors like "HDMI not authorized," "TiVo service not available," and other system failures. I can't count the times I've had to unplug/replug them (and wait through the whole start-up process) to make them work. And Netflix constantly crashes even though it works fine on the smart TV and other streaming devices.

II got a ddea when I bought them, including lifetime service, but it's still $2 grand down the toilet. I tried to return one for exchange during their 90-day return policy, but they never sent me the return code so I'm stuck with all of them. 

What happened to TiVo? Used to be a great service and a great company, now I wouldn't recommend them to anyone, not even people I don't like! It's too bad, and sad, because I used to love my TiVos.


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## Old Roamio 0 (Jul 19, 2020)

I had issues with my TiVo Edge in the 1st weeks but somehow most problems got ironed out. 

They maybe should drop mention of streaming apps from their advertising. My Edge for antenna usage works great for just watching old shows on over-the-air stations. The Edge for cable TiVo and the OTA variety are almost different devices. I don’t stream on the TiVo anymore. Almost any $30 on-sale streaming device works better.


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## dianebrat (Jul 6, 2002)

dbpropp said:


> I've used Tivos for decades. Had them on all of my TVs, upgraded whenever a new model came out, up to the Bolt. Loved it, got a lot of friends to buy them too. New wife wanted AT&T/Direct TV, so switched to that for a few months
> 
> What happened to TiVo? Used to be a great service and a great company, now I wouldn't recommend them to anyone, not even people I don't like! It's too bad, and sad, because I used to love my TiVos.


This is not THAT Tivo, there have been multiple owners and we're at least 7 years from it being " the old Tivo"


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## justen_m (Jan 15, 2004)

dbpropp said:


> Very few streaming apps, and most of the ones I use aren't even available in their app store.
> Frequent errors like "HDMI not authorized," "TiVo service not available," and other system failures. I can't count the times I've had to unplug/replug them (and wait through the whole start-up process) to make them work. And Netflix constantly crashes even though it works fine on the smart TV and other streaming devices.
> What happened to TiVo? Used to be a great service and a great company, now I wouldn't recommend them to anyone, not even people I don't like! It's too bad, and sad, because I used to love my TiVos


Got it. So all my TiVos that I had that had no streaming apps, no HDMI, and no Netflix were crap? I didn't raelize that..  I get your point. IMO, the last good TiVo hardware was the Roamio, and support/guide data/features sort of went belly up when it changed ownership. Back in the time of my first couple TiVos (S2, TivoHD) and the first couple years(?) of my Roamio, things were good. It was going downhill by the time I got my Bolt. I raved about TiVo the first 10-15 years I had it, but I wouldn't recommend TiVo to anyone these days.


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## Wil (Sep 27, 2002)

You are exactly right: they did "begin great" as you said in your mistype. But that was _technically_. The founders had a brilliant notion and figured out how to make TV-watching work. There was a symbiosis between their early relatively open/accessible platform and hackers, and between the two they went on to define what the Cable/OTA DVR user experience would become. Excellent models were produced for the Cable, DirecTV satellite, and OTA markets. 

But the founders had no business sense. Plus their work was stolen by Cable companies (and Dish), who produced kludged models of the Tivo that barely worked but seemed to consumers to be "free" because their purchase price was buried in Cable & Dish subscription fees that were skyrocketing anyway, thus hidden. The DVR became a commodity, a perceived "no-cost" commodity that the consumer was not willing to pay for consciously; thus no consumer market for the far superior Tivo.

Tivo was never profitable from its retail consumer business. Ever. And once the Cable industry entered its death throes, any prospect of future profit disappeared. The OTA market was never large enough to be viable as consumers had largely forgotten how to put up an antenna. There was no technical expertise left at Tivo to deal with streaming and the industry was not going to allow anything like the Tivo DVR to function in that space anyway. Tivo won a few lawsuits and sporadically made a profit from fines and royalties but as I said: never earned a dime from its ongoing consumer business.

Tivo as a company was long dead by then, its founders and all technical resources long escaped. The remaining shreds of Tivo were acquired in succession by one company or another having no retail interest or expertise. The Roamio series (with design elements that were in some respects excellent) was technically an aberration from momentum or some kind of process I don't fully understand, but from a marketing standpoint the random collection of capabilities was a mess and it was too late anyway: streaming was the marketplace reality and Tivo was never there.

It was something of a miracle they were able to put anything together as marginally functional as the Edge model. A really horrible piece of work that will be seen as a tatty monument rather than as its last significant product.


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## phone man (Nov 4, 2011)

You've used them for decades and just recently figured out that streaming isn't their strong suit?


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## moedaman (Aug 21, 2012)

Wil said:


> There was no technical expertise left at Tivo to deal with streaming and the industry was not going to allow anything like the Tivo DVR to function in that space anyway.


Channels DVR and PlayonTV would like to talk to you about this. You don't need permission if you really wanted to get in this space.


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## justen_m (Jan 15, 2004)

moedaman said:


> Channels DVR and PlayonTV would like to talk to you about this. You don't need permission if you really wanted to get in this space.


So those devices will record streaming content like my TiVo records OTA/Cable broadcasts? Allow me to keep as long as I want, play back whenever I want, with great trick play capability? Maybe I'll look into them.


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## cwoody222 (Nov 13, 1999)

moedaman said:


> Channels DVR and PlayonTV would like to talk to you about this. You don't need permission if you really wanted to get in this space.


Assuming you’re talking about RECORDING streaming subscription (ie: Netflix, Hulu, etc) who even says TiVo wanted to be in that space.

The vast majority of customers would have little interest in making on-demand content, on-demand again, just via their DVR.

I see two use-cases:
1) downloading to view offline, for example while traveling. Limited use case and more easily done via the apps themselves.

2) download to watch after your subscription lapses; which is a violation of the streamers TOS.

Aside from tech geeks here who do things because they can (“I need a local copy of twelve seasons of a show I can only watch on a pay streaming service saved to my server!”), there’s a very limited case to be made for trying to make a profitable business out of recording streaming content.


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## ms602 (Sep 5, 2017)

There was a recent discussion that touched on your question "When did TiVo go from being great to crap?"








Which TIVO is built to last?


My all in BOLT recently expired and per Weaknees is not repairable. After examining the BOLT a Roamio and a Premier, it looks to me like the BOLT is a big step down in build quality. Both of the other two look to have much higher quality components and more reliable design features. I’m...




www.tivocommunity.com




While there's no single judge on the matter, I'd say it happened right after Roamio was released, and TiVo ceased being an independent company. We can only speculate, as we have no person that was witness to events that unfolded, but it would appear that TiVo transitioned from what economists call an inclusive institution to an extractive entity, where the priority of business activity moves from innovation for the service of customer needs to stagnation with priority on profit flow to shareholders.

In other discussion, it's been said that Roamio is the best, and I would agree with that assessment having owned every generation TiVo except Series1. Currently I own both a Roamio (standard) and an Edge. The Edge is in storage, while the Roamio gets used daily. I don't see a point in owning a mini when an additional DVR does the same job.

I also own their streaming dongle (TiVo Stream 4K) and can say that it is decent and does streaming better than any of the DVRs. It's not amazing, but pretty comparable to an Amazon Fire TV dongle or the Roku. The TiVo dongle has zero compatibility with the DVR or broadcast TV, and the tie-in with TiVo is simply that it has TiVo+ (the streaming service) built-in. So if you mainly use other usual streaming services (Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Peacock, etc) there's no advantage to having the TiVo dongle over any other.


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## moedaman (Aug 21, 2012)

cwoody222 said:


> Assuming you’re talking about RECORDING streaming subscription (ie: Netflix, Hulu, etc) who even says TiVo wanted to be in that space.


probably not. But it is possible.


> 2) download to watch after your subscription lapses; which is a violation of the streamers TOS.


People have been arguing about the legality of Playon for years. Yet, they still are in business and nobody has ever sued them or their users.


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## moedaman (Aug 21, 2012)

justen_m said:


> So those devices will record streaming content like my TiVo records OTA/Cable broadcasts? Allow me to keep as long as I want, play back whenever I want, with great trick play capability? Maybe I'll look into them.


They aren't devices. They are software that uses your own equipment. They both have limitations, but I do know that Playon works really well. I have never used Channels DVR myself, so I don't know directly how stable it is.


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## EWiser (Oct 2, 2008)

For me it was when they killed the app for streaming devices to play shows recorded on your TiVo They would be in a better place if they had continued down that path. Sort of what Channels is doing now.


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