# TiVo UK sales graph?



## amh15 (Jan 5, 2002)

Hi all,

A couple of years ago I remember someone posting a graph of UK TiVo sales (actually installed households, I think) against time. Does anyone have that graph? It's for an MBA assignment where I have decided to write about the TiVo consumption experience (remembering the apalling marketing when it was launched).

Looking for it or anything like in the next couple of days...

Thanks!

Alan


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## steveroe (Oct 29, 2002)

It took a bit of digging in the archives, but here it is:

http://archive.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?postid=223990#post223990

The most recent graph was done in 2003!


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## amh15 (Jan 5, 2002)

Thanks very much!

Alan


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## Davyburns (Jan 7, 2004)

Appaling marketing is right!!
I hadnt heard of it til 2004, and when I did, I immediatley bought one, and put a lifetime sub on it.
Just shows what could have been done with a bit more passion in the Sales Director!
Davy


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

They spent a fortune on marketing in print, in the cinema and, I think, even on TV in 2000 and 2001. I know because I printed loads of them in my mags (thanks for the cheque, TiVo!).

TiVos were set up in every Dixon in the land.

If you missed it - well I'm not sure what they could have done.


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## katman (Jun 4, 2002)

TCM2007 said:


> TiVos were set up in every Dixon in the land.


Very true but it would have been more helpful if Dixons had some staff who understood what Tivo was and were able to demonstrate it !!!!!!


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## Davyburns (Jan 7, 2004)

I would be ashamed to admit that I was a regular Dixons visitor, and I dont have time to visit cinemas, yet I was wooed by the Psion, and the pc, and all the other gadgets of the time, but Tivo never cropped up.
Many of my peers and friends, who visit my house, always ask, "whats that big box thing", and when I tell them, they are always impressed, some to the point that they have "joined the ranks" purely on my say so.
I am not a marketing guru, but would suggest that the whole marketing scheme was badly aligned, and didn't get to the people who were most likely to be impressed.
I must admit, though, sky plus, although a vastly inferior product, has done little more, even with its huge PR machine!
Davy


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## AMc (Mar 22, 2002)

I'd heard of it, but at &#163;399 for the box AND &#163;200 for the lifetime sub I thought it was too expensive. It wasn't until I got one I realised it was worth every penny.
If we could do it all again I'd do product demonstrations in shopping centres and the celeb endorsement thing Sky are currently doing for Sky+...but that ship has sailed.


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## 6022tivo (Oct 29, 2002)

Davyburns said:


> I must admit, though, sky plus, although a vastly inferior product, has done little more, even with its huge PR machine!
> Davy


If I was to say Sky are paid by TiVo US to run all the helplines, administration and also to MARKET the tivo in the UK. Would you be suprised?


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## 6022tivo (Oct 29, 2002)

AMc said:


> I'd heard of it, but at £399 for the box AND £200 for the lifetime sub I thought it was too expensive. It wasn't until I got one I realised it was worth every penny.


Same with me, I remember the PAUSE TV ad, and thought that was clever. But to be honest from the marketing, thats all I remember...
I did not know it had a guide, season passes, what inputs it could take and so on..

I was a £99 buyer, was going to give the demo sub a go and just use it as a manual recorder with pause. I signed up to lifetime within 2 days.

Realising the potential, I then tried to buy up every tivo in the north west and ebay them for near £300 (still the going rate at the time).

Tivo did change my life in many ways, and like you until I had one in my home and in use I never would of thought it was worth £400.


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## Davyburns (Jan 7, 2004)

6022tivo said:


> If I was to say Sky were paid by TiVo US to run all the helplines, administration and also to MARKET the tivo in the UK. Would you be suprised?


I knew about the helpline and admin, hadn't realised about the marketing. were they in charge of the marketing from day 1?

Its a bit like putting ITV in charge of television licensing


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## 6022tivo (Oct 29, 2002)

Davyburns said:


> I knew about the helpline and admin, hadn't realised about the marketing. were they in charge of the marketing from day 1?
> 
> Its a bit like putting ITV in charge of television licensing


As I understand it, yes. (Sure someone will confirm).

SKY did market the tivo for the UK from Day1.

I remember the Recommended by SKY on the main page which disapeared on the 2.5.5 update. (You can still see it at the end of the boot up animation at the top right if anyone misses it).

I can only think TiVo US did not realise that Sky and NDS had been working on SKY+ or even tivo game them the idea. Tivo was at the time the answer to a SKY PVR, or maybe Sky knew what were doing and made it not look inviting as the SKY+ was well into development.


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## Tim L (Jan 5, 2002)

Davyburns said:


> I knew about the helpline and admin, hadn't realised about the marketing. were they in charge of the marketing from day 1?
> 
> Its a bit like putting ITV in charge of television licensing


It seems a peculiar arrangement now, but it's a bit of a stretch to suggest they were doing anything Tivo hadn't approved first.

I think the main problems were the price, and that they didn't go into its features much past being able to pause live TV.


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## 6022tivo (Oct 29, 2002)

Got to go to work but found these links that are interesting re the price on the second link, and also confirmed the launch date which I was unsure about.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/945275.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/1268739.stm


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## iankb (Oct 9, 2000)

I think that the biggest mistake they made with the marketing (after giving it to Sky) was to push the pausing of the live buffer, rather than the ability to record all episodes of a series.


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## AMc (Mar 22, 2002)

And the ability to make unattended recordings from OnDigital, Sky and cable without having to set both the STB and the VCR.
When Mr Tonks (remember him?) started shifting units at &#163;230 I bought one, primarily because although my OnDigital box could wake my JVC video for a recording over SCART it wouldn't stop at the end of the program - so the VCR would carry on recording until the end of the tape and then rewind. So I could make a grand total of 1 unattended recording!

I personally 'sold' 3 tivos to friends and family all of whom were sceptical until they saw it in use in my house.

May be a rental model would have worked better - who knows?


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## Davyburns (Jan 7, 2004)

Add the fact that the tivo is constantly recording, so switching the tv on, and finding a program started 20 minutes ago, is no longer a problem, along with Tivos wishlists, and Tivo's suggestions, that were ignored in the marketing launch.

I wonder what possesed the CEO of Tivo, to give the launch and marketing of such an innotive idea, to his biggest competitor?


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## Major dude (Oct 28, 2002)

AMc said:


> And the ability to make unattended recordings from OnDigital, Sky and cable without having to set both the STB and the VCR.


ditto

'Pausing live TV' just did not sell it to me, but when I realised that TiVo could control any source and was therefore immune from being scuppered by the analogue switch off and saw a TiVo was being sold off as a discontinued product I bought one quickly followed by another for £99 each 

Why is it in Whitehaven and anywhere else piloting the digital switchover people are not complaining about their VCRs being rendered useless?


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## Automan (Oct 29, 2000)

I wonder how many Tivo are still up and running (with an active sub) now in the U.K.?

Automan.


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

I'm not sure that Sky did handle the marketing, it's so long ago now...But two things worth remembering. Firstly TiVo didn't sell the boxes, Thomson did - and marketing the box was down to them, not TiVo. And second, Sky+ didn't exist at the time, so Sky wasn't a competitor. I don't buy the conspiracy theory that Sky deliberately screwed up TiVos chances in the UK.

What TiVo does is bloody hard (I would say impossible) to convey in a page press ad or 30 second TV slot.


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## Davyburns (Jan 7, 2004)

TCM2007 said:


> What TiVo does is bloody hard (I would say impossible) to convey in a page press ad or 30 second TV slot.


They seemed to have managed it quite well in the USA.

You regurlarly hear Tivo's mentioned in US TV programs, and most of the Americans I meet on holiday either have one, or at least know about them


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

Once you know about them, it's easy.It would e easy now, as most people know what sky Plus does. You have to put yourself mentally back to the pre PVR age of 1999!


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## Davyburns (Jan 7, 2004)

OK, sky plus did it, and Tivo is ten times better. if sky could do it, why not Tivo?

If it would be easy now, why dont Tivo re-launch?

I do agree, that products can be launched before their time, but I dont believe that Tivo is a case in point!

Everyone I talk to about Tivo, thinks its a great Idea, most (like myself) never heard the original launch.

If everything Tivo UK is in the hands of RM, its very unlikely that anything more than we already have, will ever be offered.


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

I remember some of the marketing, and saw the boring silver boxes in dixons, but all I got from it was "pause live tv", and so thought - that's not worth &#163;400 and didn't buy.

Once I learned it could record from sky, with an EPG etc then I was sold - but it took an american friend to tell me that...

Considering I buy many expensive gadgets on release and don't use them much - I call that poor marketing.


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## iankb (Oct 9, 2000)

Davyburns said:


> OK, sky plus did it, and Tivo is ten times better. if sky could do it, why not Tivo?


Because, in the majority of cases, Sky were just selling it as a recordable upgrade to an existing customer. The fact that the Sky+ box and the standard digibox had the same (crude) EPG probably worked in their favour.

Even if it was to a new Sky customer, given the choice between a non-recording digibox or a recording 'digibox', the latter sounds quite attractive.


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## blindlemon (May 12, 2002)

mikerr said:


> I remember some of the marketing, and saw the boring silver boxes in dixons, but all I got from it was "pause live tv", and so thought - that's not worth £400 and didn't buy.
> 
> Once I learned it could record from sky, with an EPG etc then I was sold - but it took an american friend to tell me that...
> 
> Considering I buy many expensive gadgets on release and don't use them much - I call that poor marketing.


Same thing happened with me.

I had actually been musing about an idea to create a computer-linked recorder that would know when things were on and record them automatically around the time that TiVo was launched here, but the advertising gave *absolutely no hint whatsoever* that TiVo could do this - just the "pause Live TV" rubbish, so I never bothered to check it out.

It was only two years later when I read about the US TiVos online that I realised there was already a system which would do what I had been dreaming about a couple of years before! At that time I vaguely recalled the "pause live TV" ads and wondered if that could have been the same machine - imagine my chagrin when I realised it was!

*If TiVo couldn't manage to sell their product to somebody who had already been thinking about how to do just what TiVo does, then I have to agree, that was pretty poor marketing *


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

Davyburns said:


> OK, sky plus did it, and Tivo is ten times better. if sky could do it, why not Tivo?


Sky+ had a near infinite marketing budget (they could air TV ads fro free, and were mailing all Sky customers very month).



> If it would be easy now, why dont Tivo re-launch?


Because IMHO there is no market for a TiVo type product for which you have to pay for the EPG.


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

blindlemon said:


> *If TiVo couldn't manage to sell their product to somebody who had already been thinking about how to do just what TiVo does, then I have to agree, that was pretty poor marketing *


Reaching 100% of the potential audience is a function of budget as well as quality.

If you'd been reading my magazine you'd have known all about it.

So I'd put it down to pretty poor magazine purchasing on your part.


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## aerialplug (Oct 20, 2000)

I too felt that the marketting didn't really emphasise the main features that TiVo provided. Pause live TV was the only major feature they really emphasised in the advertising. Since having a TiVo, within a week I wastched virtually no live TV as the box recorded and kept the programmes I wanted to watch - this is what they should have been emphasising.

It's true that every dixons in the country had a TiVo on display - half of the ones I saw hadn't even activated the shop demo mode and were quietly sitting under a TV in the shop showing something completely different. When I spoke to staff about it, most had very little idea of what it did. In one Comet store, I saw a sticker tht implied that if you bought a TiVo, why not buy a pack of video tapes to go with it.

But at the end of the day, marketing a product that's so radically different from anything else on the market is always going to be a problem. People simply wouldn't see the need of some of the more radical features until they started using them.


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

aerialplug said:


> Since having a TiVo, within a week I wastched virtually no live TV as the box recorded and kept the programmes I wanted to watch - this is what they should have been emphasising..


That's hard in a snappy 30 second ad.


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## Milhouse (Sep 15, 2001)

TCM2007 said:


> That's hard in a snappy 30 second ad.


Not if you have the right creative team producing the ad. Trouble was, TiVo didn't.


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

Disagree, I think it's hard full stop.


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## iankb (Oct 9, 2000)

I think that people were well used to what a VCR could do. So persuading people that they could record without changing tapes, and starting watching a recording while it was still being recorded, wouldn't have been that hard.


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## Milhouse (Sep 15, 2001)

Like I say, with the right creative team it would have been possible - not easy, but possible. Unfortunately the best that TiVo and their advertising agency could come up with was pausing live TV.

Although it has to be said that at the time TiVo were still saddled with the battle against the networks who were accusing TiVo and other PVR manufacturers of stealing their revenue by allowing viewers to skip adverts, so perhaps TiVo decided that promoting the "virtual channel" concept and the numerous other TiVo benefits wasn't such a good idea to avoid antagonising further the networks.

Nah, let's be honest - TiVo did just sign up with a really sh1t ad agency. Or were only prepared to pay peanuts, and got what they paid for.


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

iankb said:


> I think that people were well used to what a VCR could do. So persuading people that they could record without changing tapes, and starting watching a recording while it was still being recorded, wouldn't have been that hard.


I seem to remember that the "without tapes" thing was actually one of the most common _objections_ when I tried to evangelise TiVo. "What happens when it's full up" "What if I want to keep a show forever" How do a I loan a show to my mates" etc.

The real killer thing for me remains the fact that you record everything and construct your own TV schedule, and that always drew blank looks until the ubiquitous Sky+ gave people a taste.

Even the BBC, presumably with the aid of a press release, managed to miss the point and lead (like many IIRC) on Suggestions as the killer app:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/945275.stm


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

A bit of Googling reveals the guilty party:

http://www.dmwmedia.com/user/davina


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## mikerr (Jun 2, 2005)

> I seem to remember that the "without tapes" thing was actually one of the most common objections when I tried to evangelise TiVo. "What happens when it's full up" "What if I want to keep a show forever" How do a I loan a show to my mates" etc.


Yeah, I bought an expensive (at the time) dvd recorder ast the same time purely to archive stuff from the tivo. 
It got hardly any use at all.



TCM2007 said:


> They spent a fortune on marketing in print, in the cinema and, I think, even on TV in 2000 and 2001. I know because I printed loads of them in my mags (thanks for the cheque, TiVo!).


Can you dig up a copy of the print ads ?


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## TCM2007 (Dec 25, 2006)

I'll try and find some. IIRC they consisted of blokes looking amazed at what their TiVo just did.

Looking back, I don't think there is much any marketer could have done to get over the &#163;600 price point - over &#163;700 in today's money. Almost 10 times what Sky+ costs now.


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## cwaring (Feb 12, 2002)

TCM2007 said:


> IIRC they consisted of blokes looking amazed at what their TiVo just did.


If they were based on the TV ad  (QT required) then they were really awful, and that's putting it politely


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## Milhouse (Sep 15, 2001)

cwaring said:


> If they were based on the TV ad  (QT required) then they were really awful, and that's putting it politely


At least they had an up and coming star in the ads... if I'm not mistaken the guy on the right is Martin Freeman from The Office (and also the awful Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy film). Spot on casting for such a downbeat campaign!

The TiVo ads could be used in a master class on how not to advertise a product... TiVo may as well have piled a couple of million pounds into a pile, poured petrol on it then tossed a match for all the awareness those ads raised.


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## martink0646 (Feb 8, 2005)

TCM2007 said:


> If you'd been reading my magazine you'd have known all about it.


I purchased on day one purely down to a review in T3!!

Martin


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## terryeden (Nov 2, 2002)

martink0646 said:


> I purchased on day one purely down to a review in T3!!


AOL.

There was a T3 in our local takeaway pizza place. I used to flick through while waiting. Read the TiVo review several time and was shocked that the cinema advert (on LoTR, IIRC) hadn't conveyed just how wonderful it was.

A few months later, they dropped to £99 and I snapped one up.

Sadly, it gets very little use nowadays. iPlayer, DVDs and BitTorrent are responsible for much of my viewing now.


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