# Deal with your website or lose customers



## davkline (Mar 9, 2014)

Listen, I've been a Tivo subscriber for close to 15 years, so it's not like I'm anti-Tivo or anything.

But Tivo's website is not only so slow it's useless. It's also an insult to customers.

I mean, for a major media company in 2014 to operate a website at speeds slower than an early 1990s dial-up modem is just insane.

I have called Tivo customer support about this several times in recent months, and the customer service reps act like they've never heard of the problem before -- like maybe it's my browser that's the problem (even though I explain that the website is slow as molasses no matter which PC or browser I use).

Tivo's failure to correct -- or even to acknowledge -- the problems with the website reflects a real contempt for their customers on their part.

I'm a national business reporter and I'm now thinking I should get one of my colleagues to do a story about what this says about Tivo's lack of respect for paying customers.


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## godsey1 (Jan 23, 2014)

Their site works perfect for me. It may have a 2 or 3 second lag, but a lot of sites on the net do.

Tony


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## kdmorse (Jan 29, 2001)

It may not be abysmal for all people, at all times... But it's pretty abysmal for a lot of us a lot of the time.

A quick trace shows that any of their server side scripts (those that end in .do), often run absurdly slowly. I logged in (15 seconds), clicked on Find TV Shows, and tivo-tco/index.do took 75 seconds to begin returning data. Their static resources appear to be responding just fine. 

TV Listings Guide - 90 seconds...
My todo list, daily picks, these are all 60 second plus operations. When they don't timeout and issue a connection reset.

And yes, to head off the inevitable "it's your browser, it's your ISP"... I just tried with IE/Firefox/Chrome, from a Comcast, FIOS, Verizon Business line, and AT&T business service. Although all of them were up and down the east coast, I don't have any west coast exit points to try.

Seriously, I wrote it off as unusable a year ago, and it hasn't gotten any better...


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## davkline (Mar 9, 2014)

Agreed. I have spent literally 4-5 minutes (not seconds) just waiting to log in to Tivo and see my shows, let alone go on to set any new ones to record, etc.

I'm on the west coast, and I've used IE, Chrome, Firefox et. al. in both business and work settings. I've cleared the caches, even cleared out all the cookies just to make sure that it really is true that Tivo maintains a web presence that is so lousy. 

Btw, I've been using modems and online services since 1980 -- a good 12-13 years even before the web came along, so I'm not some novice about this stuff.

Interestingly, the Tivo app works much more quickly and efficiently. I think with the website the problem is simply lousy outmoded coding, probably built for a much smaller user base circa 2005 or so. 

The fact that there are wide-ranging complaints about the website throughout these forums says that it's not just one or two people's browsers that have a problem.

And the fact that Tivo does nothing about these complaints, despite knowing about them for at least a year now, says something about the company's attitude towards customers.

The only modern website I've seen worse than Tivo's is the Cover Oregon health exchange site. That ought to tell you something.

At least Cover Oregon concedes that their website is a mess. If only Tivo would have the courtesy and respect for customers to acknowledge their complaints and promise to correct them.


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## jrtroo (Feb 4, 2008)

davkline said:


> And the fact that Tivo does nothing about these complaints, despite knowing about them for at least a year now, says something about the company's attitude towards customers.


I'm agreeing that the tivo site is crazy slow. But, we don't know that they have done nothing, we just have seen no improvement to the load times.

I'm hoping that they have been working on it in the background. As we know that they have grown the user base quite a bit and I'm thinking they have had to deal with dedicating more resources to support the need for Roamio and Premiere boxes to be online constantly.

But, just speculating as we know it is slow and they must know that the user experience is going to be irritating. (not to mention how frequently you must use your login credentials)


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## davkline (Mar 9, 2014)

You're right, jrtroo, that they may be working on it in the background.

But if that's the case, why doesn't Tivo acknowledge the problems with the site?

Why doesn't Tivo management instruct its customer support people to stop treating people who call about these website problems like they're hallucinating?

That's what rubs me (and I suspect a lot of other Tivo subscribers) the wrong way.

Nothing shows respect for customers like an honest statement that you hear their concerns and are trying to resolve them.


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## gonzotek (Sep 24, 2004)

davkline said:


> Nothing shows respect for customers like an honest statement that you hear their concerns and are trying to resolve them.


Except maybe actually resolving them 

But seriously folks, the TiVo website is abysmally slow. Whatever the reasons for that, I truly hope they prioritize improving it substantially before another year goes by.


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## davkline (Mar 9, 2014)

Right on, gonzotek!


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## malverde (Mar 13, 2007)

I have been having issues too.


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## nooneuknow (Feb 5, 2011)

Me too!

I dread the thought of having to use TiVo's website. It's was slow before the makeover. Now, many of the helpful links throughout TCF no longer work, and even some of their own links are broken, and don't redirect.

The most memorable instance is when TiVo changed their legal policy, and I wanted to read it, and wanted to opt-out. Their own links to what we allegedly agreed to if we did nothing didn't work. By the time I found my way by trial and error, it was too late, and I had given up my rights to sue them, or demand compensation.

Besides them providing broken links in the notification methods, they required snail-mail correspondence in order to opt-out.

It all seemed very deliberate, and I had wondered if they made sure there were plenty of other broken links, just to have plausible deniability against any accusations of it being intentional.

Now, it just seems that TiVoMargret is the only one who actually cares about the retail customers, and everybody else there just doesn't give a "shat".


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## a80099 (Oct 13, 2013)

Agreed.. the website is almost unusable most of the time. It needs a major overhaul.


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