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TiVo Tries To Explain Why They're Taking Away Features
from the dance-around-the-questions-a-bit... dept
Last month we wrote about how TiVo (and ReplayTV) both somehow miraculously decided on the very same day that their customers would be happier with fewer features, as they would download an update that took away popular features. The reason for this? New copy protection controls that the entertainment industry thinks they need, but which are only going to push people away from (a) watching the shows or channels that use this and (b) buying TiVo or Replay as other options become available that don't tell viewers they can do less. John has submitted an interview from Wired Magazine where Wired quizzes TiVo's general counsel on why they would do this, and wonders if this is just a way for the content providers to wedge their way in between TiVo and viewers with their own "control." TiVo's lawyer dances around the questions and basically says it was a tradeoff they had to make to get permission to build TiVoToGo. In other words, they did a little horse trading: take away a few features here, and let us add a few features here. This is a bad precedent. You shouldn't need to do this to innovate, and it's a shame that TiVo couldn't stand up to the entertainment industry and tell them "our customers don't want this, and neither do we." All it means is that, for many of us, it's now much clearer that we don't want TiVo.
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Figures...
Time to build my own DVR...
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seel out from begining
The fact that cable and the sats are just waiting for the right time to totaly suplant Tivo with their owned OEM crap should serve as a huge red flag that Tivo should be doing everythign in their power to make the direct customer their friend and they fail to deliver at every possible turn and instead cowtow to the industry side of the line.
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Good enough software
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Re: Good enough software
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Not great but
TiVo still does DVR features better than any competitor, though I wish they'd respond to some of the most requested features from the TiVo community forums.
If they start limiting features related to non-PPV/sports events then I'll be more concerned. But in the back of my mind I do hear the whispers of "when they came for ___ I said nothing, when they came for ___ I did nothing, and when they finally came for me there was no one left to protest".
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