TiVo has been taking it on the chin lately.
The recent blog post in the New York Times entitled TiVO, Nice Service if You Can Get It, is the typical drivel written by somebody who hasn’t taken the time to properly research and use the product they’re talking about.
As an example – the writer, Joshua Brustein, says that TiVo has an expensive fee of $19.99/month. He doesn’t mention that you could purchase a lifetime subscription for $499. If you’re planning on keeping your TiVo for longer than 24 months, the lifetime subscription is the way to go. (Web Watch won’t mention the number of deals that are on the TiVo website that may lower the overall cost even further.)
The article goes on, with the writer’s cable company trying to pimp their own DVR over a TiVo — hey, that happens. Same thing with the account of what he went through to get a cable card, involving multiple trips, phone calls, and a service tech who never showed up. Obviously not an issue with TiVo, but with the cable company the writer is using. For our TiVo service, Web Watch drove over to our local Cable Shoppe and picked up the cable cards directly. Installed them into our new TiVo ourselves, and were up and running in just about an hour or so.
Obviously each user’s experience is going to be different, but none of what the writer included in his article is specific to problems with TiVo.