Ok, so I’m referencing an article that uses some of the fuzziest math and logic I’ve ever seen in a news article, but I think the underlying fact is true: the Tivo Series3 is not doing so well.

Tivo has seen a dip in stock price over the past 2 months, even though the Series3 is one of the most wanted electronic devices on the market. The reason? Try the $800 price tag for the best model. That’s well out of the range of the casual TV watcher. New subscriber rates seem to be holding steady, but the cost of acquiring those new subscribers has gone way up, although the article does not explain how.

So what is Tivo to do about this dilemna? Well, do what everyone else is doing. That’s right, they’re going to sell advertising! But I thought the point of buying a DVR was to be able to avoid seeing ads, right? Well, apparently not any more. Now it’s about services and quality recordings. They’ll find the shows you like, and make a recording that can be clearer than you’d get from a DVD for some broadcasts.

It seems like the target audience is beginning to slip from the general TV-viewing public to the TV aficianados, the people who live and die with each episode of CSI, and use that time when others sleep to view the great shows they missed the first time around but their Tivo recorded for them.

Technorati Tags: tivo, series3

A tech-tinkerer over at the Tivocommunity forum has come up with a way to upgrade the Series3 to 1TB using an external RAID setup. This is a big upgrade over the standard 250GB that the Series3 comes with out of the box, especially when we’re talking about recording HDTV, which can use up a hard drive rather quickly.

LINK: Tivo S3 Upgraded to 1TB via RAID

Technorati Tags: tivo, series3, raid, terabyte

Alright, so you’ve already paid $69.99 for your Series2 Tivo, assuming you took the time to mail in the $150 rebate. Now you’re paying $19.99 each month for a subscription to Tivo’s service. If you’ve got the high-definition box, change that $69.99 figure to $800. What kind of extras is Tivo offering you for all that money? Well, pretty crappy ones in my opinion.

For years marketers have dreamed of the day when people could buy a movie ticket through their computer, and many people now do. Not many thought a person’s TV could, or should, do the same job. With Tivo’s extras, you can also find the nearest car dealer who sells your favorite brand of car, as long as you don’t drive one of those terrible Russian brands. When would you use this? Probably never, but I’m sure some hot-shots at Tivo thought it would be a huge hit with advertisers who would pay them hundreds of millions of dollars a year to be featured on Tivo’s extra services. Oh heck, I know what hot-shot “idea men” are like, they probably even used the b word. Yeah, billions a year from spamvertising! We’re all rich, let’s take off our suits and roll around in the money!

Tivo Inc. is a company barely able to survive. They have very little proprietary technnology, and a lot of companies with a lot more money are trying to move in on their turf, and doing it quite successfully. Tivo needs to offer many extras in their service, but what they have right now are not extras. They’re just more ways to squeeze money out of their product. People are not as stupid as Tivo thinks. They know the difference between an advertisement and something of actual value.

Tivo’s future can go in two directions: breakthrough innovation or death.

Technorati Tags: tivo, series2

This past weekend didn’t just feature two great fight cards competing for the same viewers at the same time, it may trigger an increase in sales of the Tivo recording device among boxing fans.

I’m sure many boxing fans realized for the first time this Saturday that trying to watch two fights at the same time is much more annoying than you could imagine. Showtime and HBO both featured fights at the same time. Both are premium channels, but not pay-per-view. That meant anyone with a Tivo could watch one and then watch the other one afterwards. They could also record both and pause one to watch the other.

Unlike other uses of the Tivo, such as recording TV shows and movies that are destined to be shown again many times, boxing matches will only be shown once, and nobody really wants to watch a fight that is more than a day old. Once they’ve read about it in the newspaper, what’s the point of watching the whole thing just to make sure the paper was accurate?

I predict much higher Tivo sales among sports fans in coming years, as people try to find ways to fit a 2-3 hour event into their busy schedule.

Technorati Tags: boxing, tivo