The Big Think

Erin wants to watch the premiere of “24″ tonight, but since we dropped cable TV all we have is the antenna. Fortunately, FOX comes in loud and clear through the rabbit ears.

So I spent the last hour and a half messing with the TIVO to see the incoming RF signal on the rabbit ears (which involved finding a long phone cord so the Tivo could reconfigure itself and call into the mothership). There’s not a simple “use antenna/use cable” flip selection in the menus anywhere.

Once the tivo had gone through its setup procedure again I was finally able to see our paltry 8 local broadcast channels. Fine so far. FOX looked great, and I thought all was well until I tried to hit “record”. I thought that it’d just record the current program and list it as “unknown” or “channel 7 2:00-3:00 1/15/06″ or something. But NOOOOO. It turns out that you have to be subscribed to the TIVO service to even use the basic recording capabilities! They don’t even allow you to record unknown programs unless you pony up the $12.95/month for their service. And we can’t call in and just get a month of service because Tivo has decided that now you have to pay them for a full year, or pay a disconnect penalty.

Is this a good way to treat customers?

Upon doing some research it looks like our old Series 1 Tivo will still do basic recording without the service, so I know it’s technologically possible. There seems to be no other reason to hobble this functionality in the current models except to force the (very) few Tivo users out there like us who don’t want an extra $13/month bill to pony up. No wonder people are turning to homemade PVR’s, and no wonder Tivo is slowly going out of business. Feh.

*UPDATE* Reading online some more, it appears that Tivo pulled a fast one on their Series 1 unit users a few years ago (I’m out of the loop on this, and remember when everybody was ticked at Tivo a few years ago, but didn’t know what the fuss was about). At some point, Tivo decided that too many people were buying Tivo’s and then not subscribing to the service. Keep in mind, the box that the Series 1 unit came in said that the Tivo could be used as a dumb VCR without the service, and this was a big selling point among friends who had the boxes back then. I remember Patrick talking about the fact that you could still program it to record channel 7 on monday nights from 7-9, for example. Well, Tivo decided that they wanted to lock more people into their service (or, in the parlance of business, to “recapture the lost revenue”). Tivo boxes have no way to reset the onboard digital clock so the units must call in every so often to make sure their clocks are updated, daylight savings is observed, etc. When non-subscribing Tivo boxes called in, the company sent a software update that disabled the “dumb-vcr” capabilities! We currently have an old Series 1 Tivo that doesn’t have the updated software, but in order to switch it over to display signals from the antenna, we have to go through the full setup sequence, and the last step of that sequence is… calling in to Tivo. *POOF* Goodbye standalone digital VCR.

Imagine this: you have just bought a new car that comes with, say, air conditioning. One day, the A/C stops working and when you take it to the dealer, the mechanic tells you that you’ll have to pay $13.95 per month in order to get your A/C back. Would you be upset? What if the fine print said they had the right to do this? How about then? Ahh, but in the logic of many defenders of Tivo’s behavior,you wouldn’t have the right to be upset because the manufacturer told you that this could happen, at least, they did so in a legally meaningful way. And End User License Agreements are consistently pushing the envelope on what they can include, even to the point of putting in language that allows them to access your computer whenever they want, or put root kit’s on your hard drive, or disallow you from doing common sense things. Lots of bad stuff.

But this isn’t a EULA situation. The situation is slightly different with the Series 2 Tivo boxes because Tivo didn’t hide the fact that they wouldn’t record without the service, so my above post is a little misrepresentative of the current reality. But it is a big no-no that Tivo would disable a feature in units that were already paid for and which had been sold under the understanding that they would work in a certain way. And I’m sorry, but printing “we have the right to change stuff” in the small print of some EULA does not morally constitute an excuse.

By the way, according to the “thebigthink EULA”, reading of the preceding paragraph constitutes agreement to the End User License Agreement. Said reader agrees that the owner of this webpage can access their personal financial records, account number, credit reports, and mortgage information, and may use that information in any way that the owner deems appropriate. Furthermore, the reader agrees to hold the owner of this website innocent if they are to suddenly find that thousands of dollars have been disappeared from their accounts, or that the name on their house title is suddenly changed. Sound silly? Don’t like it? Too bad, you’ve already read this far.

Dadgumit, we missed the big sale over at w00t! Today. A refurbed Roomba for only $119. We could have mated it to the robomower and had our own robot army!

Back to the (evil) drawing board.