BusinessWeek article

[janry]

Sorry if this article has been posted before, but I couldn't find in the searches. Not the kind of press TiVo needs.

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2008/07/trouble_for_tiv.html?chan=technology_technology+index+page_d igital+entertainment

Suddenly, though, the HD TiVo is looking like a piece of junk to thousands of users, including myself.

[dig_duggler]

"But when I did a little investigating online today to see if others were having the same problem, I was surprised to see there were more than 10,000 TiVo community threads since April from irate TiVo fans who have had the same problem."

Um, what? 10k threads?

I mean it was/is a serious problem. But you can't have a 'Techbeat' writer and editor make such a glaring mistake.

[sethjvm]

So the only press that TiVo deserves/needs is positive press? I would that that the average consumer would be more than happy to know if a product has problems before they buy it.

[janry]

Um, what? 10k threads?

You can't let a little thing like details get in your way. :D

So the only press that TiVo deserves/needs is positive press?

Who said that?

[jrm01]

The only press they deserve is accurate press.

[ZeoTiVo]

Plus hejust left the Hard Drive angle hanging and never verified that one way or the other. Does businesweek not employ editors anymore to redline such half done articles or verify factual statements?

[jlb]

Agreed. Heck, with any hard drive, if there happens to be a bad sector and then you try and write to it, it may cause issues. TiVo has never professed to some magical device that ensures there will never be a hard drive with a bad sector in their boxes. That's a fact of life.

That artice is just so misguided.....yuck......

[jmaditto]

"But when I did a little investigating online today to see if others were having the same problem, I was surprised to see there were more than 10,000 TiVo community threads since April from irate TiVo fans who have had the same problem."

Um, what? 10k threads?

I mean it was/is a serious problem. But you can't have a 'Techbeat' writer and editor make such a glaring mistake.

Maybe he Googled the word "Tivo" and it returned 10,000 plus hits so he just rounded down. :D

That article didn't have much meat in it that is for sure.

[charms]

We can critique his grammar and the accuracy of "10,000 threads" but it seems a lot more people than we'd like to admit are having sudden "hardware failures" around this 9.3/9.4 transition.

My faithful S2 ran for years without anything like this. My brother (500 miles away, THD bought from different stores at different times, DVR-E) had the exact same failure symptoms on the exact same day. The only thing we have in common is that we both had recently received the 9.4 update. That's not a coincidence. Sorry, you can't just explain that away with a simple "hard drives fail, that's life" theory.

There's a problem here.

[janry]

There's a problem here.

Yes, I believe there are 2 kinds of THD with DVR-E owners: Those that have lost their external dirves, and those that are going to lose their external drives soon.

[MickeS]

Yes there's a problem here. And his last paragraph is dead on:

"The company relies on its loyal fan base to evangelize its products, which are competing against cheaper cable and satellite DVRS and other equipment. Some three or four months into the first of these problems being reported, money-losing TiVo is building plenty of bad karma among its most faithful users, who could fall out of love with what has been an amazing product."

We have definitely seen it here on this forum, and the problems I had with the latest update definitely put a damper on my enthusiasm and willingness to recommend it to others. I managed to fix mine after some work, but a "normal user" would have been much worse off.

[brewman]

You can not deny that TiVo's OS does an abysmal job handling disk sector problems when upgrading software. Basically, TiVo is forcing your TiVo DVR to play russion roulette with every upgrade and you have no choice in the matter other than to drop TiVo.

There's no reason the unit should be completely unusable due to a minor disk error except that TiVo has obviously done a benefit/cost analysis and decided it's better for them as a company to allow this to occur. They will not address the problem until there is another DVR manufacturer with a competitive product that decides to play in their niche (and I don't consider the offerings I've seen from the cable companies as a competitive product).

[slowbiscuit]

Yes there's a problem here. And his last paragraph is dead on:

"The company relies on its loyal fan base to evangelize its products, which are competing against cheaper cable and satellite DVRS and other equipment. Some three or four months into the first of these problems being reported, money-losing TiVo is building plenty of bad karma among its most faithful users, who could fall out of love with what has been an amazing product."
But even this is not necessarily true, at least when comparing a Tivo HD to a Comcast HD DVR rental in the ATL. Over three years, the Tivo/cable DVR cost is even and the Tivo is paid for after that. This is assuming 3-year $299 sub and $179 refurb HD cost upfront ($13.27/mo. Tivo vs. $13.95/mo. cable rental). Lifetime would be even cheaper over the long run because of resale value, and you know the DVR rental fee is going to go up over time, not down.

Against the sat DVR's Tivo is not such a good deal, of course.

[JWThiers]

Maybe I'm lucky, I have had zero problems. But then again I haven't added an external drive or increased the internal drive either. Just plain old stock unit.