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$99 lifetime offer

140K views 555 replies 153 participants last post by  Tivogre 
#1 ·
I have an extra Tivo HD box I no longer use in a spare bedroom and the multi service discount of $6.95 ran out so I called in to cancel it and they offered me $99 lifetime.

At a point I should stop paying the $7 and cancel it or buy the lifetime, I just don't use it. I don't have any conflicts I care to go in the 2nd room and program and I just don't use the 2nd HD box anymore.

Any plans to communicate with a 2nd box better in the near future or no?
 
#477 ·
I could get Lifetime on another HD or Series 2.
The only other Tivo's on my account are a series 2, which they are giving me the $6.95 plan on .
The $99 offer doesn't really help much on an S2, since you can easily find used lifetime S2s for $99 or less. The $6.95/month plan for an S2 doesn't help either since you can pay for lifetime after 14 months of payments.

Maybe you can find a used Tivo HD and transfer the $6.95 plan.
 
#478 ·
The $99 offer doesn't really help much on an S2, since you can easily find used lifetime S2s for $99 or less. The $6.95/month plan for an S2 doesn't help either since you can pay for lifetime after 14 months of payments.

Maybe you can find a used Tivo HD and transfer the $6.95 plan.
My 86 year old Dad has the S2 and will not give it up. My step Mom doesn't like ANY changes with their tv so....Maybe I should go ahead and do the lifetime on it. I could get another HD from eBay for $50, add lifetime and then sell it for $250 to $300. That's the plan that I've been working on.

The csr at Tivo actually suggested this a couple of months ago. He said that I could recoup some of the cost of the LT for the Elite this way.

I have three, LT, HD's that I'm going to eBay. Then I'll wait on the IPSTB. The Cox gateway and cable card fees are getting old.

Also, I still have two Premieres that I could activate and use to get LT on some more HD's. (Calling during the 30 window to cancel after activating of course)
 
#479 ·
I called Friday and said that I had gotten $99 lifetime last month on my HD and can I get it on my other HD.. The csr said let me check and came back and said yes.. For every primere you can get 2 lifetimes on older boxes..

The box I just called about was on the $99 yearly plan..

So now I have a monthly elite and 2 TivoHDs with lifetime

It may be a little csr roulette but it pays to ask nicely
 
#480 ·
I was just offered the $99 lifetime when I called to cancell service on an old tivoHD we haven't used for a long time but were still paying $6.95/mo for.

She gave a free month service and gave me a date to call back by to either cancel or pay the $99. It looks like I should be able to sell the box with lifetime for around $300 on ebay without much trouble. Any reason not to go that route, if I don't have any family or friends that would want it?
 
#481 ·
I was just offered the $99 lifetime when I called to cancell service on an old tivoHD we haven't used for a long time but were still paying $6.95/mo for.

She gave a free month service and gave me a date to call back by to either cancel or pay the $99. It looks like I should be able to sell the box with lifetime for around $300 on ebay without much trouble. Any reason not to go that route, if I don't have any family or friends that would want it?
If you can stand to "invest" the money short term, and have no objection to turning a profit, I can't see why not to. You might even be able to move it quickly on Craigslist and avoid the fleabay hassle.
 
#482 ·
Called to see about canceling my S2 and wasn't offered the $99 since I didn't have an S4, but I was offered to upgrade the S2 to an S4 Premiere 45hr for $200 and keep the monthly at $6.95. When I look at the tivo web site I only See Premiere with 75 hours and the XL with 150 hours. So which model was he talking about? I can't decide if it's a good deal or not.
 
#483 ·
Called to see about canceling my S2 and wasn't offered the $99 since I didn't have an S4, but I was offered to upgrade the S2 to an S4 Premiere 45hr for $200 and keep the monthly at $6.95. When I look at the tivo web site I only See Premiere with 75 hours and the XL with 150 hours. So which model was he talking about? I can't decide if it's a good deal or not.
The 45hr model was the Premiere that had a 320GB hard drive in it. The latest model has a 500GB hard drive. It could be a refurbished Tivo, or just an older model they have left from the old stock.
 
#484 ·
Called to see about canceling my S2 and wasn't offered the $99 since I didn't have an S4, but I was offered to upgrade the S2 to an S4 Premiere 45hr for $200 and keep the monthly at $6.95. When I look at the tivo web site I only See Premiere with 75 hours and the XL with 150 hours. So which model was he talking about? I can't decide if it's a good deal or not.
It's only a good deal if you think it's worth it to upgrade.
You'd be paying MSRP for a 1st generation Premiere (not guaranteed to be 'new') just to get the $6.95 subscription transferred over to it.

Meanwhile, the S2 becomes a brick. Probably worth more if you gut it and sell the parts individually than if you tried to sell it as a whole.

If you think you might like the Premiere for what it has to offer over an S2 or just have an itch to upgrade, this is not a bad deal. Although you would be paying full price for the hardware, you are getting to keep your legacy subscription. The perk is, that is not something that you can do outside of dealing directly with TiVo at this time.

YMMV as this is coming from someone who only gets Tivos with a lifetime sub. :p
 
#485 ·
I have my series 2 box with lifetime for 7 yrs where the hard drive is begining to go bad. I am seeing all kinds of people with boxes for sale on ebay so I figured I'd call Tivo and ask before I bought a new box.
Per the billing supervisor, the $99 lifetime deal is for people who have a series 1 or series 2 box and are looking to put lifetime on it. The reason they are doing this is because the boxes are becoming obsolete and dont have much life left in them anymore.
If I buy a premiere box either series 3 or 4 then I have to pay the $399 lifetime or multi discount of $12.95.
The only other offer was a new premier box from them directly with a wireless g adapter and six months of hulu plus with lifetime service for $399.00 It does work out to be over $200 in savings but I still think i can buy a premier box with lifetime on ebay for cheaper. I already have a wireless g adapter and dont really care about hulu so I think thats the way Im going to have to go.
If anyone knows about getting the 99 special on a premier, please advise how to do this.
Thanks:mad
 
#486 ·
I have my series 2 box with lifetime for 7 yrs where the hard drive is begining to go bad. I am seeing all kinds of people with boxes for sale on ebay so I figured I'd call Tivo and ask before I bought a new box.
Per the billing supervisor, the $99 lifetime deal is for people who have a series 1 or series 2 box and are looking to put lifetime on it. The reason they are doing this is because the boxes are becoming obsolete and dont have much life left in them anymore.
If I buy a premiere box either series 3 or 4 then I have to pay the $399 lifetime or multi discount of $12.95.
The only other offer was a new premier box from them directly with a wireless g adapter and six months of hulu plus with lifetime service for $399.00 It does work out to be over $200 in savings but I still think i can buy a premier box with lifetime on ebay for cheaper. I already have a wireless g adapter and dont really care about hulu so I think thats the way Im going to have to go.
If anyone knows about getting the 99 special on a premier, please advise how to do this.
Thanks:mad
The $99 offer started out on S3s, specifically I think it was S3 HDs that were coming off of 3 year pre-pays purchased during a period when lifetime wasn't being offered.

Then it spread to if you callled to cancel an S3 platform unit that you'd been paying on for at least 3 years, even if monthly, you could get it if you kept playing CSR roulette, and then if you were buying a Premiere you could get leverage to lifetime an S3 or S2 at $99.

I don't think you'll be seeing $99 lifetime on the Premiere anytime soon.

They do seem to have a thing going through Aug. 31 where buying a Premiere and signing up for a monthly one year commitment ($14.99 per, I think) let's you lifetime an S1 or S2 and maybe an S3 at $49.99

What model is your S2, is that the original hard drive, do you still have analog cable?
 
#487 ·
I have a 540040. still using all the original cables, the machine inside is as it came from the factory. The worst thing is I had a brand new never used 540040 that i bought six months ago at a garage sale for $20. The guy said it had lifetime on it although tivo said it didnt.
I decided 3 months ago that I had no use for it and gave it away for free on freecycle. Now I am kicking myself as I had a perfectly good machine I could have taken the drive out of. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20.

Going to just hang in there for right now and weighing my options. :confused:
 
#488 ·
I have a 540040. still using all the original cables, the machine inside is as it came from the factory. The worst thing is I had a brand new never used 540040 that i bought six months ago at a garage sale for $20. The guy said it had lifetime on it although tivo said it didnt.
I decided 3 months ago that I had no use for it and gave it away for free on freecycle. Now I am kicking myself as I had a perfectly good machine I could have taken the drive out of. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20.

Going to just hang in there for right now and weighing my options. :confused:
For the cost of a new hard drive (or free if you have any IDE hard drives 40 GB or larger laying around), you can most likely save that S2. You can find help with that here at TCF. Check out the Tivo Upgrade Forum section.
For a higher cost, there are resources where you can buy a hard drive with the Tivo software loaded onto it, where all you have to do is swap it out.

There's also a slight possibility that the power supply might be failing. That can also be fixed/replaced.
 
#490 ·
I called Friday and said that I had gotten $99 lifetime last month on my HD and can I get it on my other HD.. The csr said let me check and came back and said yes.. For every primere you can get 2 lifetimes on older boxes..

The box I just called about was on the $99 yearly plan..

So now I have a monthly elite and 2 TivoHDs with lifetime

It may be a little csr roulette but it pays to ask nicely
My CSR told me it was 1 $99 lifetime for each premiere -- I guess it's still the case that they make it up as they go along.
 
#491 ·
My CSR told me it was 1 $99 lifetime for each premiere -- I guess it's still the case that they make it up as they go along.
The first time that I called, dealing with the Premiere's, they told me that they might do two of the LT's, on HD's, if I add the Elite.

The second time I called, to cancel my 30 day HD, they changed it to LT. I didn't even add the Elite on! She said that if I called back to add the Elite, they would do another LT HD or Series 2, for me.

Who knows..........
 
#493 ·
So they gave you 30 days free, then when you tried to cancel that they gave you lifetime?
Yes,

I activated it online under the 30 day money back deal.
I called to cancel after a couple of weeks and they offered the $99 LT. Of course they gave me back $12.95 on the 30 day guarantee.

Now there was an Elite in the mix of that and still is. I'm still thinking of adding LT to it. I had activated it online months ago, but cancelled it before 30 days. They refunded that $12.95 and told me that if I called back to reactivate, I could get the $99 LT on two Series 2's or HD's.

I was waiting on news for the IPSTB to make my move on activating the Elite. The way that these cablecard fees are going, I should go ahead and sell all my LT Tivos, to do away with the $6 a month fee for each one. $2 for each card and $4 for the Digital Gateway fee (Advanced tv) for each. Then I could use just the Elite and the rest IPSTB's.
 
#494 ·
I went ahead and bought the 45 hour premiere for $200 to transfer my S2 service grandfathered in at $6.95 a mo, and got them to give me the $99 lifetime on my S3.

So I'm going from having a LT Humax, an S2 and an S3 ( both at $6.95 a mo) To having a $6.95 a mo Premiere and a LT S3, and an S2 that is pretty worthless and a LT Humax I need to get rid of. :)
 
#495 ·
I think the $99 deal is just to keep the subscribed units number up, I don't think it generates any profits,
Other than the paperwork/time to get is started, it really doesn't cost TiVo much to have a TiVo subscribed. So I do think it generates revenue. As the Tivo services are all done automatically over phone lines and the web, so little or no expense, except if their phone lines have to be increased. But I think most people go with a internet connection to get the extra features. TiVo can sell their advertising for more when they have more subscribers. But I think TiVo probably really want to sell lifetime only when a person is not going to pay the monthly cost, as that is their real 'bread and butter'.
There are at thousands of Tivos unplugged in peoples storage not making any money for Tivo. If Tivo got $99 for lifetime for each of those TiVos and the greater advertising money with a bigger customer base, it would help the bottom line of Tivo greatly.
 
#496 ·
I called up to cancel my Tivo and was given this offer - went ahead and signed up, it sounded like a good deal. I am not sure which series without looking at home - was purchased in Sept of 2008 - before the premiere came out - it is an HD Tivo - online says 20 hr, in order history says 180 hr - think that's for sd. I have directv and use that in the winter then suspend and have used the tivo in the Summer - have hung onto for a few years not using it much, it but finally decided to cancel because I was barely watching tv. As I said it seemed like a good deal. I guess they figure some money is better than none?

Editing: I think it is the Tivo HD - series 3 from the pictures - the one that records 20 hrs of hd. I'd had service on this standalone tivo for almost 4 years, but have been using Tivo from the series 1 Directivo.
 
#499 ·
I might be able to get a hold of a series 3 Tivo HD (160GB drive) for about $40. I thought I remember reading here that someone basically put one of these older series 3 units on a month-to-month billing. Then, after about 3 months, was able to call and try to cancel it, but then also get the $99 lifetime offer for it. Is this true?

Also, I have 2 newer Tivo Premieres and was able to get the $99 lifetime offer for my S2 box after getting one of these Premieres & threatening to cancel the S2. I took it and its now on a TV in our basement. Earlier in this thread, someone mentioned that you can get two $99 lifetime offers (for older units) per each Premiere. THen someone replied with this:

My CSR told me it was 1 $99 lifetime for each premiere -- I guess it's still the case that they make it up as they go along.
I wonder which it is? Or is it really more hit-or-miss with what kind of CSR you get with ANY of these $99 offers?
 
#500 ·
I might be able to get a hold of a series 3 Tivo HD (160GB drive) for about $40. I thought I remember reading here that someone basically put one of these older series 3 units on a month-to-month billing. Then, after about 3 months, was able to call and try to cancel it, but then also get the $99 lifetime offer for it. Is th
I just put one on no commit month to month was thinking of trying after 6 or 7 months.
 
#501 ·
Just because a company is not making a profit overall, doesn't mean that they don't make a 'profit' from a particular event.
You mean they may be charging a price above cost for the service, which all providers seek to do. That is different from profit.

It would indicate that the service contributes positively instead of negatively to the overall bottom line.

Just before I posted this I note that you revised your previous statement- looks good.
 
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