WTF? Tivo Service connection FAIL

Last night, as I often do, I watched some YouTube videos via the YouTube app installed on my Roamio OTA 1TB.

I didn't change a damn thing between then and now.

Tonight, I went to watch some YouTube videos and there are now *zero* apps listed when I go to Apps. The YouTube app has just magically disappeared overnight! What the hell???

OK, I just now made an effort to try to debug this problem. I figured out that the problem is that my Tivo is failing when trying to connect to the TiVo service (and I guess this prevents my Apps from showing up). I power cycled -everything- on my local LAN, and everything is (and probably was) working just fine -except- the bleepin' Tivo box. And even that passed the built-in diagnostic that -just- checks the network connection. That's fine. No problem. It looks to me like the Tivo *service* is just broken, aka "experiencing an outtage".

Does this happen a lot? This is REALLY irritating. And it is REALLY stupid (and horrible programming on somebody's part) that the user can't even use or see *any* Apps as long as the Tivo "service" is down.

Geeezzz! Some service! I paid for the lifetime service, less than a year ago. I never counted on the company not even being able to keep that up and running. What's wrong with them? This isn't rocket surgery fer pete's sake!

I'm not even going to waste my time calling the "customer support" phone number. Those Phillipinos are blithering idiots. All they can do is to walk you through their pre-canned script, but they have no understanding of the hardware, and I know from past experience than they don't even HAVE a U.S. version Romio OTA box that they can even check things on. (I hope that Tivo, the company, is saving a lot of money on this last-in-class "customer support", because it is absolutely worthless to actual users.)

 

Well, it is about Noon PST/PDT now, and things seem to have recovered now. Youtube is back. My thanks to everyone who replied. It was at least comforting to know that it wasn't just me, and that this was indeed a problem on Tivo's end.

On last thought...

I'm a professional software engineer by trade and training, so I can tell when software is good and when it is just badly written. In this case, it is clear that the software is just crud. There is no earthly reason why apps should just mysteriously disappear, just because the box can't make a connection to the Tivo "service". YouTube obviously could still work, even without such a connection, but some bean counter told some software engineer to make the app (or maybe even all apps) fail utterly in the absence of such a connection.

That's bad enough, all by itself, but even worse is the way the software just makes a mystery out of this simple problem. It took me about 3/4ths of a hour to finally figure out what the real problem was, i.e. the Tivo service being down ON THEIR END. Would it have killed them to just pop up some sort of a notice saying (in effect) "We're sorry, but the TiVo service is currently down, and due to an idiotic corporate decision, none of your apps will work until it comes back."?

There's no excuse for such crappy (software) handling of such an obviously predictable failure mode.

 

I'm a hard-core night owl, which is why I was up at 4 AM (PDT), trying to watch Youtube.

Anyway, I first posted my rant about this screw up here, but decided to also send the company a message/inquiry via their web site contact form. I specifically asked if they were having an outage on their end.

The good news is that I got a reply back already.

The bad news is that apparently, the people who staff their customer contacts via the web site are just as useless, if not moreso, than the inept morons they have staffing their call center in the Phillipines.

The email response -only- contained a copy of a pre-canned article from Tivo's "knowledge base" the sum total of which was this:

Thank you for contacting TiVo Email Support.
We apologize for any inconvenience that this has brought you. This may
be a temporary problem with the Service or your Internet connection.
Please wait a few minutes and then try again. If you continue to
experience this problem, please restart the DVR.

In short, they didn't even admit that they were having a service problem on their end.

I'm going to keep my Tivo, but I won't recommend any Tivo products to anybody i care about, because what is laughingly called their "customer service" is garbage, no matter which way you try to approach it.

This is a typical example of morend short-term corporate thinking. Get people's money and then abandon them. Eventually, this attitude is going to cost the company money, but by then, the people responsible will have (golden) parachuted out, or so they think.