An open letter from an 11-year TiVo customer: The Premiere is the final straw.

Some will probably say "good riddance, don't let the door hit you on the way out" - I'd like to apologize in advance for those folks. Insular fanboyism and vitriol has been part of this forum's response to challenges in Tivo products & service.

I'd also like to say it's always sad to see another customer go, especially one with as long a tenure as you (joined the forum in 2003, nice!) but the choice for what works best in your household is yours to make. That said, the Tivo Premiere works well for my household - well enough that we purchased an additional Premiere XL, though we would not have done so without a shockingly good deal presenting itself. Future potential users reading this thread would be wise to note that times change, situations change, and your household needs are what are most important.

Your comments regarding Tivo's tone-deafness are preaching to the choir... we all hope posts such as this one attract some attention somewhere, in the aggregate, and Tivo starts to realize ignoring customers completely and not finishing software they start does not pay in the long run.

Finally, Weaknees does rock - I haven't had them replace my drive, I do those myself, but have corresponded about other things and they're one of the nice things about this community IMO. Glad to hear you had a good experience there.

jrtroo said:

All issues this poster (cross-poster) has aside- I find these kinds of posts somewhat fishy. How many times are we seeing someone slam tivo with their first post ever, even though they have joined years and years ago (and always previously loved their units and have gobs and gobs of them)? Often these have no details as to the true problem, which could have a resolution.

Who would even remember their login or have bothered to become a member?

Puzzling behavior at best.

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I don't really find it puzzling - I did that myself. I joined in 2007, lurked even before that. Posted three times in 2007, a handful in 2008, then nothing at all until July 2010 - and maybe a post every couple of months until the beginning of 2011, when I decided to become a bit more active.

I've had Tivos that entire time - but I've only posted much here for approximately six months. Doesn't mean the entire time I've owned Tivos just became irrelevant - it just means I chose to do other things than talk about them.

Also, people who are happy with products generally don't seek out forums. I was once active in forums (and on AVSforum) in topics about my 7.1 setup and various TV's - but have had no reason to visit in quite awhile. Doesn't mean I've changed my opinion on those units, or that my opinion is any less relevant.

What's more, this forum has actually done very well (compared to many places) at getting people to search - many real-world end-users come here searching for some information, find it, and then leave. That's what I've done, even before I had a membership. Some places are deluged with the same repetitive simple questions daily - TC doesn't have that, for the most part, at least not to the same degree, which I'm thankful for!

Anyway, I guess I don't find it particularly "suspicious" that he didn't post. And if he's like most end-users, his login and password are probably the same he uses for other websites, or one of a handful - or even worse, it's written down - so remembering them might not be an issue. It's just a forum, after all, not your bank login or something!

Oh yeah, and not to brag, but I still want to find anyone who didn't win some contest that got a better deal than I did: Premiere XL + lifetime for $241 total. Even cheaper than my Woot+199 regular unit.

SugarBowl said:

With the Ipad, iPhone apps, and multi dvr streaming, the premier has turned the corner in my mind.

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Speaking for myself. I don't any any "I"stuff, and have only one DVR. Plus the multi DVR streaming is *not* available yet... it is a hack/secret and neither stable (based on people's postings) nor supported.

I want a rock solid, fast, and feature-full Premiere. In the 1+ year I have owned the Premiere, I have had to completely replace it once, reboot it dozens of times, frozen boots due to slide remote or TA, been frozen for 1 to 20 min many times waiting for control to return during unexplained lockups, forced to endure many hours on the phone with the cable company trying to resolve repeated cable card and tuning adapter issues, and stuck with the old SDUI to get acceptable usability and performance.

Not that much has changed for me over the year, it is even LESS stable than before the last few updates, performance has improved only slightly, and they added some useless features (to me) like Hulu+ and I-stuff. It did not live up to my expectations, at all.

It is still better than my cable company's DVR, but not by a lot. Perhaps other cable companies' boxes are much worse. And many people are perfectly happy with the Premiere- Kudos to them. I still have hopes for TiVo, but I can *certainly* understand and sympathize with the original poster's disgust.

Thanks crxssi. You and I seem to have experienced many of the same issues.

First off, it is very entertaining to discover that I might somehow have planned this back in 2003 and just waited for the right moment to stick it to TiVo. For those of you who are eager to see a conspiracy, let me try to assure you that I have been through the full TiVo era, from the very first series, to a DirecTV box for a while, to several cable Series II boxes, to several Series 3 boxes. I have loved some boxes and liked some others. That said, I despise the Premiere XL with a passion, and I am disgusted with the TiVo company's failures over the past few years.

For all of you who genuinely wonder what the Premiere issues are, just read your own forum. I won't bother with a full recitation, but. . . The Premiere has a terrible and SLOW user-interface, tons of added "features" that are just revenue-bumps for TiVo, and the company is either unresponsive (at best) or outright unwilling (at worst) to be honest with us about the true horizon to fix the product. They have effectively walked away from significant product engineering improvement on the core service (i.e., time-shifted TV) and spent that effort on rolling out loads of features that duplicate features on your computer/DVD player/Xbox/PS3/AppleTV/you name it. Some of you may like that stuff--hell, I like a few of the options--but, I am not saying that stuff is bad. . . I am saying that regularly rolling out new revenue-generating features when you are not honoring your product commitment on your flagship box and service is not fair pool.

Furthermore, my Premiere XL has been a mess. It didn't talk to my other Series 3 boxes for months--and, when it did, it was glacial (over an .11n network). It rejected an external hard drive. It murdered several internal hard-drives. When I tried to talk to TiVo about it, I was bounced between people, hung up on, and just generally ignored. Not to mention, setting up the box was a nightmare when it first came out--there was little or no info about cable systems and cards, and TiVo was of zero help in ameliorating the issue. They did not seem to have done any legwork to assure positive consumer setup experience.

Also, tangentially, I bought Roxio's Toast 10, specifically for the TiVo app. After a couple of months, the software updated and KILLED the TiVo app completely for all customers using that software iteration. No explanation. No refund. Now, you can make the case that that was Roxio's fault, but I wouldn't have even known about the app without TiVo marketing it to me via their website. In isolation, I wouldn't care, but this is about a series of bad experiences with TiVo.

Finally, the TiVo system is needlessly opaque for 2011. There is absolutely no transparency about what is going on during startup, shutdown, and when there are problems. When the system shuts down suddenly or encounters an issue, it gives you close to zero info on what happened. You can't buy a third-party media hard drive, install it, and have the system format it for you. You can't attach a standard USB external drive. You can't run any consumer-friendly utilities. You are flying completely blind if anything goes wrong.

Whew, it is exhausting to go over this stuff, and it is frankly depressing to look back over the experience.

crxssi said:

Speaking for myself. I don't any any "I"stuff, and have only one DVR. Plus the multi DVR streaming is *not* available yet... it is a hack/secret and neither stable (based on people's postings) nor supported.

I want a rock solid, fast, and feature-full Premiere. In the 1+ year I have owned the Premiere, I have had to completely replace it once, reboot it dozens of times, frozen boots due to slide remote or TA, been frozen for 1 to 20 min many times waiting for control to return during unexplained lockups, forced to endure many hours on the phone with the cable company trying to resolve repeated cable card and tuning adapter issues, and stuck with the old SDUI to get acceptable usability and performance.

Not that much has changed for me over the year, it is even LESS stable than before the last few updates, performance has improved only slightly, and they added some useless features (to me) like Hulu+ and I-stuff. It did not live up to my expectations, at all.

It is still better than my cable company's DVR, but not by a lot. Perhaps other cable companies' boxes are much worse. And many people are perfectly happy with the Premiere- Kudos to them. I still have hopes for TiVo, but I can *certainly* understand and sympathize with the original poster's disgust.

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