Maybe they should charge extra for the remote

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Has TiVo gone mad? Mad with power? Mad with lust for wealth? Or are they doing anything and everything to stave off bankruptcy?
It's sad -- so sad -- that I went from being a huge TiVo fan to being disgusted with them in such a short time.
Here's the latest outrage from the company that keeps finding ways to get into our wallets:

In its ongoing bid to be a central conduit of media, TiVo Inc. plans to broaden its digital video recording service later this year so users of its set-top boxes can download videos from the Internet and watch them from their television sets.

... TiVo's new broadband offering, however, will work only with downloaded videos that are not copy-protected, such as most user-generated clips and many video podcasts. Feature films and videos purchased from online stores like Movielink or Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes will not be supported, though company officials said they are seeking to offer such protected content in the future.

The service feature will be implemented by the end of this year through an upgrade to the TiVo Desktop software, which some subscribers already use to view photos from the Web and listen to Internet radio. TiVo said it will take downloaded videos that have been placed into a computer's TiVo folder and automatically convert them into an MPEG-2 video format so the videos can be viewed on TVs and searchable via TiVo boxes. The video formats that will be supported are QuickTime, Windows Media Video and MPEG-4.

The software will cost $24.95 for new users and will be a free upgrade for existing users.

In other words, you still won't be able to watch legally-downloaded content from, say, iTunes or any other online video store -- you can only watch crappy clips uploaded to YouTube or the like, and even then the files have to be downloadable in one of the three formats above. You can't view YouTube videos directly, you've got to find them, download them, and store them on your computer in a special shared folder. And in fact, they haven't updated the TiVo to play these standard video formats -- no, they're still running on ancient MPEG-2. So once you download the video, you have to convert it to MPEG-2 format before you can play it on your TiVo.
Pardon me, but what's the point? That's a lot of work to watch some home videos of someone's cat. I mean, why can't one simply access YouTube and the like using the TiVo directly?
On top of this, the TiVo desktop software, which has always been free because it enables you to use the connectivity features built into the TiVo -- which in turn require the desktop software -- is now going to cost customers an extra fee?
So, we pay for the box. We pay for monthly guide listings and to "unlock" features of the box (a fee which they recently raised to, frankly, outrageous heights), and now we pay for the software that's required to take advantage of the box's built-in functions.
Is anyone else tired of being fee-ed to death by companies?

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