The Tivo Scam
Yet another story proving how Tivo is the biggest scam in consumer electronics. When Tivo and Replay TV came out I thought it was the coolest thing around with one exception - the forced you to buy a service plan to be able to record stuff. Service plans are the way that companies turn one time sales into recurring profits - which is something that their investors love. But me? I hate it. Why can’t i just program in the times manually like I did with the VCR. ReplayTV went away but Tivo got in bed with the now leery TV networks and slowly but surely added in more restrictions like preventing you from fast forwarding through certain commercials and deleting certain shows after a network-set expiration date.
Now comes word from The Consumerist (an awesome web site for all this stuff, by the way) that now they’re testing sharing demographic data with their advertisers. I assume a change to the user agreement will soon follow once they figure out how to monetize that information. The author makes an excellent point about consumers taking back their rights from these type of companies:
The next big revolution in marketing needs to come from consumers realizing that demographic data has real value, and that they should be compensated fairly for it. Or actually, since most of us do realize that, what we need is a way to formally announce “ownership” of it so that it can be protected, aggregated, and sold directly.
It’s for this reason that I continue to enjoy my choice of DVR, SnapStream’s BeyondTV. It’s software for your Windows computer and works with a TV capture card (analog and HDTV) and, if necessary, an IR blaster. The program guide data is FREE and you can manually enter dates and times for recurring shows as well. You can watch the recordings on your computer, on your iPod, on your cell phone, or streaming from another computer (or cell phone) anywhere on the internet - live and/or previously recorded! That’s like a Tivo and a Slingbox all together. And for hackers like me, BeyondTV has much more options. In fact you can record multiple shows AT THE SAME TIME if you’re adventurous.
And I paid a grand total of $50 back in 2002. That’s it. Compare this to the hidden costs of Tivo or the DVR boxes taht cable companies are selling nowadays. I’ve upgraded versions for free over the years and still rely on BeyondTV to catch The Daily Show or The Office if for some reason (like last night) I miss it. I’ll also be using it to catch a couple of soccer games this weekend when I’ll be away from my digital cable goodness. It’s easy to roll your own DVR. And when you do, you won’t be subject to a Tivo hijacking - with certainly more hijacking on the horizon.
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