Lunching With TiVo's E. Stephen Mack

« NBC, the Olympics, and Intel's new Viiv platform | Main | TiVo Desktop for Mac v1.9.2 »

Lunching With TiVo's E. Stephen Mack

Thomas Hawk has a great post about lunching with Stephen Mack, Director of Service Operations at TiVo. In it, Thomas covers a bunch of lingering TiVo news. A few details are mentioned about the Series 3 TiVo (but no launch date), HME apps are discussed, and DirecTV's continued support of the HD DirecTiVo box are also mentioned.

It'll be interesting to see how TiVo will release a standalone CableCARD HD product (that may cost hundreds of dollars) while at the same time releasing TiVo software for the Motorola hardware Comcast offers customers for almost free. I'm guessing that the Motorola 6412 running TiVo will lack a great deal of features that require the full Series 3 box to take advantage of. I hope that TiVo can find a market for the Series 3 and also help existing Comcast customers, but I suspect it'll be a tightrope walk to please both sides.

That said, after living with a 6412 for the past few months I would pay any price to get rid of this unit and get back onto a real TiVo box.

by Matt Haughey February 14, 2006 in News

Comments

I couldn't agree more, the 6412 is one buggy POS. At first I thought it was "OK", and it is way more responsive them my D*TV HDTV Tivo was. After a few months that is the nicest thing I can say about it. We have two boxes one of them just randomly fails to record things (gets about 2 seconds), and has some weird db corruption that prevents me from reordering the priority on certain number groupings. Comcast solution swap it out, no migration of shows or even the record list, somthing like 50 shows between the wife, kids and myself... they swear it couldn't possible be the software... but of course it is.
I won't even get started on all the sound and video bugs I have seen, especially with pausing or skipping forward or back. All repeatable and demonstrable. Add on to that the "feature" that causes the guide data to dump on a power cycle and takes days to a week to rebuild (two whole weeks of data)... Feh, the MS foundation stuff simple brings nothing to the table and I can't wait to dump it. Hell I have been toying with going back to D*TV, in my area I got more HD since the HD Tivo unit managed to get a couple stations like WB and UPN in HD where comcast doesn't have them (Sunnyvale, CA). Pretty sad state of affairs.

Unfortunately I fear you will be right, just like with the D*TV units Tivo will not own the customer with comcast tivo's and so we will likly have the same awful cycle of no patches/fixes and no new features. Hell probable even fewer features then on a normal series2 just like with the D*TV units. I sincerely hope it's not the case, but the fear has been burned into me now.

Add on the all out attack on anything remotly resembling fair use and MS rolling over for the IP owners (Tivo too though they hide behind the skirt of macro vision) and soon we will all be lucky if we can record comercials much less the shows we paid to receive via cable or sat.

Not to be an alarmest or anything :).

Posted by: Griffon at Feb 15, 2006 1:37:41 AM

My Comcast tech support folks get calls from me frequently about the horrid quality of the 6412 cable box. I've had every problem mentioned above, and of course it's the software--they keep telling me they haven't seen these problems before, the lousy liars! I absolutely hate this Comcast POS, and have only kept it for the HD recordings (when it deigns to make one for me). Luckly I split my cable and can also record into my Tivo, still sitting under the Comcast box.

Posted by: Foovius Foo at Feb 16, 2006 9:46:11 PM

Any rumors on the release date for TiVo software on Motorola hardware? I too have a Motorola cable box w/ Comcast HD service and it's a far cry from the intuitive bliss that is TiVo (HHOS0.

Posted by: Alex Bischoff at Feb 18, 2006 4:31:25 PM

I guess I'm lucky: switched from two Tivos to two 6412s, and am not going back, if only for the ability to record HD, and for the fact is has two tuners.

Glitches with my 6412:
- occasional (one/hour) audio dropout of about one second
- unresponsiveness for 10 seconds or so (happens once a week or so)

Annoying (especially the unresponsiveness), but I'm still pretty happy with them. I'll be even happier when I can combine this box with Tivo software sometime this year (?), but for now it suits me fine.

Do miss wishlists though :-)

Actually, my pet peeve isn't software at all, it's the relatively poor quality of the guide data; reruns are often not billed as such, so I get multiple recordings of same show. Fortunately, the harddrive is big enough to accomodate that.

Posted by: RvD at Feb 22, 2006 2:33:00 PM

Lunching With TiVo's E. Stephen Mack

Comments

Post a Comment

On this site

Recent Comments

Advertising