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Series 3 TiVo on sale

Finally, the day I've been waiting almost two years for has arrived: TiVo is selling their HD-ready CableCard ready DVR. At the moment, they're selling with no rebate and no incentives, at $799. The pre-paid monthly plans don't save much money unless you do the 3 year plan, which saves you about $150 in fees.

Considering I pay Comcast $10 a month for a crappy box, I don't mind paying for the TiVo service on top of the price, but hopefully in a few months they'll bring the prices down below $500 with incentives and rebates.

Since I've been waiting forever for the box and keep losing recordings on my Motorola box, I splurged. I'll post a full review after I've had it a few days:

by Matt Haughey September 12, 2006 in News

Comments

no lifetime service Matt? ;). If you go to tivo.com/vip the lifetime service transfer offer is live. I ordered mine that way! Wish there was some way to see when it was actually shipping. I want to set up an appointment with comcast to get the cablecards set up.

Posted by: joshua at Sep 12, 2006 10:41:43 AM

I've been looking forward to this too. Now on the day of release I read that TiVo had to get rid of TiVoToGo and Multi-Room Viewing??? What's up with that?? http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060912-7721.html

Posted by: daniel at Sep 12, 2006 12:04:38 PM

$1,100.00+ for a DVR and service? Truly there are suckers born every day.

Posted by: Voice of Reason at Sep 12, 2006 12:28:14 PM

If TiVoToGo is indeed not included, I might start crying. Seriously.

Posted by: New York at Sep 12, 2006 12:32:36 PM

I couldnt possibly be more fucking pissed off right now.

http://www.tivo.com/2.0.3hdDvr.plt.faqs_2.asp#8

"Will the TiVoToGo™ feature and Multi-Room Viewing be available on the Series3 HD?
As always, TiVo's goal is to make all of the Emmy® award-winning TiVo service features available on all of our hardware platforms. Because TiVo worked directly with Cable Television Laboratories Inc. (CableLabs®) to enable the recording of digital standard definition and high definition channels with the TiVo Series3 HD box, this product has unique requirements, including what content can be taken off of the DVR and in what form. TiVo is working with CableLabs and our own engineering team to enable both Multi-Room Viewing and TiVoToGo functionality in a future release."

Posted by: New York at Sep 12, 2006 12:36:22 PM

Woah. And I thought MythTV and Media Center were expensive. I fail to comprehend buying one of these -- as I fail to understand a lot of TV spending habits. If it at least did OTA HDTV maybe I could see buying it to get an HD recorder with no cable fees.

Posted by: CJ at Sep 12, 2006 12:38:26 PM

I just called to cancel service for my Series 2. I'll stick with the Comcast DVR, crappy as it may be over spending this much money on a new TiVo box. They tried to drop the monthly service charge to $6.95 to keep me from cancelling, but I declined. The rep also said that the price of the box would likely come down around the holiday season, but I told him I'd wait for that to happen before deciding whether or not to come back to TiVo.

Posted by: Kevin at Sep 12, 2006 12:49:32 PM

Can't wait for this to get here Saturday (not shipping til Thursday and got 2-day)

Posted by: Rob Stekson at Sep 12, 2006 1:12:45 PM

I have a Series 2 with a Lifetime Subscription and was not happy that they removed the lifetime option. However, I got an e-mail from Tivo today offering to let me transfer my lifetime subscription to the Series 3 for $199. That makes this a bit more appealing...

Posted by: John Rice at Sep 12, 2006 4:40:12 PM

Wow, and I was really looking forward to this unit. Without MRV and TTG this thing is only worth a few hundred. I will stick with my modified DTivo's until they fix the legal issues. MRV is a MUST!

Posted by: Thor at Sep 13, 2006 5:20:52 AM

CJ, it does do OTA HDTV.

Posted by: Leo at Sep 13, 2006 7:33:18 AM

Anyone else checked with Comcast on the cable cards? I called because I was thinking about upgrading to digital cable and a Series3 but after speaking with comcast and finding out they want $9 per month, per card additional if I don't want the set top box, I decided to pass.

Posted by: Murdock at Sep 13, 2006 8:06:36 AM

I talked to Comcast about Cable Cards yesterday before I ordered my S3. They told me the first one was free, the second one was $6.95 a month.

Posted by: joshua at Sep 13, 2006 8:22:03 AM

Saw an ad for this on the Tivo. What a crock. 25 hours of HD recording. Laughable. No TTG and no MRV. Pathetic. Tivo is network televisions bitch now. I'm getting a MythTV HDTV box and pocketing the difference. This cost is outrageous.

Posted by: Pfister at Sep 13, 2006 8:32:30 AM

So instead of paying Comcast $10 / month, you're now effectively paying tivo $31.74 / month.

Posted by: Charlie at Sep 13, 2006 8:49:50 AM

I picked up my cable card from Comcast today. $6.95 like Joshua said because I didn't turn in my desktop box, yet.
Anybody else get a hit on Best Buy by searching on "tivo series 3" in Google. It comes up about one time in three. You check in your area and it says they have the series 3. They let you get almost as far as your credit card number before it goes in a loop.

Posted by: Eric at Sep 13, 2006 9:14:44 AM

So did you get "the email" yet?

Posted by: LonV at Sep 14, 2006 8:05:13 PM

I'm disappointed the Series3 is so expensive. I hope they either bring the price down or release a more mass-market version. I just can't bear jumping from $5 a month to Comcast for the DVR to over $30/month to TiVo.

Posted by: Preston at Sep 14, 2006 8:30:44 PM

Yeah, I got an email tonight saying my TiVo would ship by end of day, Friday, instead of by Wednesday or Thursday of this week.

It's kind of maddening that this would happen, you'd think their store app could adjust the "shipping in 1-2 days" message depending on inventory in real time, but apparently not.

Still, at $800 each, I'm kind of surprised that the demand was so high for these boxes at launch. I thought at such a high price point sales would be lukewarm for the next few months.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Sep 15, 2006 1:42:17 AM

yeah, mine's delayed too alas. I was surprised just like you Matt. Either they didn't have a very big production run to start with, or demand is much greater than anyone would've expected given the price point. Which is nice, I'm all for seeing TiVo succeed! Also, now I feel like less of a fool for ordering overnight shipping to get the S3 to my door a week before my cable card installer was due to come.

Posted by: joshua at Sep 15, 2006 11:32:17 AM

What about us DirecTV folks?

Posted by: Victor at Sep 17, 2006 5:24:22 PM

How long are we all going to allow CableLabs to treat the public like criminals? They dictate policy under the assumption everyone is going to steal their content and post it somewhere for profit. Do they not realize most of their content is shit that no one really wants? Keep treating us all like criminals Cablelabs and we may all start acting like criminals. Cablelabs have ruined any promise Vista initially offered with the new MediaCenter and now they are dictating how Tivo will function? These group really needs to be conrolled. Time for some off air HD tuners and Myth or MediaCenter PC's. This has gone beyond promise.

Posted by: AlienAgenda at Sep 24, 2006 7:01:33 AM

How many times are you morons going to burn your money? I remember buying the same damn thing 2 years ago for $1000.
It was called an HR10-250 HD TiVo.
Then I remember it getting phased out, and to get one that would do the same thing as the "old": I was asked to buy a new one for a few hundred dollars and then give it back to D* when I cancelled, sign up for 2 years of service, never lower my level of subscription, and *gift* them my property (they wanted the HR10-250 back, probably so that they could upgrade to their O/S, change it to the Ka/Ku DBS tuner, and rebrand it as their new HR20.
Now we have another one of these with another proprietary service - "CableCard".
What happens in a few years when the cable company says we're going to move to MiniCableCard, CableCardXD or CableCard 3.0 (none of those things exist, but handy how I need a 361-in-one memory card reader nowadays)
What happens when somebody hacks this device to remove DRM and Cablelabs sends down an instruction so that all of their cards do not work in Tivos?
What happens when cable companies move entirely to MPEG-4 and launch new cable boxes? What happens if you get Fios?

Technology is changing too fast to warrant the purchase of overly expensive and closed-proprietary hardware. Do realize that the FCC has little to no control over what cable companies can do because they own their own system, run their own wires, and connect their own consumers. The government has control over the most important things like shutting your box down for 2 minutes when there's a severe thunderstorm warning to let you know. Because all of us are so dumb we can't read a 16 word sentence in 60 seconds. We need the full 2 minutes.

So go ahead and buy this crap. And buy the new one next year. And the year after.
As long as you know they will always cost about a thousand dollars, charge you some more a month (what are we at like, $7 for the cablecard, and $13 for the tivo service), and forever and ever - these crapboxes will only be able to store 25 hours of TV.

I do get solace in the fact 25% if not half of the morons buying this thing aren't going to be able to use it because their HDTV doesn't do HDCP. Should have thought of that when you blew your money, but that is not anybody's forte here.

Posted by: Eric at Sep 25, 2006 2:56:12 PM

Verizon Fios works great with CableCARDs and TiVo, and they're not required to by the FCC mandate that states that all major MSOs (Cable Providers) MUST provide CableCARDs to any OCUR (OpenCable Unidirectional Receiver) upon request.

This means that per this FCC mandate, cable providers have to supply CableCARDs for any OCUR (TiVo, in this case).

There are quite a few types of CableCARDs in production, but they are all backward compatible.

Even if the CableCARDs were not backward compatible all major MSOs have to have (in stock) compatible CableCARDs for any OCUR on OpenCable's list of supported devices (TiVo is on this list) at any given time to be compliant with the mandate.

The above is not a risk.

And for some of the above users: damn, lighten up. If you don't feel like it's worth the money then don't worry, nobody's making you buy it. For others, this has been a long awaited product and we'll put up with the cost, and wait (even if a bit impatiently) for TiVoToGo and MRV.

Posted by: Jason at Mar 26, 2007 7:55:40 AM

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