Junk Food For The Soul

Sweet! Just got a good deal from TiVo. As I mentioned earlier, one of my TiVo units broke so I was going to replace it with a newer DT unit. So I looked on TiVo’s website and found the one I wanted – $99. Not bad.

But off to the side of the order page was the part where you order the service plan with it, and the cheapest plan is $12.95 a month. Um … I’m payin $6.95 a month now for the recently broken unit. I don’t really like the thought of doubling that. When I bought the second box I was getting a cheaper rate because I had a second box.

So I called up TiVo to find out how to transfer the current plan from the broken box to the new one. Shawn in Customer Support wasn’t very helpful. Nice enough, but he said $12.95 was the cheapest plan and that I would just have to cancel the plan on the broken box and activate the box with the $12.95 plan when it arrived.

Hmm … that was enough to make me reconsider the purchase. I only use the second unit a couple of days a week. It’s not a need. But I decided to take him up on his offer to transfer me to the “Retention Center” to help me cancel the account. I really didn’t need their help with that part, but the word “retention” sounded promising.

Glad I did. I told the woman who answered – sorry, missed her name – the same story about my broken TiVo, having 2 boxes and wanting to get new box under the same plan. To my surprise she said no problem and even gave me the $99 TiVo for $69.

I got to keep my cheap plan and get $30 off the new box. All I had to do was confirm my shipping information and give her my credit card number. The box will arrive at my doorstep, at which time I’ll call back with my case number and they are supposed to switch the plan from the broken TiVo to the new one.

Thanks TiVo!

Adam TV, Technology, TiVo

I came home from traveling a few days to find that the TiVo unit in the bedroom has suddenly given up the ghost on me. It was paused on a show that I know I wasn’t watching when I left the house and was stuck. I unplugged the unit, plugged it back in and it came up with the familiar “Powering Up” message.

And that’s as far as it will go.

A while back it was making some ticking sounds like the hard drive was going out in it so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, but the ticking stopped probably a year ago. Well, whatever decided to take the life of my beloved TiVo has come back. Why it chose to take the newer of the two boxes I own is a mystery to me, but either way now I’m down to one TiVo … and (sadly) that doesn’t seem to be enough for me. I miss having the TiVo in the bedroom full of The Daily Show episodes that I can watch for a few minutes before going to sleep.

So I’ve decided I should buy a new one. (I lasted a whole 4 days before giving up the idea of a single box.) Why not, the new DT ones work with my cable box that has been collecting dust – and yet costing me $5 a month – for a couple of years now.

Adam TV, Technology, TiVo

So, I just got my new Netflix Player box a few days ago and I really like it. Works great, free content from Netflix whenever I want, and couldn’t be easier to use.

Then today I’m reading one story about The Daily Show being streamed online followed by another about how great it would be to get Hulu video on a set-top box. I marked one of the stories on my Google Reader Shared List and commented how much I wished a company would just come out with a dead-simple device that would allow me to watch all of this stuff on my TV. Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, great video podcasts, streaming services from networks like ABC and Comedy Central, everything. And it would need to be able to expand to any other service that popped up. Obviously a tall order licensing-wise because most of these companies don’t play well with others, but it could be done.

Then I started to think about that for a sec. “I want a box that would allow me to watch Daily Show on my TV? I can already do that with normal cable.” That’s when I came back to the reality that what I really want is the ability to watch anything I want, anytime I want. When I’m ready to watch The Daily Show, I want it available. I don’t want to hope that I TiVo’ed it. I don’t want to worry about the fact that I’ve had several episodes waiting on me and because I ran out of space my TiVo deleted a couple. I don’t want to have to watch a couple of minutes of each episode to see if it’s a rerun because I don’t set my TiVo to record first-run only since I sometimes have conflicts.

I just want to be able to punch up “Daily Show” and see their episode list. Then I can choose the episode I want and hit play.

Why can’t all shows be like that? If I want to watch a show like LOST on the night it comes out because I have to be able to talk about it the next day at lunch, I can. But in most cases the show is simply made available at a certain time each week and whenever I choose to watch it after that is my business.

Podcasts already do this. Each weekday a new episode of Buzz Out Loud, my favorite tech podcast, is made available sometime in the late afternoon. But I don’t listen to it that day. I usually open iTunes sometime over the weekend, download all the episodes I haven’t listened to yet and then burn them to a CD to listen to in my car. If I do a lot of errands over the weekend, I may be caught up before Monday morning. Most of the time I’m still listening to them on my Monday and Tuesday commute.

Because the content is timely, I don’t really let it go more than a week without catching up. The Daily Show, with it’s political and topical “news” would be a similar example on the TV side. But the other show that I listen the most on my daily commute is The Adam Carolla Show. It’s a daily radio show from the West Coast that I download online. Because it’s more than 2 hours everyday and my commute is only about 75 minutes round-trip, I couldn’t possibly hope to keep up with the current episodes. In fact, I’m months behind – and would have been a year or more behind if I hadn’t decided to skip the entire year that Danny Bonaduce co-hosted. But it doesn’t matter because it’s still enjoyable to listen to.

TV and movies should be the same way. You could accomplish something close by watching a lot of TV on DVD, watching streaming shows online, using the Netflix Player, etc. But what we all really want is an easy way to watch exactly what we want to watch at the exact time that we want to watch it. Of course, we’d also prefer not to have to take out a second mortgage to do it.

Update: Sounds like some people in high places actually agree.

Adam Movies, TV, Technology, TiVo

I’m a little behind on my TV. The new season just sort of snuck up on me. Luckily my TiVo is more alert than me so it has already started recording some of my favorite shows. I just had to fill in the new shows. At the same time I decided to clean out some of the old ones. Desperate Housewives and LOST have been moved to summer this year. I don’t care enough to watch Desperate Housewives during the season and LOST was much easier to watch during the summer (as I did with season 1) when I can watch two or three shows at a clip.

Here are the shows on my TiVo for this season:

Non-primetime shows:

Pardon the Interruption, weekdays at 5:30 p.m. on ESPN
The Daily Show, Monday-Thursday at 11:00 p.m. on Comedy Central*
Robot Chicken, Sundays at 10:30 p.m. on Cartoon Network/Adult Swim*
The Soup, Fridays at 10:30 on Comedy Central*
Drawn Together, Thursdays at 10:30 on Comedy Central*

*Replayed often throughout the week

Adam Daily Show, Family Guy, LOST, Pilots, Robot Chicken, Smallville, TV, TiVo, Veronica Mars

From paidContent.org:

Amazon and Tivo are in discussions about creating a new feature that would automatically copy films downloaded online through Amazon’s Unbox service onto Tivo sets. The New York Post reports this as an aggressive move by Amazon in response to Apple’s iTunes move downloads.

This makes sense. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been wondering why no one is partnering with TiVo for something like this. Everyone is coming out with a video downloading service because we all know it’s the next big thing. Except no one seems to be ready to allow someone to easily watch it on his/her TV, which is of course exactly where we all want to watch it.

TiVo already has that “last mile” relationship. It’s a natural fit. Of course, not everyone has a TiVo but it’s certainly a larger group of people than the video downloading fans at this point.

Adam Movies, Technology, TiVo

For once a smart idea out of one of the TV networks. Wonder if this means that some of them are actually starting to get it?

CBS has announced that they will give TiVo viewers an early look at a new pilot for this season called “The Class”. The pilot will be available a week before broadcast to TiVo users on the TiVo Central menu page.

“We’re not rewarding bad behavior. That technology is here to stay,” CBS marketing group president George Schweitzer said of DVRs and its users’ ad-skipping habits.

“We first thought it would be the boogeyman, and then we found out that people who use TiVo watch television more, they’re much more involved in what they see, and we want these people to watch our shows so they can tell other people how good they are,” he told Reuters.

Damn straight. About time these guys start to catch on.

Adam TV, Technology, TiVo