The other day while I was going through my excessive amount of news feeds (73+) I noticed that ars technica states that only 20% of all TiVo users own a Series 2 device. I’m not sure where ars technica got this information but from what I’ve seen the site seems to be reputable. Is this really the case?

Out of the remaining 80%, how many of these users own a DirecTiVo? How many own a Series1 device? If anyone has any more information I’d like to see it. To be honest, I would have expected the Series2 percentage to be a lot higher. I’ve never owned a Series1 or DirecTiVo DVR, however, from what I’ve seen the Series2 devices are a lot better. Just curious and confused…

TiVo now has a new subscription program. Under this new program, you will given a 40 hour TiVo for free. The only “catch” is that you must agree to sign up for a one year subscription and pay a higher monthly subscription fee of $16.95. There are also a couple of other fine points to keep in mind.

• If you cancel your subscription you will be charged a $150 cancellation fee
• TiVos purchased under this offer are not eligible for the multi-TiVo discount
• There is a 30-day money back guarantee
• The DVR cannot be used with a lifetime subscription
• The offer is only valid between 11/8/2005 and 11/29/2005

I don’t think I’ll be taking advantage of this offer however; it’s not a bad idea to give the consumer another type of subscription plan. Often times people are reluctant to get a TiVo because of the upfront cost of having to buy the box. Now with this plan you can get into a TiVo without any out of pocket expenses. The only question I have is if the monthly subscription fee goes down after a year. If this is the case, then this really isn’t a bad deal. To take advantage of this offer head on over to TiVo’s website.

First seen on ZatzNotFunny (damn that guy is good).

It looks as though TiVo recently meet with the FCC to discuss the “background and status of the CABLECard”. Could this mean that a CABLECard TiVo is coming soon?

Thanks to Dave once again for providing this information. If you don’t already read Dave’s site you should consider adding it to your list of favorites.

Yahoo and TiVo have partnered up to allow you to schedule your TiVo recordings directly from Yahoo TV. While this feature is essential the same kind of thing that TiVo Central Online already offers, I’m rather excited about it because I think it will generate a lot of new subscribers to the TiVo service. I’m sure that there already are a ton of Yahoo TV users who are now thinking about getting a TiVo simply because recording from Yahoo TV is easy. Smart move TiVo! To get started, head on over to this page.

Could this partnership have been caused by the talks TiVo had with Yahoo back in April ‘05?

What follows is an interview that I had with Will Wagner the creator of AutoPilot. Will was kind enough to take some time out of his day and answer the following questions. If you haven’t tried out AutoPilot yet, you really should. The software is able to do some amazing things with your TiVo recordings.

Can You Give Us A Little Information About Yourself?

Well, there are three of us contributing more or less on the evenings and weekends. We all live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have all worked together in the past at one point or another.

What’s Your Favorite TiVo Feature?

I’m a “wishlist”-aholic to be honest. Every time I run across an interesting actor or director, I’ll create a new wishlist and on a regular basis, I’ll use that feature to find and record shows I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

Why Did You Create AutoPilot?

It started out while I was trying to find an easy way to get children’s shows off the TiVo so my 2 and 4 year old daughters could watch them in the car. I found a couple of solutions, all of which unfortunately meant spending an inordinate amount of time watching progress dialogs, so I started toying with ideas to write our own software. Some arm twisting and few beers later, I got a couple of old friends to help out and we’ve been working on it since.

How Has The Response Been?

The response has been great so far. We’ve been getting good coverage from websites like TiVoBlog.com and slashdot.org and that has given us a good number of users. Most important, the people using it have been positive on the product and have been giving us great feedback on features we never would have thought of on our own.

Having worked professionally on software products since the early 90’s, the ability these days to set up an online forum and have instant feedback from a community of users is really an improvement on the software development process. It’s help getting feedback on what’s working well and what’s not, and it will undoubtedly make it a better product over time.

Why Do You Distribute The Utilities Separate From AutoPilot?

That will probably go away in the future. We initially thought some people would want to use TiVo Desktop to download their TiVo files and would just want a small downoad to convert them into the proper format. At this pointthough, the download size between a single converter and the full package (e.g. TiVo2Palm vs the full install) isn’t worth all the effort. Hopefully in the near future, we’ll just have a better single installer that will allow users to pick and choose the components they want to install. In the longer term, hopefully we’ll get even smarter and download components as needed when the user sets up their download rules and actions, rather than always downloading everything.

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According to this article, the Good Samaritan Medical Center is offering a free TiVo and a one-year service agreement to all nurses who sign on to work a minimum of 24 hours a week. To bad I’m not a nurse :). This reminds me a lot of a post I did a while back about a bank offering a free TiVo to anybody who signed up for a home equity loan. It seems like more and more people are starting to realize that having a TiVo truly makes your life a lot less complicated.

I can’t tell you the number of articles that I’ve read which talk about alternatives to TiVo. Whether it is MCE (Media Center Edition), a cable company DVR or one of the Open Source solutions, TiVo definitely has a lot of competition. When TiVo first came on the market back in the late 90s, there weren’t many alternatives. The concept of a DVR recording your favorite shows so that you could watch them at another time was revolutionary. Now days, nearly everybody knows that this is possible. Most cable companies and satellite TV providers advertise their DVR solutions rather well. Take Adelphia for example, almost every bill that I receive from them has a pamphlet included which talks about their DVR solution. With all of this competition out there, TiVo needs to make certain that they stay on top of the DVR market and that they continue to provide a superior product.

Whenever I talk about TiVo with my friends, the number reason why they haven’t purchased a TiVo is due to the fact that TiVo doesn’t currently offer a dual-tuner DVR (other then a DirecTiVo). I try to tell these people that a CableCARD enabled TiVo is suppose to come out shortly (Q1 2006) and that this will allow TiVo to support dual- tuners. Often times this answer isn’t good enough. I know several people who went with a cable company DVR simply because it offered a dual-tuner. When I try and argue that a TiVo is far superior because of the features that it offers and the user interface, most of the time I am told that the biggest feature they want is a dual-tuner.
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