ninme

Poor TiVo.

TiVo walked away from Comcast‽

Remember how DirecTV accounts for 2,000,000 of TiVo’s 3,000,000 customers and TiVo lost that relationship?  TiVo was negotiating with Comcast last summer and offered less than the $1/month that they get from DirecTV, so Michael Ramsay decided to walk away.

Yeah, then their stock plummeted.

To be fair, if the Comcast deal had been inked and then TiVo was prevented from introducing innovative products because of their threat to the cable companies we’d all be screaming bloody murder.  It’s possible (note that word, this is pure speculation) that there was a non-negotiable clause that said something like “Non-Comcast video will not be available on the TiVo” which would have nixed any of the future plans like partnering with content providers.

Stupid Comcast! Ergh.

And:

Poor First Impressions for TiVoToGo

Peter says: “No wonder their stock is tanking. Wonderful. Damnit Apple, buy them out and let me load the TiVo OS (redesigned in shiny Apple GUIness) on a Mac mini. Do it!”

I just don’t get it. TiVo is the most wonderful thing ever invented. And don’t even try to bring up the cable-branded digital recorders. They suck. The GUIs suck. Everything about them sucks. And TiVo isn’t just wonderful because you can fast-forward the ads! And don’t try the “but I don’t watch that much tv” argument either! It’s wonderful! And the company is so crap at communicating how wonderful they are! But as everyone else is always pointing out, no one who’s ever got TiVo ever goes back.

No, they’re not paying me to shill for them. I just want everyone to buy them so M$ doesn’t buy them and turn them into something horrible and gross, slow-moving and oft-crashing, Windows NT on the inside and something that resmembles a Giger painting on the outside. shudder

Bill Gates was at that convention thing last week gushing about TiVo. He doesn’t gush about anything unless he’s about to turn it into one of his own brands. I can’t find the article Peter sent me, though.