TiVo (not DVR, the actual brand) is something of a darling in our society. Even though TiVo’s products appeal to more of a niche crowd, the brand is widely accepted as the top of the DVR food chain and one of the darling tech companies. These days, I’m not so sure they deserve it.
For the longest time, I was one of the Kool-Aid drinkers. “The OS is so much more cutting edge” or “I can’t use the clunky and slow cable company DVR” were some of the things I’d say to justify why I paid so much more up front for the hardware and per month for TiVo service.
Tonight, I was fiddling with some of my season passes on my TiVo HD. It is important to know that TiVo just refreshed their HD offering, so I’m not using the MOST current device (the TiVo Premiere). That being said, a few months ago this would have been the most up to date TiVo unit, so I would expect a typical “cutting edge” TiVo experience.
Anyway, I went to search for “Mad Men,” to record a specific showing of the program. As I was typing the name of the program, TiVo’s predictive search did it’s thing. Unfortunately, when I was done typing “mad,” some random show named “Mad Max” was the top hit (it was alphabetical predictive search):
For some reason, I realized that I didn’t want to have to press my remote button 4 or 5 more times in order to select “Mad Men” instead of “Mad Max.” Quickly, I figured out the reason - I’m used to “smart search,” which has become prevalent in our every day life. If we go to Google to search something, “smart search” kicks in and auto-suggestions pop up in the search box. They aren’t based on the alphabet - they’re based on what you’re most likely to be looking for, dictated by what other people are looking for! Apple’s operating system effectively uses smart search throughout their OS, which is part of the reason it is considered the gold standard.
I sat on my couch dumbfounded for a moment. Was my TiVo HD really a step behind the times? I enjoy utilizing the most current and up to date technology, and I thought my current TiVo was up to the task. Quickly, I flipped through my TiVo interface to see if I had missed something and I found a menu option called “TiVo Search.”
When I first got the TiVo HD, I remember playing around with TiVo Search, but it was slow and clunky (it was beta version), so I never used it much. Now that I was on a mission to get my TiVo’s swagger back, I gave it another look. It was still slow and clunky - not nearly the smooth user interface on the rest of my TiVo - but sure enough, there was “smart search.” I typed in “Mad Men” and the first choice was exactly what I was looking for:
It made perfect sense. Why WOULDN’T the popular AMC program be the first result when searching a device that is connected to the internet and literally exists to help people watch and record television. TiVo had apparently realized that their device should be smart enough to know that when people typed in “Mad” they would probably want to to see Mad Men. Unfortunately, the beta version version of TiVo Search on the TiVo HD is buggy and borderline unusable. On my first try using it, my TiVo froze and I had to pull the plug and go through the 15 minute reboot process. Not cool.
Obviously, TiVo realized at some point during TiVo HD’s lifespan that their legacy search was no longer anything close to cutting edge. The currently beta TiVo Search was developed and plopped onto the TiVo HD as an add-on to the current OS. It was a nice thought, but something clearly isn’t working properly.
This is the part of the story where as a TiVo owner of any kind, you’ll feel ripped off. The brand new TiVo Premiere launched a few months ago and the biggest change was that the user interface had been overhauled and a Flash based operating system was now on board. It was obviously time for a change to keep up with the times and TiVo realized it. As a TiVo HD user, this spells doom. With a completely overhauled UI on the brand new units, you can be damn sure that your previous generation unit will be completely obsolete.
In most cases, this leads to a frustrated consumer. A successful resolution would be a next generation device that is reasonably priced for current users, and that quickly and efficiently addressed the shortcomings of the previous generation device. According to Engadget, the TiVo Premiere tries to do this, and at first it sounds encouraging:
TiVo’s really hyping up the new Flash-based main interface of the Premiere, and for good reason: it’s much sleeker than the decade-old TiVo UI we’ve come to know and love / hate, and offers far more search, discovery, and content integration options than ever before. The most prominent feature of the new UI is the “discovery bar,” which intelligently populates based on what you’re looking at — it’ll show you related new shows while you’re looking at your recordings list, and featured content based on user trends and highlighted promotions on the main screen. You can also customize the discovery bar and pin shows to it, and you can tweak it so you get better recommendations.
But then it becomes apparent that this new UI was rushed out to “keep up with the times” and it doesn’t belong on a device put out by a brand that was supposedly cutting edge:
Let’s talk about that lag for a moment, since it’s inescapable: it feels like the entire UI reloads every time you do anything. The primary culprit is the context-sensitive discovery bar, which disappears and reloads entirely from screen-to-screen; it’s annoying to the point of uselessness. TiVo says the Premiere doesn’t cache images in memory in order to keep RAM usage down, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with — besides, RAM’s cheap and this entire interface needs to be loaded up and ready to go at all times. Even the first-level menus load in slowly, and they’re an entirely local affair — there’s no reason for the same six options under “Find TV, movies, and videos” to take a second to appear every time you select it. It gets worse when you actually try and use the new browse features; not only do the icons and content take measurable amounts of time to load in, the discovery bar reloads itself every time you drill down a level to present more context-sensitive info, so it really feels like the whole UI is blanking out with each click.
Right on. So, with our current TiVo HD, we’re stuck with a search interface and operating system that works, but is badly dated. If we decide to pony up the $300 (or currently $200 on sale at Amazon), we get an updated, but obviously rushed operating system. Pick your poison.
Worse still, TiVo hasn’t caught up with the times in regard to usability of the product right out of the box. Back To Engadget once again (lots of block quoting here, but I’m trying to help people out here:
While TiVo’s certainly made strides in the interface department, the out-of-the-box experience with the Premiere is still the same halting process as ever — if you’re a new owner, chances are you’ll need a visit from the cable company to get all set up with a CableCARD and have it activated, and that’s always fraught with peril. We can’t blame TiVo for that, since so much depends on your cable company, but a little more hand-holding for new customers might have been nice — setting up a new TiVo for the first time isn’t exactly plug and play.
What’s baffling to us is that there’s no benefit to being an existing TiVo owner, at any level. You can’t just swap boxes in place, for example — the tip of the power connector has changed. More importantly, you’d also better be prepared to lose all your shows and recording preferences, since there’s no backup or restore options here, and be ready to spend some time on the phone getting the cable company to re-pair your existing card to the new hardware, since it’s not automatic — most of our channels worked after we just stuck the card in and booted up, but premium channels were broken until Comcast activated our unit. TiVo tells us they’ll put up some better information for existing TiVo owners online shortly, and there might eventually be some provisions for backing up Season Pass and WishList settings online in the future, but for now there’s nothing.
Once you do get everything plugged in and set up, you still have to drill through something like 35 settings screens, and wait for channel data and software updates to load. (We still don’t know why TiVo doesn’t include programming the remote’s power and volume buttons in the initial setup.) All in all, you’re looking at an easy hour or more — make sure you bring a book or something.
All of this leads me to the conclusion that we can’t just assume TiVo is going to put out the best product because their name is TiVo. Once upon a time, this was the case, but as we’ve outlined clearly above, those days are numbered.
Perhaps these are just some growing pains for TiVo, and they’ll quickly address the problem via an OS update, or more likely in another future generation of their DVR. But there is also the distinct possibility that a competitor will swoop in and do things better. Apple TV is on the way out, with a rumored “iTV” on the horizon. It isn’t expected to be any type of TiVo killer, but what if Apple did decide to ditch their proprietary Apple Store idea and dabble in the world of broadcast television DVRs? It would probably force TiVo to step their game up, leading to a more convenient experience for the consumer. Don’t we deserve that when we’re spending hundreds of dollars for the latest technology?
