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It is really basic premise, and I didn’t even invent it. Alas I have to warn other potential Tivo customers, after giving company many chances to make things right and a month of monumental efforts (mostly mine). Also, this is Not an investment advice regarding Tivo Inc (NASDAQ:TIVO).

We are long time Tivo customers and advocates and have 2 units at home which we enjoyed for many years. Recently, after HDMI output on our newer Tivo HD unit broke, we decided to upgrade to latest Tivo Premiere. We were disappointed to learn of increased monthly fee, but we finally decided that even with Many Great alternatives out there, we prefer the time-tested convenience of a Tivo box. Our new Premiere unit arrived as advertised and I promptly began the monumental effort needed to set it up and transfer data from our existing unit.

The manual transfer of previous recording that we didn’t watch yet is long and tedious process which could have easily been automated in about 1 week of effort for average developer IMHO. Instead I have to go through 3 screens of prompts for Every Single Show I have on the box. Few days (literally) later, I finally got that out of the way, so I set to transfer Season Passes. “Luckily” there is a handy Season Pass Manager on Tivo.com, I thought, but this is where the first big disaster hit! After reporting that many season passes cannot be transferred because there are no upcoming airing in the next 2 weeks, even remaining shows that supposedly should transfer did not arrive on the Tivo Premiere. Instead, I was greeted with countless “corrupt, delete me” entries on the Tivo box.

As I tried to recover from this by transferring only few shows at a time, Tivo website went completely nuts. Many reboots, Re-Syncs and support calls later – I was told to stop trying and just manually re-create our 150 passes… Naively I tried that as well, just for a bit, as I quickly discovered that Glee show (in Tivo’s own Top 5 Most Popular list and one of our favorites) Cannot Be Subscribed To! It simply pops up with “No Airings In the Next Two Weeks” error. I guess I naively thought that ability to keep your favorite show subscriptions was Tivo’s big selling point.

Meanwhile we started noticing many other things wrong with our “shiny new” Tivo. For the first week over 30 channels were completely missing their guide. I went through different troubleshooting steps daily with various Tivo techs, to no avail. Finally, I figured it out all by myself, managing to restore that part of functionality by repeating guided setup steps.

Still, there were many other issues – worse among them is the jumping screen and skipping video, especially if recording on the same channel as watching. Well, after some more calls, one of the techs suggested that perhaps we got a bad one and they will be happy to replace our new purchase. Reluctantly I agreed and another week later we received a Refurbished Tivo premiere unit (What??!?). Being at complete dead-end with options I spent Another Week transferring shows and doing CableCard pairing. Well, today I switched out the units and we were able to confirm most of the same issues on this Tivo Premiere as well.

As you can tell, we are still in shock and not sure where to go from here. It is very hard to justify monthly payment to Tivo when our experience with the unit is so horrid. As an aside, their whole Tivo Stream as a separate Expensive and Intrusive box is just another insult, since Tivo Premiere already comes with high speed network connection, and records everything digitally.

Back To My Big Question – Why Mess with what Is Not Broken!? We used Tivo HD and previous Tivo units for years and Never had these issues! This is with same CableCard and Cable connection, so they really can’t blame Comcast here! In fact, many issues are clearly Software Defects! It also becomes obvious that they lost all their good developers once you try their iPad Tivo client. While showing some promise, it promptly underwhelms you with limited features, constant crashes, disconnects and endless “refresh” loops. Tivo Inc’s company appeal over other Cable boxes Always Was their Software! How On Earth would they allow themselves to totally “rewrite” software for this new box and introduce so Many New Bugs and such a Poor User Experience!!?!?

PS: I ordered HDHomeRun Prime now and look forward to posting my experience here

With more and more TV shows being available via Netflix “Watch It Now” feature, including the grand hit Heros, which we still plan to catch up on (never started), momentum is building for easy on-demand streaming of shows/movies, to your Living Room TV.

With that in mind, I finally set a plan in motion to upgrade my media center PC, which is connected to the our big-screen. It was deemed not powerful enough (Athlon XP 1800+ or something, not even X2…) to process full screen H.264 media, which most media is nowadays.

One of key usage scenarios was obviously to wath NetFlix on-demand via this media PC.

So, as soon as I purchase everything, and not even before I finish setting things up, NetFlix goes commando with the following news:

• NetFlix in HD on XBox 360 – Yes, I heard it was coming, but only for Gold members, and never heard anything about HD, until today…
• NetFlix on Tivo Series 3 and HD models – This is great news for us, don’t get me wrong..

Well, I did try full screen Hulu, and it really looks nice, but mostly for their very limited library of 720p content. Installed Vuze on it also, and putting up TVTonic next.

Speaking of the upgrade, I ended up snatching a great deal, instead of upgrading my motherboard/cpu/memory, etc, as I was planning. It would have cost around $350, since I needed extra Vista Permium license for this setup, and that alone is $100. So I was happy when SlickDeals put up a coupon on refurbished Dell Outlet deals last week. Snatched up Dell Inspirion 530 with Core 2 Quad and 4GB of RAM for around that much, and added my own ATSC (HD) Capture Card with nVidia 8400 GS for full screen HD monster. It easily runs at 1080p now, including all media I tried to play full screen thus far. Plus, box itself is Beautiful, in white and slick metal front panel, plus runs practically silent. I am a happy camper!

Now, if only NetFlix would put out a Vista Media center plug-in, for easy and fast navigation of queues and instant playback, in HD, that would be awesome… But I guess they are too busy developing all those custom interfaces, instead of attacking the obvious, easy target…

FCC hasn’t been doing it’s job in regulating our home TV delivery choices! Seriously, so many years later and we still have no a-la-carte channels! But, this post is Future, not past…

I recently became aware that Cable transmits most of their digital channels, both HD and regular, in encrypted QAM transmission. Now, I respect Cable companies’ right to encrypt their digital channels which they are offering beyond the mandated "local" choices, but Why Encrypt the LOCAL channels!?

Right now there is no law stating that HD re-transmission of local channels over Cable, done in QAM, must be in ClearQAM (non-encrypted kind). So, they are free to encrypt those local channels in HD, just to force people to upgrade even when all they want is LOCAL Channels.

This becomes even more critical issue as more local channels switch to HD, and as Analog TV is phased out. All those shiny new LCD / Plasma HD TVs you buy today come with built-in QAM tuner. BUT, it’s useless if Cable encrypt the local channels!

So, FCC, don’t wait while more and more people are forced to switch by deceiving cable companies (who now also claim that they are "forced" to switch Off Analog cable, deceiving public, because the mandate is only for over-the-air transmission)! Get to work Now!

PS: I am sorry for slow posting lately. I am working on 2 big posts coming soon, promise!

While all signs pointing to upcoming demise of TV as we know it, I think we should try to make the most of this transition period.

Today, I compiled a short list of resources to help everyone’s TV addiction, now that Prime Time TV season is back with their best entertainment offerings. What’s more, this year almost all Prime Time shows are presented in glorious HDTV, delivering not only the increased resolution, but an overall improvement in clarity and color accuracy.

Arguably ABC has the best technology right now for legally streaming your shows over the Internet, along with unique offering of (near) HD quality that you can watch full screen on your computer monitor, which is naturally HD quality or higher, usually. You will need to install tiny ActiveX control to enable viewing, but it’s fast and easy. They recommend dual-core CPU for HD, but I found that it works fine on my Athlon 64 4000+ single core also.

The other excellent approach is to watch on DVD! Set yourself up with Netflix subscription, and rent entire Seasons, DVD after DVD, all Commercial Free! Most popular shows are available, including our favorite House M.D. Here is a post from famous Lifehacker blog with more ideas, including links to streaming from NBC and CBS, though, for some reason they omitted CW.

Remember, Personally, I recommend Interactive Entertainment instead of just sitting on a couch and watching TV, or at least balance the two!