Will You Pay $3 to Get TiVo on Your Cable Box?
TiVo (TIVO) CEO Tom Rodgers has been telling people that Comcast, the largest cable operator in the U.S., will soon start selling the TiVo DVR-as-a-service on its set-top boxes and will charge $3 a month for it. The service will be available in the Boston area for now, and no one knows if it will be available elsewhere. Given how horrible Comcast’s (CMCSA) own digital video recorder interface is, I guess $3 is a bargain. But that’s just my opinion. What do you think? Take our poll (below the fold)
Rodgers, speaking at an investor conference, said that 12 million pieces of content have been downloaded over the past 12 months via its TiVoCast download service, which also includes Amazon’s Unboxed movie download service. If you break it down, that works out to about a million downloads a month, or 33,333 a day. Not bad. I wonder how many of those come via automatic subscriptions to shows like Rocketboom.
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I would if it was actually $3. Comcast currently has a basic DVR that they charge $15 a month for. Part is the service fee and the other is the box fee. So It will be interesting to see how this breaks down.
My $128 cable/broadband bill is too high for digital cable and HBO as it is. But considering my time working and away from home, it would be nice to have programs i want to watch ready when i have the time to view them.
Anyone who used used Time Warner’s crappy 8300HDC’s would gladly pay $3. Read my blog posting about them and you’ll see I just spent $299 x2 + $13/mo to get rid of those useless Time Warner boxes. $3/mo would have been a steal.
The price is cheap if it delivers real TiVo functionality.
I have 2 Comcast Motorola 6412 HD-DVR boxes and their software is buggy crap.
However, if you read the conference call transcript carefully, the “TiVo on a Comcast box” really isn’t yet available to any real customers in the Boston area. It has taken forever for them to get this going.
That gives me doubts about how well it actually works, or will work.
Does TiVo really have a future? I expect in a couple years I’ll be watching all my TV (movies too) through my Wii. I’ll setup a program guide with my favorites, and while I’m at work the programs will be downloaded complete with commercials spliced in. When viewing, I can still fast-forward like I do now with my DVR, but will naturally stop on commercials (like i do now) because they catch my attention or they precede the next program segment.
$3 a month? Sign me up.
I have a TiVo now (lifetime contract) and I have quite a few auto downloads set — Between The New York Times, The Onion and Cranky Geeks I get easily 10 downloads a week… And I actually watch them. I would only expect the total number of downloads to rise as more people get connected boxes…
I also tested Amazon UnBox — never again — it took 4 hours to download a two hour movie… and I had to wait to start watching until it was done downloading… Never again.
$3 a month…when can I sign up ?
I’ve been on the waiting list in boston since the day the comcast.com/tivo page went online. and I haven’t heard anything.
but I would be happy to pay $3/month. I’d actually pay a lot more…
Bijan,
Me too. Comcast is a poor communicator.
I blogged about it on Thursday:
Comcast TiVo DVR Service Begins Shortly
http://offonatangent.blogspot.com/2007/11/comcast-tivo-dvr-service-begins-shortly.html
–Steve