Go to TiVo . com, set up an account and activate it. I strongly suggest a lifetime subscription. It pays for itself in about 3 years and if you’re the type to sell your old stuff it’ll greatly increase the value of it. There’s even a market for broken TiVos so you can still put it on Ebay if it’s not working.
Can I also activate it through my cable company–Suddenlink
No, the TiVo service is entirely independent of your cable company. You will have to call your cable company to activate the CableCard, though.
As friedo said, TiVo is it’s own company and has nothing to do with any cable company. Go to TiVo . Com and activate it there. Get a Cable card and a Tuning Adapter from your cable company, hook them up and then call your cable company to pair the cable card to the TiVo.
Tuning adapter? The cable card is usually all you need.
Cable companies are weird about customers using their own CableCARDs. Sometimes they allow it, most of the time they don’t. (Even for the same company.) For ours, they actually provide a discount for “customer owned equipment” using their first CableCARD. Then it’s something like a dollar a month more for each additional card. One of those rare cases where having the cable company’s equipment is cheaper than having your own.
The problem is that cable companies are not properly stocking (as required by law) CableCARDs anymore. It can take a while to get a working one.
As far as buying used TiVo (especially lifetime ones which are plentiful now), note that only Premiere’s and Roamio’s handle the new MPEG4 compression cable companies are rolling out now. Don’t buy a Series 3/HD.
There is a consortium working on a system to replace CableCARDs, but it is moving glacially. Who knows when the next-gen stuff is going to roll out.
I’ll agree that it’s difficult to get a working cable card. Sometimes I’ve had to swap mine 3 or 4 times to get it straightened out. At least now (after some legal battles) they don’t say stupid crap like ‘what’s a cable card’ or ‘we aren’t compatible with TiVo’.
As for a Tuning Adapter, at least with TWC, it’s required to get all the channels (if you don’t have a cable box, which is the case if you need a cable card). Without it (and you can tell when it needs to be reset), you’ll lose a bunch of random channels.
It’s possible that your cable company doesn’t yet use SDV. If they don’t now, they probably will soon. It saves a ton of bandwidth.
Lastly, I wasn’t aware that you could own a cable card. It’s like your key into the cable company. I’m not saying you can’t, I just didn’t know it. But the FCC has mandated that the rental fee for it be very low which is why they only charge something like $1-$3. If that wasn’t the case, I’m sure it would be more like $5-$10, since it seems to cause them so many headaches and the higher price would help push TiVo out of the market.
Here’s info from TiVo’s site regarding tuning adapters. For what it’s worth I have Optimum Cable and my TiVo Roamio didn’t need one (I also don’t subscribe to any premium channels).
Last time I perused the TiVo Community forums the consensus seemed to be that the current model TiVo, the Roamio, will be the **last **to utilize a CableCARD. Short version: Cable companies are going to make cableboxes IP addressable devices, like cable modems. TiVo will have to follow suit. There is a lot of incentive to do this, because a huge disadvantage of CableCARDs is they cannot do any On-Demand, PPV authorization, which everything is switching to.
CableCARDS are legally sold all the time on eBay. You can even buy them in bulk. They don’t allow anyone to steal cable services, however. Hardly a “key”. They still need to be paired which involves you and someone with the cable company, a bunch of numbers, etc. (There are a couple different makers of CableCARDS. You have to have the right one for your company in your area. Assuming they allow it at all.)
On Demand rolled out on CableCARD TiVos starting last year. We have it. It works. It’s a major pain to scroll thru slow loading menus, etc. (Plus the huge annoyance of having to sit thru commercials on most shows. No FF at all. But I just want to watch the last 2 minutes of a program that got cut off! Join the 21st Century bozos!)
I called my cable company today and explained that I own a TiVo box and a Motorola card (I bought the card online) they said that in order for it to work I would need THEIR card to get their channels with it which is another $3.00 per month. Why are you directing me to TiVo? It didn’t sound to me like I need anything from TiVo to make this thing work like it should. Are you saying that in order for it to record I need a TiVo account? If so it was a waste of money to buy the box. I bought it with the intentions of not having to pay the $19.00 per month fee my cable company wants for the equipment to be able to record.
[drops mic]
I’m done
[walks away]
I called my cable company today and explained that I own a TiVo box and a Motorola card (I bought the card online) they said that in order for it to work I would need THEIR card to get their channels with it which is another $3.00 per month. Why are you directing me to TiVo? It didn’t sound to me like I need anything from TiVo to make this thing work like it should. Are you saying that in order for it to record I need a TiVo account? If so it was a waste of money to buy the box. I bought it with the intentions of not having to pay the $19.00 per month fee my cable company wants for the equipment to be able to record.
You’re confusing several different things.
TiVo provides a service that allows TiVo boxes to download your local TV listings and schedule recordings. You must subscribe to this service for the TiVo box to record anything. You can buy a monthly or one-time lifetime subscription.
The CableCard in the TiVo box must be activated on your cable system. That requires a call to your cable company. Whether or not they will require you to use their own CableCard is up to them – the fact is cable companies don’t really like supporting CableCard devices, and only do it because the FCC requires them to do so. So they’re inclined to make the process difficult.
It depends on the cable company. If your cableco uses switched digital video, you need the tuning adapter so that the tivo box can tell which station signals to send.
Then what good is it for me to use the cable companies card for MY TiVo box? Are you saying that the TiVo box will not record without subscribing to their service? I expected that if I bought their box it would be the same as buying a DVD recorder/player. When I searched the net for a DVR that is what popped up everywhere and it appeared to be the only choice I did not understand that I would need to subscribe to anything and thought that I could simply hook it up to m TV.
None of this makes sense to me. If I wanted to ay a subscription fee I would just rent the service from my cable company. If I have to subscribe to TiVo as well as pay my cable company to rent their card this all gets too expensive.
TiVo is a higher-end product. People buy them because they work a lot better and have more features than generic cable company DVRs. That has an up-front cost. In the long run, you’ll save money if you buy a lifetime TiVo subscription and return your cable box to your cable company so you’re no longer renting that. (You’ll only need to rent the card for $3 a month.)
Ok, a couple basic things:
[ul]
[li]Obviously you must pay the cable company a minimum monthly fee for the cablevision wire/service going to your house.[/li][li]You must have a CableCARD tuner for your TiVo to tune in the cable companies channels. Regardless of what your cable company may tell you, and yes they will outright lie to you and tell you only their CableCARDs will work, you can purchase CableCARDs yourself and your cable company can and ***must ***authorize them to work. Or you can just rent one from your cable company for literally $2-3 a month.[/li][li]You must pay TiVo either a monthly fee or buy a lifetime subscription in order for your TiVo to work. A TiVo box is **NOT **just a digital VCR or DVD recorder, it is a subscription device which provides you with premium features like a very user-friendly interface including updated, accurate and detailed program guide information, a very user-friendly remote control, remote scheduling via the internet, and with a newer TiVo viewing & downloading of content to tablets & smartphones devices.[/li][/ul]
So your choices for having cable and a DVR are:
[ol]
[li]Subscribe to your local cablevision service (but don’t rent a cablebox), subscribe to TiVo to activate your TiVo box, and either buy a CableCARD yourself online or rent one from your cable company for $2-3 a month.[/li][li]Subscribe to your local cablevision service, and rent a combo cablebox/DVR from them. No CableCARD required but cable company DVRs have a much cruder and less user-friendly interface (and they cost more than an extra $2-3 per month to rent than just a regular cablebox).[/li][li]Subscribe to your local cablevision service, and buy a non-TiVo DVR which doesn’t require a subscription. It will have a very bare bones menu system similar (or worse) to the cable company’s DVR, and it will not be able to record more than one channel at a time (big downside*!*).[/li][/ol]
The cost of renting a cable company’s cablebox/DVR combo will be comparable to the cost of the TiVo service + a CableCARD, so 1 and 2 above will cost about the same per month, but with a less functional cable company DVR. Number 3 will cost you the least per month but unless you’re tech savvy it may be both difficult to install and use so I don’t recommend this.
Those are your choices. TiVo is the only major maker of consumer DVRs. Essentially your only other choice besides a TiVo is a cable company DVR. Originally there were two competing DVR makers, TiVo and ReplayTVbut they folded about five years ago.
TiVo’s original business model was:
- Sell the hardware for less than cost. But require the service for them to be useful.
- Collect and collect and collect fees.
- Profit.
(Sounds like certain cell phone plans, doesn’t it?)
One big change is that most of their income in recent years comes from patent fees. They’ve sued AT&T and others and make quite a lot of money that way. They even get money from your cable company for patent fees for DVRs. But, many of their key patents are expiring soon. That and the changes to the cable industry is pretty much going to kill TiVo as we know it.
You can do a lifetime subscription, which makes up for the discount on the hardware and then some. Unless you get a deal on that. And deals, especially on older hardware, are common.
Waaay back when, I was talking to the head of US research for a major Japanese electronics company. His anger at TiVo was barely contained. What they, and others, wanted to do was sell DVRs like VCRs, with included service. But they knew there was no point since consumers would see cheap TiVos and costly other DVRs and buy the TiVos.
Without much real choice in the market, very few people bought DVRs. TiVo basically killed the consumer-owned DVR business. I.e., their business.
Don’t want to pay TiVo fees? Don’t buy their DVRs. And don’t complain about it.
Well maybe. But I think the DVR market mostly suffered from consumers taking a very long time to understand their true functionality. It wasn’t simply the means-to-an-end set top box that a VCR or DVD player or cablebox was. Plus worrying that if the subscription network it required went under they’d be stuck with an expensive doorstop. I even remember reading a lot of clueless professional reviewers refer to it as simply ‘…some kind of digital VCR but with a monthly fee’.
When I first heard about TiVo in an email newsletter in 1999 I immediately got the significance of the idea. It wasn’t merely a digital VCR, it was a way to create your own, personal TV channel, just as the advertising said. That sort of ‘TV of the Future!**’ grandiose ad statement is usually nonsense filler, but in TiVo’s case it was totally true (the key to it being that it would be constantly recording in the background 24/7, even while you played recordings). In a way TiVo was the precursor to today’s streaming paradigm. It was streaming, but only in real time and using a hard drive to hold a small library.
What really turned out to be TiVo’s problem was that you can’t patent an idea. Once people began to see DVRs usefulness other companies scrambled to implement it. Some, like DirecTV, actually licensed the TiVo software to run on their hardware for a couple years. But only until they, and all the cable companies, could produce their own (much shittier) DVR software.
I don’t see that initially selling expensive to buy DVRs (but without a monthly fee) in the first place would have been any more successful. Less so actually.
Actually, you can patent an idea. That’s exactly what patents are. And as I said, TiVo makes a lot of their money off of patents. All the cable/satellite companies that provide DVRs are paying fees to TiVo.
As to the pay-up-front model, it would have been expensive at first. The Asian electronics companies were quite eager to get into the DVR market. Once DVRs became major commodity products with several major competitors, the prices would have come down. Instead we got stuck with TiVo. A really poorly run company. (They can’t even run a functional web site.) Their products and services are overpriced as a result.
It is indeed the case that a lot of people didn’t/don’t “get” DVRs. I didn’t think we needed one until we were given one. It took only weeks before it completely swayed us.
We rarely watch anything in “real time”. And since our DVR can play stuff from a variety of sources, we watch a lot of non-traditional TV and whatnot using it.
But DVRs never broke out big time. Practically a niche product. Even with the cable/satellite DVRs, many people don’t use them like they could and are drifting towards the streaming model. (Interface issues are a major problem.)
I came here initially to tell about my TIVO experience, but I see I already mentioned my second generation brain-dead TIVO in the earlier incarnation of this thread. (I’m in Canada, so no TIVO service was available at the time.)
SO I bought a regular DVR (Toshiba?) but I had satellite, not cable, so the only DVR feed was channel 3. I had to pre-program the satellite receiver to switch to channels on schedule to allow the DVR to work. It was great, especially the feature for burning DVD’s off the recorded shows. However, the hard disk died, and it was a proprietary setup so it was simpler to get a DVR integrated with the satellite receiver than to repair the thing. (New satellite box also did HD, a step up.) That was fine until that device started dying (hard disk failure) and I had to deal with Bell Expressvu technical services. Send a dead DVR back with a tracking number and they try to see if I don’t notice that they “didn’t receive it” and I owe them $600. Twice.
Standalone DVR’s have pretty much disappeared since almost every cable company now offers them built in (in some way) to the cable box - at least here in Canada. USA cable service may not be up to 20th century standards yet.
The TIVO was a step beyond. It tried to analyze your viewing habits and recommend TV shows (IIRC didn’t it even record them on its own?) There’s the web article posting “Help! My TIVO Thinks I’m Gay” from some guy who watched Will & Grace and some cooking shows. It kept recommending shows with gay themes and characters. IIRC there was also a Sex & the City episode about the TIVO suggesting shows, and another about “all my recordings have disappeared!”.
To do this, of course, it needed in-depth details about shows on your local TV service - hence its own internet based TV-guide service that you had to subscribe to - and online feedback on your viewing habits from the device.