The new plans are for an 80 hour Series2. I wonder if they’re going to standardize on the 80-hour only, or if you could get a 40 hour for less, or a 140 for more?
These new prices encourage two things:
- Signing up for longer periods
- Pre-paying instead of paying monthly
If you pre-pay, you save a bit over paying monthly. The longer you commit to, the less it costs per month. Prepay for a year and save $15.40, two years and save $85.80, three years and save $141.20 compared to the monthly fees. From past conference calls, fewer than 20% of TiVo subscribers opted for lifetime. And that was on a downward trend, especially since they introduced multi-unit discounts. So this isn’t going to be a big deal for the overwhelming majority of users. And they did test pricing like this last fall, with a great deal of success. One thing that isn’t clear, yet, is if you can upgrade. Say you activate with the one-year plan, decide you really like it, and what to upgrade to the three-year plan. I’d think TiVo would want to encourage that kind of thing, locking users in, but we’ll see.
I am sorry to see it go away myself, since I’d prefer to pay once and never again – and have the equity in the box for resale. But I can understand that the demand isn’t sufficient, and the old lifetime pricing was too low for TiVo. Hey, TiVo, how about $549-$599 for the box and lifetime? 
