TiVo Fabulous Fall TV Sweepstakes

Posted on Friday, September 2, 2011 by MegaZone

TiVo Logo TiVo is offering the chance to win a pile of gear through the TiVo Fabulous Fall TV Sweepstakes, offered via their Facebook page. Enter now for the chance at the grand prize, a complete home entertainment setup consisting of:

  • TiVo® Premiere DVR
  • Product Lifetime service
  • TiVo® Slide Remote
  • TiVo® Wireless G Adapter
  • 42″ Insignia Connected HDTV
  • 6 FREE months of Hulu Plus

In addition to the Grand Prize, 25 first prize winners will receive 6 FREE months of Hulu Plus.

Interesting that they’re giving away a TiVo Premiere and one of the new Best Buy Insignia TiVo-powered Connected TVs. Perhaps this lends weight to the rumor that the Insignia TVs will be able to stream content from the Premiere once streaming support is launched in general? They could give away any TV.

The sweepstakes is open to legal residents of the 50 US states plus D.C., and you have to enter by 9/22/11. So get to it, enter now.

Oh, and you need to actually enter the sweepstakes. It happens every time TiVo does this, people post comments on their wall as if that’s how you enter.

Posted in DVR, TiVo | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Today Only – Panasonic VIERA TC-L42E30 42-Inch 1080p 120Hz LED HDTV $659.99

Posted on Friday, September 2, 2011 by MegaZone

Panasonic VIERA TC-L42E30 HDTV Today only as one of Amazon’s Gold Box deals, save 40% on the Panasonic VIERA TC-L42E30 42-Inch 1080p 120Hz LED HDTV. It includes support for Netflix, CinemaNow, Pandora, Napster, and Facebook apps and it supports DLNA. The full MSRP on this set is $1099.95, and Amazon normally sells it for $812.78, but for today only they’re selling it for $659.99.

Posted in Amazon, HDTV | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A Story of Subterfuge and Guile from TiVo’s Past

Posted on Friday, September 2, 2011 by MegaZone

TiVo Logo I shared my recent post about TiVo’s domain name troubles in Spain on TiVo’s Facebook Wall and that prompted TiVo’s former Senior Director of Product Marketing, Ted Malone, to share a fun story from TiVo’s past. Ted’s a great guy, I worked with him at Sling Media, where he was VP Product Marketing & Product Management at the time, and these days he’s Senior Director of Product Management for Microsoft Mediaroom. Anyway, Ted, with an assist from TiVo customer advocate Gary Sargent, shared the story of how TiVo obtained the tivo.co.uk domain name back in the day, for their first UK product launch.

It seems a domain name squatter had grabbed tivo.co.uk before TiVo got it. Ted was in charge of the product launch and really wanted the domain name, but the squatter was asking $15,000 for it. TiVo was unwilling to pay such extortion, so Ted decided to try something a bit tricky to get the better of the squatter. He had TiVo’s web team create uk.tivo.com and told the squatter TiVo was no longer interested. Because of the high price TiVo would just go with uk.tivo.com and the squatter was welcome to keep tivo.co.uk.

Suddenly the squatter goes from seeing easy money to holding a nearly worthless domain. If TiVo wasn’t interested in paying him for it, who else was going to pay him big money? No one else was likely to start a company named ‘TiVo’ in the UK, after all.

That’s where Ted really got tricky. Behind the scenes he recruited Gary, one of TiVo’s early customer advocates, to approach the squatter as a user who was interested in launching a TiVo fan site for UK TiVo owners. Since Gary was already known as a vocal member of the TiVo community it was certainly a plausible story. Seeing a chance to salvage something from the blown deal, the squatter agreed to sell the domain to Gary for £500. He originally wanted more, but Gary explained he was starting a non-profit fan site and simply couldn’t afford to pay more, so the squatter took what he thought he could get. It was a far cry from the $15,000 he wanted from TiVo. In exchange TiVo gave Gary a free TiVo DVR with lifetime service.

Gary ran a fan site at the domain for a couple of months to complete the ruse and avoid abuse from the squatter, as he wouldn’t know he’d been had. To complete the process Gary told the squatter TiVo’s lawyers had come after him and he was being forced to turn over the domain to TiVo, making him look like the victim. Gary turned over the domain, which TiVo then used for their product launch as they wanted to all along. And the domain squatter probably thought he’d gotten away with making £500 off of a domain that he would’ve been forced to turn over if he’d still held it when the lawyers got involved, that he’d taken Gary for the money for a domain he couldn’t hold. In reality he sold the domain for less than he probably could’ve made if he’d asked for a more reasonable amount up front, TiVo saved money and potential legal fees, and Gary got a TiVo and lifetime service, which was worth more than £500 at the time.

I really can’t stand domain name squatters, so I think this whole escapade is just awesome. I’m really glad Ted and Gary shared this story, it isn’t the kind of thing you often hear about in corporate histories.

I wonder if the domain name squatter will read this and realize he was had over a decade ago. I kind of hope he does.

You can read the story in their own words at Facebook.

Posted in DVR, TiVo | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Android Holds 16% of US Phone OS Share, iPhone 11%, RIM 8%

Posted on Friday, September 2, 2011 by MegaZone

Nielsen July 2011 Smartphone Marketshare Nielsen Wire has posted new smartphone numbers for July 2011, showing that 40% of mobile consumers in the US currently use a smartphone. Of that 40%, 40% use Android, 28% use Apple iPhone (iOS), 19% use RIM Blackberry, and 7% still use Windows Mobile while 1% uses the new Windows Phone 7. The remaining 5% is listed as ‘other’ and would include things like WebOS and Symbian. Doing the math, and a little rounding, that means 16% of phones in the US run Android, 11% run iOS, and 8% run Blackberry.

The smartphone market is really well on its way to being a duopoly of Android and iOS. Blackberry is up there right now, but while the two leaders have been growing their market share, Blackberry has been losing it. That should continue and the two leaders will increasingly open their lead over Blackberry.

Nielsen July 2011 Smartphone Late Adopters Looking at consumers who plan to buy a new smartphone in the next year, 31% said they want their next phone to be an iPhone while 34% say they want it to run Android. Bad news for RIM, only 7% say they want a Blackberry. That’s especially when 5% say they want Windows Phone 7, and it’s barely broken into the market at this point. So much for Blackberry’s vaunted customer loyalty. Still, they have a chance, 2% say they want ‘Other’, and with WebOS and Symbian Gone they’re really up for grabs, as are the 18% who are undecided.

If these numbers play out, things are looking very good for Android and iPhone – but not very good for anyone else. Blackberry looks to remain in a serious slide unless they can do something drastic to turn things around.

Posted in Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Mobile Devices, Palm OS, Symbian, Windows Mobile | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

TiVo Loses Rhapsody and One True Media

Posted on Friday, September 2, 2011 by MegaZone

TiVo Logo TiVo is losing a couple of OTT services. Though, given their popularity, or lack thereof, it probably won’t impact many users. One True Media is dropping support for all TiVo models, according to a thread at TiVo Community. One user posted a message they received from One True Media.

We are sorry to announce that we are in the process of phasing out our “Share to Tivo” feature.* We are including instructions on how to access your current shares.* We realize that not everyone is set up to receive internet video on their televisions, but you can continue to share your One True Media creations via our “Share to YouTube” and Facebook shares.

TiVo URL for direct type in (when user is logged in)
To manage their channel:

http://www.onetruemedia.com/otm_site/view_channel

To add a Video to their channel:

http://www.onetruemedia.com/otm_site…_id=**********

Directions to share:
1. Go to share online for the Video you want to add to your TiVo channel
2. In the URL replace /auth_share? with *channel_publish_work?
3. Make sure to keep the work_id
4. This take you to the TiVo share pages

Customer Care
One True Media, Inc.

I’ve never gotten the impression that One True Media is a very popular service among TiVo users, so I doubt there will be too many people up in arms over this. YouTube just dominates video sharing.

The other service TiVo is dropping may impact more users. TiVo models earlier than the Premiere lost Rhapsody, as reported by Zatz Not Funny. Rhapsody recently changed their API, which broke all of the existing third party apps, like TiVo. TiVo has created a new Flash-based app for the Premiere, but will not be updating the app for the earlier TiVo models. Given the popularity of other services, such as Pandora, the loss of Rhapsody probably won’t bring too many tears.

As Rhapsody explained it:

Here is some background: we contacted all our device partners several months before this necessary change to our service, providing them all the info necessary to make a successful change. The vast majority of these partners made the change on time and successfully tested their devices (as did Rhapsody) and signed-off. However, after roll-out, some partners found bugs in their systems not apparent in previous testing that they needed to address. These partners are working to correct the issues they discovered as quickly as they can. They realize you’re their customers too and want to get things working properly.

Rhapsody first revealed that TiVo had decided to drop support on the Series2 and Series3 platforms, updating only the Premiere:

Tivo has started pushing out their firmware update to their series 4 DVR systems. They say it should be out to everyone by the end of August.

As far as the series 2 and 3 devices, Tivo has chosen not to update the firmware for those devices, meaning Rhapsody will no longer be accessible on them. This was a call that Tivo made, not us, and yeah, it sucks. Wish it was better news, but that’s the news we have.

And this was later confirmed by TiVo on TiVo Community:

I can confirm that an update is rolling out to Series4 boxes which will get Rhapsody up and running again. Unfortunately, due to recent technical limitations with the Rhapsody application Series3 and Series2 users will no longer have access to Rhapsody from their TiVo DVR. We apologize for the inconvenience.

It sounds like One True Media didn’t give TiVo any choice, they’re pulling support. But with Rhapsody it sounds like they made a necessary update to their service to update an expiring cert and TiVo decided not to invest resources in updating the client on older platforms. Or perhaps they couldn’t, given the “recent technical limitations” statement, though I’d like to know what those limitations are.

So what about you? Are you upset by the loss of either of these services? Leave a comment.

Posted in Broadband, DVR, TiVo | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment