Wow, it has been a busy day for activations – I decided to consolidate these.

My thanks to Chris, Jae, Peter, and Karl for the TiVo Reward Referrals.

It looks like the inventory clearance on the old Series2 units has started. Buy.com has the 80-hour Series2 free after rebate. Well, mostly free – shipping is $14.96. But if you haven’t used Google Checkout before you can sign-up and as a new Checkout customer save $10 on the order, making it $4.96 shipped. After the $170 mail-in rebate, of course. I don’t know if there is a way to get free shipping with Buy.com.

Circuit City is already offering a discount on the TiVo HD – instead of $299.99 you pay $258.99.

But there’s more, there are also current Circuit City coupons to save $40 of a purchase of $199 or more. Using a coupon brings it down to $218.99 (plus any tax). A number of users at TiVoCommunity.com have picked up units for this price at their local Circuit City. And some have also received refunds for the difference in price, since they purchased it in the last week before the price dropped.

You might be able to get other retailers, such as Best Buy, to price match. Can’t hurt to try.

I’m really surprised to see it discounted so soon after launch. This should really boost sales – until CC runs out of boxes.

(Personally I stopped shopping at Circuit City when they backed DIVX over DVD… yes, I’m old and crotchety.)

One of my co-workers recently received an email from TiVo about her billing, and she asked me about it as the resident ‘TiVo expert’:

From: CustomerCare@tivo.com
Date: Jul 27, 2007 2:14 PM
Subject: Important message regarding your monthly billing

Dear Valued TiVo Customer,

It has come to our attention that you have not been billed for one or more months of your TiVo service. After your gift subscription was used in full, the credit card you provided when you activated your DVR, should have been billed for your ongoing service. Due to a system error however, this did not happen. We apologize for this inconvenience and are working quickly to fix this issue. Within the next ten days, you should see a charge on your credit card for the service you have received since your gift subscription expired.

To see a detailed view of the charges on your account once the appropriate changes have been made, please visit www.tivo.com/manage.

Thank you for being a loyal TiVo Subscriber.

Sincerely,

The TiVo team

At the time I hadn’t heard anything about this, so I advised her to contact TiVo to make sure this wasn’t a mistake. She did, and TiVo told her that this affected ‘thousands’ of customers. It seems to be related to gift subscriptions. Apparently they gave people an extra month ‘free’ between the end of a gift subscription and the start of monthly billing. In the case of my co-worker, she started with a 3-month gift but she received the 4th month free before billing commenced. I went looking and found this thread on TiVoCommunity.com from other users who received the same email.

So, if you received that email and were wondering what it was about, now you know. If you don’t think it applies to you, I recommend contacting TiVo’s customer support.