The priority request sign up page for the coming 7.2.2 release is up! The big addition to 7.2.2 is, as the subject says, undelete. It also has an improved suggestions engine and support for the Linksys USB200M v.2 Ethernet adapter.

(OK, lots of posts today…)

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?

Thomas Hawk also has a summary of the conference call.

OK, I had a chance to listen to the entire call. Nothing too interesting, IMHO, no big news, leaks, etc. Just a few things I think are worth calling out.

This is kind of long, so I’ll cut it…
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TiVo is phasing out its popular lifetime service plan and implementing a series of flexible pricing options that include the company’s hardware, the DVR maker announced on Wednesday.

Of all the possible things to focus on from today’s news, and the different ways to spin this one issue, why am I not surprised they went straight for the negative by stressing what TiVo is dropping *first*, right in the headline? And, as for popular, I recall from past conference calls that fewer than 20% of TiVo subscribers opted for lifetime. They also missed the prepaid options. Time to leave a comment over there…