HOT for TiVo owners

K

Kitsune

n00b
Joined
Oct 10, 2004
Messages
17
Cancel your accounts.

No, seriously. I called their customer line at 877-367-8486 and told the customer rep that I was cancelling, because my Toshiba player has a lifetime of the stripped-down TiVo service for free and I didn't consider the extra features worth the thirteen bucks a month. In less than two seconds he offered to cut six bucks a month off the service rate. No fuss, no muss, no struggling through layers of people and managers, just *bam* half off the monthly subscription rate to keep me from cancelling.

Of course, I have some leverage in that my TiVo player would keep functioning even if I disconnected the service, so they know that I really had nothing to lose by cancelling. (And I was honestly cancelling, I didn't expect them to offer to drop the price.) It's up to you to come up with your own believable reason for cancelling, just be sure that whatever reason you come up with, it's one that could conceivably be mended by offering you a discount. Good luck!
 
:eek:

Not the greatest idea.... This will probably be locked..

That could lose the company ALOT of money.... If hundreds of people just started threatening to unsubsribe at once =/
 
Atari said:
:eek:

Not the greatest idea.... This will probably be locked..

That could lose the company ALOT of money.... If hundreds of people just started threatening to unsubsribe at once =/
Click to expand...

People do this all the time with cell phones. It's called customer retention, and it's a pretty common practice.

When I cancelled Direct TV, they offered to lower my monthly bill, give me more stations and give me a $75.00 credit!
 
I must have gotten about 5 free months out of T-mobile before I cancelled my service with them. Same idea. "customer retention" Good job Kitsune.
 
To the best of my knowledge I've only been paying $5/month for my Series-II TiVo service for the last 1.5-2 years now. So if you were paying $13... ouch.

Regards,
fastgeek
 
If you listen to the analysts, this is more than just retention. Tivo is facing an uphill climb to stay in business.
 
fastgeek said:
To the best of my knowledge I've only been paying $5/month for my Series-II TiVo service for the last 1.5-2 years now. So if you were paying $13... ouch.

Regards,
fastgeek
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ours is $4 :-/
 
You should ask TiVo if they still offer lifetime memberships. We bought a lifetime membership for $250 when we got our first TiVo around 5 years ago. In the long-run you'll save the most with that option.
 
Congrats on getting your price lowered. I have a few replays myself from when they dropped the service from the package but all the retailers boxes still said 3 years. :)
 
I recently got a free Tivo with a plasma purchase...exactly what features do you lose if you cancel?
 
Tivo IS having a hard time. I considered it, but since "You must have a land telephone" that idea went right out the window.
 
Apallohadas said:
Tivo IS having a hard time. I considered it, but since "You must have a land telephone" that idea went right out the window.
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With a stand alone Series 2, just network it, no phone line needed other then the initial set up which you could always do at a friends. You'd need a USB to Ethernet adapter or USB wireless adapter depending on your networking needs to go with it.
 
fastgeek said:
To the best of my knowledge I've only been paying $5/month for my Series-II TiVo service for the last 1.5-2 years now. So if you were paying $13... ouch.

Regards,
fastgeek
Click to expand...

Stand alone or Directv Tivo?
 
joemama said:
I recently got a free Tivo with a plasma purchase...exactly what features do you lose if you cancel?
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Well, if you have a normal TiVo, you lose all of its functionality if you cancel. But if you have a TiVo that came with 'free TiVo basic service', going from the pay service to the free service removes your ability to search the schedule by name, removes the TiVo's automatically recording things it thinks you'll like (a very mixed blessing if you haven't trained yours), and reduces the schedule size down to three days. So if you're going out of town for a week and you want a show recorded that's five days away, you're outta luck.
 
mjones73 said:
With a stand alone Series 2, just network it, no phone line needed other then the initial set up which you could always do at a friends. You'd need a USB to Ethernet adapter or USB wireless adapter depending on your networking needs to go with it.
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Didn't know that was a possibility.

And off the top of my head, I'd have to really think about friends that still have land lines.
 
I thought all TiVo boxes came with *free* basic services... It's really the subscription services that make TiVo so awesome.

The company may be in bad shape financially, but I don't think that should make anyone hesistant to buy a TiVo system. Reason being, if the company gets to a point where they can no longer sustain operations I think we can all be certain that TiVo will be aquired by another company.

The TiVo name is more well known than the technology it represents. A much, much higher percentage of people know what a TiVo is as compared to a DVR. I saw a street survey on TV not too long ago where the reporter was interviewing random people who were walking by... the averages were around 7 or 8 people out of 10 knew what a TiVo was, but only 2 or so out of 10 knew what a DVR was. Out of curiosity, I asked a number of people I know (who aren't much into technology stuff) about TiVo & DVR and found that almost all of them know about TiVo, but most got a perplexed look on their face when I mentioned DVR. I even know people who have a generic DVR and call it a TiVo (and if it ever breaks they will be looking to replace their "TiVo" when they go shopping).

So, my point is that even though the company might be in financial trouble there is no way that TiVo is going to go out of business and disappear. TiVo is without a doubt the dominant brand name within their industry.Some other company would acquire TiVo for the brand name, technology & customers before the worst would happen.
 
I think only the toshiba sdh400 which is just a tivo with a dvd player has free basic and some higher end pioneer dvdr ones do as well.
They stopped that with the humax drt800.
If you dont have one of those models then you have to pay.
The initial setup can be done via network on some. I had a drt800 setup on the network flawless but I just got a dt800 that that did not work on. Also it didnt like my voIP phone so i had to take it somewhere to dial in.

What you need to do to get it to work is a network with DHCP. A usb NIC. I used the Belkin.
Then in dialing options you have to put in ,#401
Again this doens't work on all of them.

I too bought a series 1 tivo in '99 and I think that the lfetime service was like $199 back then. Or it might have been $250 and I got the box for $50 then a $100 MIR which made the service $200.
Anyway traded it for a series 2 with lifetime and got money back!
But to make a short story long if you have service setup each additional box is only $6 a month. To get lifetime on those it would take 50 months to pay for itself.
I will pay the $6 a month. Unless I can get it for $4.

**Edit**
Forgot to mention the tivo 2 go thing too. I just had to pick me up one of those $60 NEC Dual layer drives so I could burn shows from the other tivos I have that dont have a burner in them.
This is great. Finally Tivo is catching up. They have a little way to go for all the dreamers. But it will always be ahead of Cable companies and Sat. companies as far as inovation.
Transfer shows and burn them to your computer that is great.
 
john2k said:
I thought all TiVo boxes came with *free* basic services...
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nope, some you have to buy service. In fact, I don't think there are any offered with free basic service anymore.
 
my dvr stores 60hours. has buttons to skip commercials. and has no monthly fee. yay.
 
Keep in mind that the fee you're paying only partly goes to Tivo, the rest goes towards the networks as part of an agreement that allows you to skip commercials. Since they lose out on advertising revenue, they wanted some way of making that money up, hence "Video On Demand" fees. Dish has the same thing, $5/month for their dual-tuner DVR box, except they tell you right up front that they're making no money off of it. If Tivo was charging $13/month, then they were making a horrible amount of money off you compared to what they should've been.
 
As off topic as you can get, but does anyone know where on the boards we can post TIVO issues? I'm trying to use the Tivo2Go service, but it sucks balls. I was just wondering if others had similar issues.
 
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