Author: Michael

Starting “next week” (we suspect this means Wednesday, March 15) the lifetime subscription will no longer be available for purchase for standalone TiVo and DVD/TiVo combo units. So if you’re looking for a lifetime subscription, get in quick! You can order a unit from us until then and we can, by request, email you your TiVo Serial Number (TSN) so that you can purchase lifetime on a unit.

Lifetime TiVo service subscriptions last for the lifetime of the box and aren’t transferable to another unit, but are transferable to a different person. Lifetime currently costs $299 and can only be purchase directly from TiVo (as with all TiVo service).

In addition, the monthly cost of a TiVo subscription is $12.95. It’s unclear at this point whether that will remain the same or not for those initially activating new units.

Current TiVo subscriptions are said to be unaffected by these changes. So if you already have lifetime, you’re all set. If you’re paying $12.95 per month now (or $6.95 for a secondary box on your account) then according to the press releases, your price won’t increase (although they have previously increased monthly fees from $9.95 to $12.95).

But now might be a good time to switch over to lifetime service. The break even point (neglecting the time-value of money) is 23 months. So if you think you’ll have your current unit for two more years (who wouldn’t?) and if you have the cash to lay out, we recommend it. In the end, if you want to get a newer box down the road, your old one should be worth some good money on eBay too, so factor that into the equation.

One more note, just to be complete about the world of lifetime. DirecTV TiVo users were once able to purchase lifetime for their units also, but that’s long gone. If you did have lifetime on one of these combo boxes, DirecTV now applies it as a lifetime DVR service on your DirecTV account. So now you can change around DirecTV DVRs at will and you still avoid the $5.99 DVR service fee. But moving a lifetime box to a different account doesn’t transfer the lifetime service to that account.

When we first read the headlines, we assumed that TiVo and Verizon Wireless were going to get content from your TiVo to your cell phone via TiVoToGo. That seemed a little silly – most cell phone screens are smaller even than iPod screens. But upon actually reading the press release, we find that the application is really an extension of online scheduling – pretty cool. So if you have a Verizon Wireless phone and a Series 2 TiVo on a network, then you’ll be able to use your cell phone to schedule recordings from anywhere you can get cell service, apparently.

This feature could actually prove to be pretty handy. We’re rarely far from a computer where we can log in to TiVo Central Online to schedule a recording, but this just makes it simpler. More details here:

TiVo’s Press Release

TiVo today announced a new feature that will come to many TiVo DVRs this summer: KidZone. This is a feature with the ability to restrict shows that kids can watch. Parents will be able to specifically approve shows for kids, and that’s all that will be available to them. In addition, the TiVo will be able to help parents decide which shows might be appropriate based on ratings.

As with pretty much all new TiVo features at this point, KidZone will only be available to TiVo Series 2 DVRs – those that don’t have the DirecTV service integrated into them. TiVo says this feature will be available “mid 2006.”