Category: TiVo News

TiVo launched a new rebate on January 27th. This rebate is not exactly new, but extends some prior rebates and cuts back on another. Best of all (for us at least), is that the rebates are now consolidated into one form and some confusion in the language of prior rebate has been clarified. Here’s the deal:

1) $200 rebate on Series3 Home Theater TiVo DVRs (NOT the TiVo HD) continues through April 5th.
2) $150 rebate on dual-tuner standalone, standard definition units continues through April 5th.
3) $150 rebate on single-tuner Humax DVD TiVo units continues through April 5th. (The $49 net price on 40GB Humax boxes lives!)
4) The prior $170 rebate on single-tuner standalone, standard definition units dropped down to $150 and this new rebate continues through April 5th.

Here’s the new TiVo Rebate form.

For those interested in minutiae, notice that the prior rebate (like several predecessors) referred to a “$150 TiVo® Series2™ Dual Tuner DVR Rebate [valid only on TiVo Service Numbers (TSN) starting with 264, 275, 565, 590, 595, 649],” but only the 649 unit actually has two tuners. This caused a huge amount of confusion for our customers, because the Humax DVD Recorder IS eligible for a $150 rebate, but has a single tuner.

The new rebate finally fixed this source of confusion.

Today is the first day of a new TiVo promo: Get 3 free months of TiVo service with the purchase of any TiVoHD and a qualifying subscription. That “qualifying subscription” language is a bit of a catch, because the promo only works if you purchase monthly service and you do NOT pre-pay…so anyone looking to get the benefit of the multi-year or pre-pay discounts won’t get the free months of service. Also, any current TiVo subscriber wanting to take advantage of the current lifetime service offer won’t use the promo.

To take advantage of the promo: Enter the coupon code “3FREEHD” (no quotes) when activating TiVo service between 1/16/08 and 2/16/08 at TiVo.com.

Here’s the fine print:

*Customers get three months of free service when they purchase a TiVo DVR and activate a one-year monthly TiVo service plan between January 16 and February 16, 2008. Not valid on pre-paid TiVo service plans. Must use promo code “3FREEHD” at www.tivo.com/activate when activating the TiVo service. TiVo service agreement terms apply. See www.tivo.com for details. Customer service: 877-367-8486.

Here’s the official TiVo offer.

Lifetime service for TiVos has been a hot topic since day one. There was early confusion over whether lifetime was related to the owner or the unit itself (long since clarified to be the unit itself) and there have been numerous price changes. Then, TiVo stopped lifetime service altogether for most units. Then it came back as part of special offers from time to time, usually as a transfer. Currently, they have a new type of special offer running, and a transfer option, and a way to get it on some initial units.

Here are the possibilities:

If you have a TiVo.com account, you can add another unit to your account and get lifetime for that unit. The cost is $399 and that’s available until February 13, 2008. If you have a TiVo.com account, that means you have a non-DirecTV TiVo, and you can log in and see your units on TiVo’s site. See the Humax option below if you want a way to get a unit on a new TiVo account with lifetime. Also note that this option only works for units that have never been previously subscribed to TiVo.

If you have a non-DirecTV TiVo that currently has lifetime service, you purchased lifetime service for it before October of 2003, and the unit is currently active, then you can transfer lifetime service from that unit to a new TiVo HD (not a TiVo Series3) for $199. You get one year of service on the older unit, and you can keep it going for the regular secondary-unit prices after that. Click here to see if your old unit qualifies first. For this deal, you have to purchase the TiVo by February 3, 2008 and you have to complete the service transfer by March 8, 2008. This option also only works for never-before-subscribed units. This works with WeaKnees TiVo HD units from 20 hours up to 144 hours (or more . . .).

Last, but definitely not least, is the case of the Humax DVD TiVo. These units are still eligible for lifetime service, even if you don’t already have a TiVo.com account. Lifetime service for these units currently costs $399. We don’t know of a current expiration date for this price or offer, but if it’s something you want, you should do it soon.

A little time with Amazon Unbox

I’d been reading a bit about Amazon Unbox and its use with TiVos for a few months. But I’d always thought of it as a competitor to using iTunes with my AppleTV, which seemed like the obvious answer for how I’d potentially download movies and TV shows to my living room. Then it caught me at the right moment, and now I’m sold.

In preparation to see the new Bourne movie, we had set a Wishlist for “Bourne” to catch the previous two. We saw the first, but the second never arrived since it was never broadcast on a channel we received. So I tried using Universal Swivel Search. And the brilliance of the Amazon Unbox integration kicked in. The TiVo told me that there were no upcoming broadcasts of the movie, but that I could download it for $3.99. That seemed easy, so I did it.

The TiVo asked for three pieces of information: my Amazon account email address and password, and my TiVo.com password. Then I authorized the download, and it began. That was it – no drive to Blockbuster, no envelope from Netflix. I didn’t even have to go to my computer to use iTunes.

Now it didn’t come down immediately. Frankly, I don’t even know how long it took, but the next night it was there, ready for me. So far, so good.

The next part was a bit rocky, and, to me, surprising.

Let me step back a moment. Amazon has two options for most downloads: rent or purchase. If you rent, the media downloads and sits for up to a month, waiting for you to watch it. If you purchase, you get it endlessly. I rented.

As an aside – some movies can only be purchased. This may be an early stage of the movie’s release, or it may be an issue with the copyright.

So my wife and I sat down to watch the movie after the kids went to sleep one night. When we started the movie, the TiVo made clear that once we started, we had only 24 hours of potential viewing of the movie. We could watch it as much as we wanted in that 24 hours, but after that it would be deleted from the hard drive. Now I understand that we can’t have it forever, but 24 hours? My viewing pattern is something like a max of one hour after the kids go to sleep. I just can’t do two hours in a row, especially on a week night. I could do two nights in a row to finish a movie, but this model doesn’t allow that. Start at 9 PM one night, and if you sit down at 9 PM the next night, it’s gone. I do, of course, get to watch it as many times as I want in that 24 hour period – does anyone care about that feature? But, OK, those are the rules.

Here’s the warning I’d get if I were to try to start watching from the beginning and I’d run out of my rental time before the movie could finish.

Of course, the movie isn’t over 400 minutes long. Not sure what bug caused that.

But back to watching my rental/download!

The wonderful side of the TiVo takes over. No DVD to insert, no unskippable intro video, no impenetrable (and slow) DVD menu to navigate. No obligatory painful music loop. It’s like watching a movie that I recorded – so, so much better than a DVD, always. This, alone, would make the whole system worthwhile to me. I get instant reply, I get my TiVo remote. I get intuitive control.

I understand that the ability to download a movie in HD isn’t quite ready. The bandwidth required, and the storage capacity at Amazon, just aren’t feasible – but they will be soon. So my movie downloaded at a lower resolution. But, strangely, the movie was the right aspect ratio for HD – just letterboxed all the way around.

You can see from the above picture, that the image could have been enlarged to fill the screen, and without losing the proper ratio. (This image capture was done with S-Video, so it’s narrowed, but on my HD TV, it looks correct.) I’m not really sure why the OS doesn’t let me zoom this to fit my screen. It gets first letterboxed into an SD aspect ratio, then the TiVo letterboxes that with black borders to fill the screen width-wise.

The other great benefits of the TiVo are right there – and, again, compared to a DVD, they pretty important: I can sit down the next night and start again where I left off – no ff’ing to find the right chapter or any of that. I can get info with the info button. I can rate it with my thumb ratings. And I don’t have to send it back, or own another piece of plastic.

In the music world, I haven’t been all that keen on downloading music rather than ordering a CD (of course, Radiohead is the exception!). With music, I want the actual CD. I want to read the notes, and I want to be able to grab it and listen in my car or in the garage, or the kids might want to play it in their room. But with movies, the download method is just much more sensible. I really don’t want it after I’ve watched it – I don’t want to own a stack of DVD cases. And I’ll only watch it one my one TV. And I’ll only watch it once.

Amazon has been marketing this new service a few ways. There are ads all over their site. There are ads on the TiVo. And, maybe best of all, there are free and discounted movies from time to time. The last free ones were some old classics (but you can’t complain about a free download of “8 1/2”). But then each Friday, they put a list of movies up for rent at $.99. (Since I wrote this originally, they seem to pop up with discounted movies on various days.) You don’t have to watch them on the discount day, just set them to download. Then you’ve got 30 days. I will say that on my Mac, their Unbox page is painfully slow so I usually browse on my TiVo, but I’m sold – and you should try it out.

Try Amazon Unbox

Starting today, changes are coming to TiVo service pricing. In most cases, pricing goes down, or the minimum commitment gets shorter. The one place where the pricing is going up is on the Multi-Service discount pricing:

As far as we understand, this pricing is for NEW activations of units. Existing units should be grandfathered in to current pricing, or should be able to be changed to lower pricing, if available, when their current commitment is over.

Finally, there’s a way to start getting lifetime service again – this time for $399 . . . but you have to be a current TiVo customer (meaning you have a box on an account with active service) and you can add a new unit, and get lifetime for $399. So essentially, this is like “lifetime multi-service” for $399. But theoretically, if/when the main box on your account comes to the end of its term, this will become the main unit on your account, and all others should renew at the MSD fee. Anyway, this is valid until February 13, 2008.

Want lifetime, even as a new customer? You can still get it on our Humax DVD TiVo DVRs.

See TiVo’s pricing plans page for more info.