It seems that you can still activate Lifetime on your box – rumors are that there are a few more days to do so here:
We’re doing our part – coupon code tivo50 still gives you $50 off any TiVo-branded 290 hour or larger unit here:
Do it fast! We will email your TiVo Service Number after you order, and before we ship your unit, so that you can activate while you still can.
As many of you are aware, TiVo will stop offering its Lifetime Service option for TiVo Series 2 DVRs on or soon after today. Lifetime service is a great deal for TiVo owners: $299 instead of the other $12.95/month option. The $299 equates to 23 months of service at $12.95 each. So after 23 months, essentially your service is free. And, better yet, since the service is tied to the box, if you sell the box, the lifetime transfers to the new owner. So units with Lifetime are worth much more than others if you ever want to resell them down the road – in the past, they’ve pretty much been worth almost as much more as the lifetime purchase price, and that could even increase as it won’t be an option anymore.
Toward that end, at WeaKnees, if you order any unit that can currently get Lifetime service by the close of business today, we’ll email you your TiVo Service Number soon after the order is placed. This will enable you to activate your service and pay for Lifetime while you still can. To be clear: you must purchase by the end of the day today, and you must activate service within 30 days of purchase, according to our most currrent information from TiVo. And we’ll guarantee that.
In addition, if you order a 290 hour or larger unit, WeaKnees will take $50 off the price, with coupon code “TIVO50” at checkout. This coupon expires tonight, and applies to 290 hour or larger units here:
Get it while it lasts! TiVo is pulling this option because it’s too good of a value to customers!
Coming soon to a TiVo near you: Undelete and Easy Delete.
TiVo has always encouraged its users to provide suggestions for future software versions. It even sponsors a forum for those who want to push their own pet “must have.”
One of the items that users have been clamoring for is a CTRL-Z (or Apple-Z for some of us) – the ability to bring back a program that was accidentally deleted, sometimes by a babysitter, sometimes by a two-year old who grabbed hold of a remote, sometimes by a spouse who “thought you weren’t interested in watching 24, sweetheart.”
Well, fight no more. If you have a standalone Series 2 TiVo DVR (i.e., a model starting with TCD, a Sony SVR3000 or a DVD player/burner with the TiVo service), your unit will soon automatically download software version 7.2.2.
This version of the software will create a new “Recently Deleted Items” folder, that will temporarily house the stuff that was tossed. So long as there is space available on your hard drive, you will be able to resurrect any program within that folder.
The software version also will create a one-key delete key, so that if you are in the Now Playing list, you can press clear and automatically delete a program without a confirmation screen. Makes sense, because if you blow it, you can simply head to the Recently Deleted folder and fix your mistake.
One interesting application of this new folder is a rather primitive, but plausible, way of gauging how much space you have left on your TiVo. Because the TiVo will remove items from the Recently Deleted folder first, you will not run out of recording space so long as you have items still stored in that folder. If you fear that you might be close, you can always count the number of hours stored in that folder to gauge roughly how much space you have left. This calculation can be difficult, though, if you are recording programming at different recording qualities. Up to four half-hour shows at basic quality will be wiped out with a single half-hour show recorded at best quality.
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: