A common resason I hear for not getting a Tivo is a reluctance to pay a monthly fee for little more than the electronic TV guide. Never mind that your cable company also charges you a monthly fee for your DVR, or that the generic DVRs have a horrible user interface and don’t have wonderful features like the SeasonPass. Most people can’t get past the monthly fee after paying for the hardware. So yesterday, TiVo announced a new pricing plan wherein you pay the monthly fee (forever) but don’t have to pay for the box itself. Oh, and you can’t buy the lifetime service after this week either. According to the official Tivo blog:
We found that the overwhelming majority of consumers favored the
bundling together of the TiVo box and TiVo service. You spoke, we
answered.
I call bullshit. The overwhelming majority of consumers favored not having to pay a monthly service at all. This coupled with the elimination of the Lifetime service, makes me seriously doubt that I’ll ever get a TiVo again. I’m not alone, read through the comments on Digg. The new pricing plan is also causing some confusion (although a Tivo employee clears it up in the comments there).
According to TiVo, this new plan "they have increased the lifetime value of a TiVo customer by over $100." Well see in the upcoming months if the decision makes an impact on the bottom line. While they may have increase the cost to, I mean value of, each subscriber this may not translate into more subscribers.
A complete wrap up of the TiVo quarterly call is on Thomas Hawk’s Digital connection.