.FLYINGHEAD THE FLEXIBLE ENTERPRISE
.TITLE The ongoing battle between cable TV and TiVo
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.SUMMARY Are cable television companies purposely or inadvertently sabotaging their customers’ TiVo installations? This question came to mind a few weeks ago when our local cable company performed an "upgrade" that virtually disabled TiVo personal video recorders. In this article, Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz explores that question as the basis for a case study on industry flexibility. He also looks at specific solutions for problems being encountered, and possible solutions for the industry as a whole.
.OTHER
Are cable television companies purposely or inadvertently sabotaging their customers’ [[http://www.tivo.com|TiVo]] installations? This question came to mind a few weeks ago when our local cable company performed an "upgrade" that virtually disabled my family’s TiVo personal video recorders.
In this article, I’ll explore that question as the basis for a case study on industry flexibility. I’ll also look at specific solutions for the problems we encountered, and possible solutions for the industry as a whole.
A personal video recorder (or PVR), also known as a digital video recorder (or DVR), is a device that records live television for later viewing. TiVo is one of the most popular brands of DVR and is a product I’ve used at home since the first model came out back in 1999.
.CALLOUT We could no longer be assured of getting each new episode of our favorite shows.
For me, personally, a DVR is an indispensable device. I like television, but because of my work schedule and active lifestyle, I’m never able to watch my favorite shows when they’re broadcast. Even before DVRs came out, I used all sorts of jury-rigged methods to time-shift my TV watching, including some elaborate tape swapping of those old VHS tapes and Rube Goldberg-like triggering of ancient VCRs. TiVo made things a lot more pleasant.
Denise and I have a fleet of TiVo devices. About two weeks ago, her TiVo (yes, we have "his" and "hers" TiVos) stopped recording her favorite programs properly. A week later, my TiVo evidenced the same symptoms.
.TEASER For the full story, workarounds, and analysis, tap here.
Most TiVo devices work in concert with the cable set-top box provided by your friendly neighborhood cable company. If you want to record Ninja Warrior at 9pm on channel 150, the TiVo box sends a signal to an IR "repeater", which simulates the cable box’s remote control, and causes the cable box to change to channel 150.
This is a relatively crude solution, but it’s worked reasonably well for most TiVo owners for almost a decade. That is, until about two weeks ago, when our local cable company apparently found a way to prevent IR repeaters from working reliably.
Here in Central Florida, the local cable network suddenly installed a new operating system update to their cable boxes which includes a feature called Digital Navigator. After years of working perfectly, our TiVo boxes suddenly were unable to change channels correctly at the top of the hour.
Searching for an answer to why everything had suddenly gone to crap, I spent hours reading on the [[http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/|TiVo Community Forum]] message boards and contacting TiVo directly. It seems the prevailing theory is that Digital Navigator calls out for programming data at the top of the hour. During this data access query, the cable box ignores IR signals from the remote control, and therefore loses the remote IR sequence for channel changing sent by the TiVo box to change the channel.
After talking with TiVo, their senior tech people really had no workaround other than updating season passes to record a minute early or a minute late, which screws up other programming. They also tried a delay hack to make the IR signal transmit more slowly, but that didn’t work either.
.CALLOUT I’ll come out about $1,725 ahead of the game.
If Denise and I were going to watch TV on our TiVos, it was beginning to seem we’d either have to accept missing the first or last minute of each program, or take the chance that the TiVo would record the wrong channel. That meant we could no longer be assured of getting each new episode of our favorite shows.
But Denise and I weren’t the only ones experiencing this fun, new problem. Apparently, this is going to be a cascading problem for thousands of consumers. It hit Time Warner Cable in Kansas City back in March, and many of us here in Central Florida, last week. As the new OS update propagates throughout the cable systems using these boxes, more and more TiVo users with IR repeaters will lose programming.
And that brings us back to the question of purposeful or inadvertent sabotage. You see, most cable companies don’t like TiVos, Windows Media Centers, MythTVs, and any other add-on device that performs DVR functions.
.H1 Mission conflict
As the business currently runs, companies like TiVo and Microsoft who provide add-on DVR solutions have a direct conflict of mission from the cable companies.
First, cable companies derive a measurable revenue stream from pay-per-view. Although many DVRs will allow you to access pay-per-view events in a convoluted fashion, most don’t work well with the pay-per-view products and, as a result, third-party DVR users often don’t buy pay-per-view.
Second, cable companies rent out their own DVRs. My local company charges $16.95 per month, per DVR. That’s $203.40 per year, just about what it would cost to buy a DVR. So if my competing DVR lasts three years, my cable company would lose more than $600 in revenue.
Third, DVR companies like TiVo want to let consumers record broadcast video. As we’ve seen in well-publicized legal battles, the television and movie industries have issues with digital rights management and tend to fear anything that seems to let consumers have access to media properties. After all, once little Bobby records You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, who knows who he’ll give a copy to?
Finally, there’s the whole interoperability issue. Each cable network is a complex and dynamic beast. Connecting new devices to it means that the cable company has to support (in some minimal way, at least) all these newfangled gadgets, making their tech support job all that much harder.
So, as you can see, it’s not really to the obvious benefit of cable companies to work with third-party add-on devices like the TiVo. But it’s also unlikely to be purposeful sabotage. It’s far more likely to be the result of sloppy engineering on the part of those engineering the set-top boxes used by cable providers. As the "adorkable" ZeoTiVo stated in the TiVo Community Forum:
.QUOTE Far more likely is just engineers doing what is easiest in their cable box design versus being talented enough to take third party concerns into account. Cable boxes are meant to be low cost as cable companies use them in volume and you never see a cable company touting their cable box as being the best out there.
.QUOTE There is simply no design incentive to make a Cadillac of cable boxes or pay extra to ensure a function does not interfere with a small subset of customers.
And interfere, they do.
.CALLOUT Mission conflict is costing cable companies revenue even as they fight to hold on to it.
And yet, it’s actually in the cable companies’ best interests to actively support TiVo and other add-on DVR customers — if they would only realize that TiVo users are a customer base rich in opportunity. You see, the typical, non-DVR user is likely to watch only the TV he or she is actually physically present to see. Purchasing the high-cost programming packages with all the premium channels often makes little sense, since that customer might only be around to watch TV from 7pm to 10pm each night.
But the typical TiVo customer scours all the channels and can record anything playing at any time, watching it when convenient. As a result, the typical TiVo customer will likely purchase all or most of the premium channels, because every program out there is readily available for later viewing.
Although I know of no such study thus far, it’s likely that most TiVo users spend two to three times more per month on cable programming services than the average cable customer. Even if the cable company doesn’t get the DVR revenue, the added programming packages purchased will more than make up for the cost, and will likely net the typical cable company a much larger profit.
And yet, TiVo customers are treated as more nuisance than profit center, which is a shame. But with an attitude adjustment on the part of the cable companies, this customer base could be a goldmine.
.H1 Breakages and workarounds
I asked members of the TiVo Community Forum to report on any problems they had with providers breaking TiVos and other third party devices. Beyond the breakage I described above, one example was provided by DancnDude, who reported:
.QUOTE My parents have AT&T U-verse. U-verse put a feature into their box that causes it to turn off after six hours of no activity, and this cannot be disabled (my dad called and asked — they said there was no way to shut that off). This essentially makes it hard for TiVo to record, since it will try to change the channel when it’s ready to record something but the U-verse box might be off and you essentially get a recording of a blank screen telling you to turn on the box.
.QUOTE The only solution is to set up a series of TiVo recordings every few hours so it activates the U-verse box and will be good for another 6 hours. I told them to set up TiVo to record 10-15 minutes of the Weather Channel or news every 5 1/2 hours, so it would keep changing the channel.
I, too, had to find a workaround or put up with missing programming. I decided it was time to move to a different TiVo technology, a third generation TiVo HD.
This would be the first TiVo I’d own that would record two streams of high-definition video. I ordered a highly upgraded version from [[http://www.weaknees.com|Weaknees.com]] that would store 292 hours of high-def programming or a whopping 2,800 hours of traditional programming onto two terabyte hard drives. Put into perspective, we could keep those two terabyte drives recording video non-stop 24/7 for more than 116 days and not run out of storage space.
But the reason I upgraded had to do with how this particular TiVo talks to the cable network. This model uses something new called a CableCARD. A CableCARD is a PC card that slides into the TiVo and performs all the functions of a typical cable box. Rather than the convoluted IR channel changing hoopla that caused our original problem, this TiVo would send an internal signal to the CableCARD and the channel would change automagically.
The only gotcha is my cable company (like most, according to TiVo Community Forum reports) wasn’t particularly familiar with CableCARDs, even though the FCC mandates that all cable companies accept and provide CableCARDs.
The first rep I talked to told me they didn’t exist. The second rep said they were available, but if I used them, I’d give up all my premium channels. This was particularly wrong because the CableCARDs exist to provide access to the premium channels. Basic cable doesn’t require a cable box, but premium channels do. Likewise, if you use basic cable, you don’t need a CableCARD — the whole reason is to provide premium channel access.
.CALLOUT There’s no incentive for the cable box to be any good.
The third rep finally acknowledged CableCARDs existed and, as a very pleasant surprise, offered to send a tech out the very next day to install them. As a not-so-pleasant, not-so-surprise, the installer had very little experience setting up cable cards (he’d only installed one other in the last seven months) and the bulk of his "install" work consisted of handing me the card to plug into the TiVo — and then spending the next three hours on the phone attempting to get the back office to configure their end correctly.
On the plus side, everyone I spoke to at both TiVo and my local cable company was pleasant and polite. Unfortunately, training on some of these non-standard offerings was virtually non-existent, at least at my cable service provider.
With the exception of my personal favorite, the Science Channel HD, we got our TV back, changing channels correctly, and recording the programming we want to watch. We did lose the HD version of the Science Channel due to something called SDV (Switched Digital Video), but that’s a subject for a whole other article. Losing one favorite channel was a pretty fair trade-off, compared to losing all of our programming, so I still consider it a win for the home team.
On the other hand, our cable company lost big. Instead of paying for all our cable boxes (we had six), I yanked them all out and replaced them with my old TiVos, recording just basic cable. I can use TiVo-to-TiVo networking to send programming from my two terabyte TiVo HD to the older Series 2 TiVos, so we’ll have video throughout the house without needing any of the cable boxes. All told, that single change saves us $84.07 each month, or $1,008.84 per year — covering the cost of the new TiVo box after about 15 months of savings. If I use this solution for three years, I’ll come out about $1,725 ahead of the game.
And that’s where it cost my cable company in a big way. Because their boxes broke my boxes, I was forced to pull their boxes out of my house. As a result, they’re going to lose more than a thousand dollars a year from me. I’m happy because that’s more money in my pocket, but it also showcases how mission conflict is costing the cable companies revenue even as they fight to hold on to it.
Mission conflict also costs the cable companies, because I never considered replacing my TiVo boxes with their DVR. I did briefly consider the excellent Windows Media Center option and even the Linux-based MythTV, but I never, not even for a second, considered using the cable provider’s DVR.
That’s because the cable provider’s DVR sucks. As ZeoTiVo said, there’s no incentive for the cable box to be any good. Scientific Atlanta, makers of my cable boxes, is really a networking company, like its parent, Cisco. Scientific Atlanta makes network nodes on the cable company’s network. Out of all the products they provide, DVR functionality is simply an add-on option, fulfilling a check-box requirement some customers demand.
.CALLOUT TiVo, for example, has dropped the ball here.
By contrast, the people at TiVo (and the people on the Windows Media Center team), live and breathe personal video recording. Everything they do and everything they think about is aimed at improving the user experience recording and playing back live TV. As a result, products made by true believers in DVR technology are going to be better and more pleasant to use than products created by a company that simply knocked one off to shut up a few whining customers.
.H1 How a Flexible Enterprise might do it better
As best as I can tell, there really are no bad guys here, although sometimes cable TV companies seem to go way out of their way to act like jackasses to their customers. Our cable provider (and all the others throughout the country) are doing their best to provide a service in a very changing world. Remember that not only are we seeing a change from analog TV to digital TV, but we’re also seeing a change from standard definition analog to high-definition video.
It’s up to the cable companies to make sure their infrastructure can take it.
But they’re also facing increased competition. The Internet itself is beginning to compete, with video-on-demand provided by more and more companies:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET Netflix, for example, offers a huge library of movies, streamed on demand from their central servers. It has a way to go to provide comprehensive offerings and a better interface, but it’s working and it’s a start.
.BULLET Individuals and Internet-based television networks like [[http://www.revision3.com|Revision3]] are producing video podcasts that are often more interesting than anything coming from the major networks.
.BULLET Verizon is now offering it’s FiOS service, with fiber-optic cabling and mind-bogglingly fast Internet and video services delivered into the home. This is a case of a traditional phone company competing on cable’s turf.
.END_LIST
Cable companies have also long faced competition from the satellite providers. Dish and DirecTV have excellent offerings, and although both companies have long had a love-hate relationship with TiVo (OK, Dish has mostly a hate-hate relationship), the satellite companies are pulling business away from cable operators.
But it’s not just up to the cable operators. Providers of third party hardware need to step up to the plate and do a better job. TiVo, for example, has dropped the ball here.
When I got my pretty new TiVo HD, it came with a one page slip with instructions for installing the CableCARDs. The key message was to remind the installer to check the encrypted channels. That’s it. That’s all the guidelines we got.
But if TiVo (or HP, or Dell, or Microsoft with Media Center PCs) want to get real penetration, they need to overcome the push-back consumers are getting from installers and cable operators. Fundamentally, they need to provide better resources to make the install successful.
.CALLOUT It’s not these specific suggestions. It’s the need to rethink the problem that’s important.
My installer spent hours working with his field office to get some settings changed to support my new CableCARD-equipped TiVo. They had to rely on complete guesswork, calling old buddies who once worked the job, and complete random chance. It would have been so much better if TiVo had provided, in the box, a detailed guide for installers. If the folks at TiVo had really done their homework, they could have provided prompts, telling the installer how to advise the back-office to set up the configuration properly.
But what else could a Flexible Enterprise have done?
How about pre-determining all of the back-office settings for all of the various cable providers? Then, when a TiVo owner running on, say, the Cox network was doing an install, TiVo would have very specific instructions for making the TiVo and the CableCARDs work on that specific network.
Or how about a CableCARD hotline? Here, the installer calls in and the TiVo hotline technician connects a three-way call to the cable provider back-office, guiding them through the setup.
Or how about localized training? TiVo and the other third-party suppliers could present free training seminars for each cable office around the country. It might be a little costly, but it could go a long way to prevent the push-back consumers are getting from the cable providers.
The thing is, it’s not these specific suggestions. It’s the need to rethink the problem that’s important.
One way to rethink the problem is to look at other industries and solutions for inspiration. What other industries might provide brain-food here? Is there another industry characterized by a centralized, high-cost, network-based infrastructure that needs to support outsider-provided nodes inter-operating with the network and yet needs to maintain both network security and reliability?
It just so happens there is: the cellular phone business. And in the cellular phone business, add-on devices are a booming market. Just one look at the over-hyped — but still a genuine phenom — iPhone will demonstrate the strength of aftermarket products in this market. In fact, there are cellular handsets of so many varieties, styles, feature sets, colors, and price points, the market is almost too big to keep track of, even by those of us whose job it is to do so.
It is an undeniably vibrant market. And the cellphone business is also going through major changes, from upgraded data speeds to Internet access to all the same technology drivers the cable TV industry is seeing.
Of course, the analogy is clear between the two industries. TiVo, Media Center PCs and other add-ons are to the cable companies as the iPhone, BlackBerry, and other handsets are to the cellular service providers.
There is no doubt there is stress between the handset providers and the cellular service providers. There’s mission conflict there as well. But although relationships between those two industries are somewhat strained, they have established close working relationships and those partnerships have created a booming market — plus they’re meeting the needs of their customers for variety and feature flexibility.
Perhaps the cable industry and the third-party set-top box providers could derive some inspiration from the cellular business. It might require some flexibility in thinking, policy, and technology — but that’s what any Flexible Enterprise will need to succeed, so it might be worth a shot.
.H1 Wrapping it up
Meanwhile, Denise and I are enjoying our new TiVo. We’re hoping nothing else breaks, at least for a few months.
Special thanks goes to TiVo Community members DancnDude, JYoung, etz, alyssa, acvthree, GoHokies!, jlb, ZeoTiVo, petew, classicsat, yunlin12, JJ, and Budget_HT for all their help and insights in preparing this article. You can read all their comments in the [[http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=397709|TiVo Community thread]] used as part of my research for this article.
.BEGIN_KEEP
Further special thanks go to the folks at Weaknees for getting my new, highly "upgraded" TiVo to me overnight, with hours to spare before the cable installer showed up. If you want to turbo-charge your TiVo, these are the guys to go to. I’ve bought a bunch of upgrades from them and been unfailingly satisfied.
And while I’m on the subject of thanking people, kudos go to TiVo for having reasonable tech support people who have a clue. I was actually able to call in and talk to a real person, who was able to research a difficult problem. With the sad way tech support is going these days, we here at Computing Unplugged believe it’s important to acknowledge companies when they provide quality service.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Visit [[http://www.tivo.com|TiVo]].
Visit [[http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/|TiVo Community Forum]].
Visit [[http://www.weaknees.com|Weaknees.com]].
Visit [[http://www.revision3.com|Revision3]].
Read the [[http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=397709|TiVo Community thread]] used to prepare this article.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.END_KEEP
