TiVo Needs to Ship a Dual-Tuner DVR Before It is Too Late And Their New Corporate Blog Needs Work

TiVoBlog.com, When Are We Going To Get A Dual-Tuner DVR?: From TiVoBlog: “Not currently having a dual-tuner is TiVo’s biggest drawback. For me personally it doesn’t matter because most of the shows that I record are on at a different time however, I’ve seen a couple of instances when I wanted to record two live events at the same time. Under these circumstances, I was forced to pick one show over the other”

Two things.

1. Alex is absolutely right. Not having a dual tuner standalone TV is perhaps the biggest mistake TiVo has ever made. They’ve used all kinds of development efforts on things like TiVo2Go etc., which are nice, but having a dual tuner product trumps anything else that they could be working on right now except perhaps HDTV.

The thing is, it’s just not that hard to do. Sure, there’s the cost of adding in a second tuner, but people will in fact pay extra for this. It is unbelieveable to me that TiVo has let everyone else ship dual (even quad) tuners while they lag behind on this.

I’m hoping that the dual tuner CableCARD box is in fact going to remedy this and will actually ship in Q1 2006 as Alex suggests. Not to rain on the parade or anything though Alex, but Dave Zatz spoke with the TiVo folks a little while back and suggested that we may be looking mid-year now instead of Q1.

2. TiVo should hire Alex to do their official blog instead of this Nova woman. I was going to wait to write a TiVo Blog sucks article (give them a month and all) but what the hell, maybe I’ll write one then as well. There has been no interesting news out on TiVo on it whatsover. Only a “welcome” message and a lame post about which cancelled series people at TiVo would like to see brought back.

The thing’s been around almost two weeks now and we only get two lousy posts with nothing of substance. Step it up there TiVo. During the same two weeks, Alex posted on: TVHarmony Updates AutoPilot (Tivo2PSP, Tivo2iPod, Tivo2Palm, Tivo2AVI, and Tivo2MPEG), TiVo HME App, Galleon 1.8 Released, Dave Zatz Dissects TiVo 7.2.1, More On Converting DVDs For Playback On Your TiVo, etc.

Further, it sucks that you moderate your comments. While I can understand a corporate blog moderating their comments, I left you a comment saying welcome (and also noting that your RSS feeds are broken) on day one and you’ve never published it. Of course all of the comments that you did publish are these half baked “TiVo Rocks” type comments. How can I ever expect to take you seriously if you only print your fan mail? You may as well take your comments down if you are going to censor them. You are not fooling anyone. Oh and by the way, your RSS feeds are still broken. But perhaps you don’t care about a little thing like people subscribing to your blog.

In any event. Sorry for the rant and maybe Alex isn’t available to do your corporate blog, but I’ll take his “unofficial” TiVo blog over your blog any day. So far you’ve only shown me what a corporate blog shouldn’t be all about: infrequent posting (even on real news like the HME release), comment censorship, and a ra ra fan club for corporate filtered nonesense instead of a serious place for your customers to talk about your product or you to share information about your future direction.

You’re blogging about the fact that someone named their “cat” TiVo, while over at PVRBlog they are blogging about the fact that you’ve now added overlap protection. Okie dookie.

At least Alex’s blog comes up first on Google when I search “TiVo blog.”