Tivo relaunch screws over faithful subscribers

For a long time I wanted a Tivo, and in December my wish came true when my boyfriend told me he had one stashed at home that he'd not set up and I could have it on long term loan if I wanted. It was a goodun, a series 1 with a Lifetime subscription. It took me a while to get it set up, partially due to discovering that not all telephone cables are created equal, but eventually I had it sitting there, dutifully switching over my Sky+ box and recording new TV on a whim.

It was everything I had hoped for, and I loved it. It's only been running for a month or so, and so it's not learnt a lot about me yet, but I don't know that it's worth teaching, now.

You'll notice I say I hooked it up to my Sky+ box, which may sound a little odd. After all, both Sky+ and the Tivo are set top boxes. Both contain hard drives and offer "series link" functionality. But the thing about Tivo, the killer application as far as I'm concerned, is the depth of its exploration. I can tell my Sky box to record stuff if I know it's on, and I can tell it to record every episode. It will do it in a higher quality and the disk has the capacity for much more content. What's missing, though, is the feedback loop. Tivo will run off and record things for me without my intervention, in a speculative "thought you might like this" kind of way. Then, and this is pretty damn cool, I get to say yay or nay. I hit a green thumbs-up button or a red thumbs-down from one to three times, and by doing so indicate my televisual preferences. Three thumbs down is "What the FUCK were you thinking?! Don't ever, EVER record this kind of shit for me again", while thumbs up compare the recording to sliced bread in a favourable manner. Tivo takes this information and uses it to guide its new choices of recordings.

Furthermore, I can set up the Tivo to record things according to a wishlist. I've asked it to record anything that is ever shown that contains the words "Thamesmead" or "larp" in its metadata. I've also told it to record any movie directed by David Fincher.

Sky+ doesn't even try to offer that kind of thing. And the stuff it does offer, the season links, for example, it doesn't do all that well. I set my Sky box to record House for me before Christmas. As American shows are wont to do, it then went on hiatus for a while. Sky+ has not recognised the second half of the season and hasn't recorded any of it. Tivo would have.

Tivo is relaunching in the UK, under the banner of Virgin. Now, I quite like the Virgin set top boxes as they were back in late 2009. The integrated iPlayer was excellent, and the interface was reasonably intuitive. It was still a bit dumb about recognising the rest of a series after a break, and it did need a reboot every now and then. I have no idea what, if any, innovation Virgin has seen since then, I moved house and the new area I'm in doesn't have Virgin. I assume, and hope, that the marrying of Virgin functionality with Tivo will be nicely put together. But I can't have it. Not in the short term. Not unless I move house.

I've been in touch with Virgin directly, asking when their cable service is likely to be available in my area. They told me they were going to do some costing and come back to me, although it could take up to 8 weeks. With the Christmas break, I gave them 10 weeks before chasing and then prodded the people who responded the first time around. They told me that my area is quite wide and would involve extensive work to cable. They don't know if they're going to do it, they're involved in a costing exercise that may take over a year to complete. So no cable imminent, then. And this is in Zone 4 of London. I'm less than 15 miles from the city, so what hope do people in villages have?

And this is why I was happy to put up with the setup I had, despite its foibles. Every so often Tivo interrupts me watching something to ask if it can turn over the Sky+ channel to record something it thought I might want. Until I changed the setup on the Sky box, I kept accidentally getting involved in recordings of shows, only to find that after 30 minutes it stopped and I was left with a still of the set top box going into power saving mode for the next 30 minutes. It's clunky, and it needs to use a phoneline to dial up for listings and it's not a large hard drive... but what Tivo does it does in a fantastic way. Until June.

Over the last couple of days the Tivo boxes have been collecting messages from base which apologise for the fact that they're going to brick the boxes in June, but encourage us to upgrade to the shiny new offering that Virgin have for us. There are even some kind of discount deals for those following the upgrade path. But for me? Me and all the other people using Tivo Series 1 because there is no real other option? Bye bye, nice knowing you!

It's made me wonder whether to continue my burgeoning relationship with the Tivo I have. Why teach it to never show me any bloody sport or say that yes, I think Buffy is great? It's going to do nothing come June that a basic video recorder in the 1980s couldn't.

The forums are awash with people discussing it. Many are pissed off about the approach, the sudden cut-off although they admit that given that support officially ends several years after it became impossible to purchase the Tivo product we've done pretty well out of it. There are questions over what PVR is the best fit to replace the Tivo. Well, for me there isn't one. Nothing does what Tivo did. I want the serendipity of discovering new content because a box in the corner of the room knows what I like. I like being able to give wide commands like "Record everything you find that has Stephen Fry in it".

Tivo have leapt into bed with Virgin and are working on an exclusive arrangement designed to promote both. There will be a new generation of Tivo subscribers who think it's new and innovative when they can issue those wide commands and let it get on with it. But for those of us outside the Virgin area? Too bad. Read the small print, when we said "lifetime" it never meant what you thought it meant, Tivo's off to play with its new friends.

Some of us are a bit sad about that.

If this then that

I've just discovered a forthcoming tool by the name of "If this, then that" which is all set to start connecting together the social networks that are pervading everyday life. It looks pretty cool and I've signed up to be part of the beta as soon as they send out new invitations. My primary reason is that I want a simple way of archiving my Twitter feed in perpetuity without annoying other people with it. One of the irritations of daily online activity is trying to follow one person across multiple sites as man duplicate the content across streams. This is made simple by some tools that will cross post to a blog, Twitter and Facebook all at once. The problem, though, is that followers on each network then try to engage with the original post and the conversation is fractured massively.

http://ifttt.com could just increase the noise in that regard, it looks like it's going to be able to set up some powerful interactions across the board, but I'm hoping that it will also be something that lets me play with data I create in interesting ways when I get a chance to do a bit of hacking. We'll see. I have to wait for my invitation to come through first, anyway.

Reflections on Social Media Camp 2009

Last year I went to Social Media Camp in April, and I wrote the bulk of this post directly thereafter. I was inspired to start up a blog but I was unfocused and didn't really have anything in particular that I wanted to write about. I also caught a very nasty illness which in retrospect I think was swine 'flu and the whole blogging thing never really took off. I'm going to kill off that quickly aborted attempt, but I'm importing the things that are worth saving, and this is one of them:

I've had Neil Crosby on various social media friends lists for a long time since way back when some of my Red Dwarf fan friends got friendly with the Buffy and Angel side of fandom, and although we've met in person a couple of times, we don't know each other well. All the same, when I saw him mention Social Media Camp on Twitter I thought it worth a look and immediately signed up for tickets which turned out to be in very short supply.

Social Media Camp is in the tradition of bar camps, which are get togethers for geeks, where a conference is effectively arranged on the spot once everyone is through the door. The BBC has sponsored a couple, and there have been various others that have looked interesting but I have a very full calendar when you divide it into the time I spend on conventions, larp and general socialising fare such as parties. I've never been available when the interesting things were happening until now.

Once signed up, nerves set in a tad. I knew I was meant to volunteer or present, but at all the conferences and work based talks I've been to, the person on the stage really knows their stuff, and has well prepared slides. So the whole idea of presenting didn't appeal, but neither did the idea of reneging on the deal. Right up until the night before I was considering pulling out, but in the end I turned up, Tweeting on the way to the effect that I was mildly nervous.

The venue was easy to find, and a great host to the event, but my vague idea of volunteering to help out melted away as I came in and was pointed at the badges, told it was a DIY affair, and directed downstairs for coffee (which I mostly don't drink). People were gathering and doing the meet and greet thing and I felt out of place, and sat myself down wondering how early it would be reasonable to run away back home.

And then people started to actually talk to me. Terence had already replied to my Tweet, noticing it via the hashtag of #smclondon, and told me to discard the nerves, it would be fine. Kat joined in with him, enthusing about how it would be fine to talk, don't be nervous, and just throw myself into it and enjoy. I signed up for the photographic scavenger hunt and relaxed.

In the end I wound up attending a talk in each slot, and even presenting one, entirely off the cuff, in a later slot. It was barely on topic, being about live action roleplay, but it was something I felt confident enough to describe and it seemed suitably geeky, if not quite linked to the "media" side of social media, and the handful of people who came to listen seemed to be engaged.

The venue was great, the talks were interesting, the food was lavish and free drinks abounded. Everyone I encountered was friendly and enthusiastic and perhaps the most uncomfortable experience was during one of the discussions where the younger members were put on the spot and confronted by people demanding to know "So what pisses you off? How do you feel about people marketing to you? How should we be doing it?" and so on. Sure, they put themselves on the spot and invited it, but it felt uncomfortably confrontational to me. The highlight talk for me was Terence Eden's talk about working with porn, although I'd expected something a little different from the description, somehow I'd expected it to be more about how porn dominates the internet and how no social media site or application can escape it, and how best to deal with that fact. But it was fascinating and well presented.

It was interesting to note that I seemed to inhabit an overlapping but different social media network corner, and some of the things I mentioned such as audioboo were exotic and barely known to others, while they had shared knowledge of blogs I was unaware of. I like that narrow overlap, though, it invites a wider range of conversation and sharing.

It was a really good day and I definitely intend to sign up for more things along those lines in future, where my calendar and finances allow. Kudos to Vero for pulling it all together.

People:

Vero: http://www.thatcanadiangirl.co.uk/
Terence: http://shkspr.mobi/blog/
Kat: http://www.safetygoat.co.uk/blog/