New Tivo pricing vs 622

[Tom Bombadil]

The new Tivo3 units have nice capabilities, but at shockingly high prices.

The standard 300 hour unit has a 250GB drive and sells for $779! Contrast to the 622 selling at $499.

Then the next step up, which I believe is the same unit except it has an additional 250GB of storage, is $1199! $420 for an extra 250GB! What a terrible price. Oh, and they extend the paltry 90-day warranty to 1 year. Geez Louise, the $779 piece only gets a 90-day warranty???

Finally there is the top of the line unit, with a mouth-watering 750GB drive, said to store up to 100 hours of HD, for $1399.

So to go from 250GB to 750GB of disk space, costs $620!!!

This could be bad news for us who are hoping for a cheap USB external storage option. Dish is going to see these prices and think that a 500GB external drive for $499 is a good price.

Likewise the DirecTV-TIVO units are also very pricey.

The HR10-250 with upgrade to 103 hours of HD is $1449.

They offer one with two 750GB drives, for 200 hours of HD recording capacity, for $1999.

I like having that many options, but the prices are staggering.

 

[kb7oeb]

They also redid their price plan, the series 3 is now more expensive than it was when it was introduced.

The exception to that is they have a promo were you can prepay 3 years of service for $300 (about $8.34 a month). If you go monthly its now $19.99 a month instead of the $12.95 a month it was.

I think tivo is nuts rights now, the series 3 is over priced as is and to top it off they jacked up the monthy fee.

You can upgrade the hard drive yourself so I wouldn't hold those drive upgrade prices against tivo. Once you upgrade you can put the 250GB drive in your computer.

 

[Tom Bombadil]

More news on Tivo

- Analysts are expecting Tivo to declare a quarterly loss of $38M.

- Tivo subscriber growth is flat. They now have 4.4M subs, but picked up only 16,000 new subs in the last quarter.

But the Tivo CEO is still claiming the company's future is bright.

 

[David Dietzel]

Tivo is in the process of being destroyed by management as a mainstream service. They seem to be building a service that is geared toward higher income consumers. The number of people out there who will pay through the nose for their time shifting service is relatively small. That small base will likely not be enough to support the company as a viable enterprise over the long haul.

What this means is that Dish management is smiling widely as new subscribers looking for affordable time shifting will flock to Dish, especially considering the fact that Dish presently is the leader in HD content and HDTVs are flying off the shelves.

So, Dish, smile and be happy and the world will smile with you.

Just get new marketing and product development leadership and you'll be on the cover of Forbes.