The history of consumer electronics is full of confounding devices. Apple Newton, anybody?
But few have offered more befuddlement than the TiVo box, the VCR-size piece of equipment that in theory was going to start a television revolution but in practice has been unable to draw enough of a crowd to earn even a disturbing-the-peace citation.
The digital video recorder and its rivals were supposed to free the television viewer from the tyranny of the network schedule because it, with minimal bother, records programs to a hard drive for instant call-up and playback. Early TiVo ads showed a television network executive being tossed out a window.
And it was going to — those same executives and their counterparts in advertising feared — kill the TV business model because it lets viewers touch a button and zip past the commercials that pay for all those “Friends” star salaries.
To accommodate its time-shifting, time-saving, ad-spurning wonders, everything about TV as we know it was going to have to change.
Well, so far, so bad.
TV business model: basically status quo. Network programmers still working their scheduling, um, magic, and from comfortable indoor seats. Average Americans seemingly as uninterested in this revolution as one in, say, Upper Volta.
Overthrow of the old regime postponed, at minimum. Revolution not televised. Specter of Betamax invoked.
Three years after their introduction, the TiVo brand digital video recorder (DVR) and its rivals are in only about 1 percent of American homes, fewer than, a recent headline said, have outhouses.
And confusion about what it is and how to make it work, many think, is the leading reason. “When they get a TiVo so Anna Nicole Smith can hook it up, then we’re talking business,” says Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television. “Once it’s hooked up, TiVo is made for people like Anna Nicole.”
Yes, the references that make you think a pop-culture tipping point may be near are starting to come. This television season, two comedies, HBO’s “The Mind of the Married Man” and CBS’ “The King of Queens,” have made a nearly identical joke involving TiVo, which uses programs you have told it to record to determine other programs to record for you. In each, the main character complained, in essence, that “My TiVo thinks I’m gay.”
“It’s extraordinary, the impact it’s had in the culture considering that you have roughly 500,000 people who have this thing,” says Phillip Swann, president of Tvpredictions.com, a California firm that analyzes new television technology.
But even after such references — even in this Christmas selling season with new DVR/DVD combos on the market with lower prices, second-generation products and the companies hinting that this may finally be the year — the shiny new boxes from TiVo and chief rival ReplayTV sit on store shelves almost like afterthoughts, displayed amid a confusing clutter of devices mostly having to do with beaming down satellite TV.
What’s most surprising about this national shoulder shrug is that, when you can actually get a TiVo or ReplayTV unit up and working in someone’s home, the user tends to become not just an enthusiast but a fanatic.
“They become almost religious zealots,” Swann says. “If I write even one slightly negative thing about TiVo, they write to me like I come from Lucifer. It’s very much like the Apple [computer] crowd.”
Difficult to figure out
Theories on what’s taking so long will follow. But a hint comes from Syracuse’s ever quotable Thompson: “We’re a society obsessed with new technology, but we’re also a society that’s completely unwilling to read an instruction book.”
And many, it must be said, argue that it’s taking a long time only in comparison to expectations that were set unrealistically high because the products’ promise was so immediately clear to people who follow television.
“If our customers didn’t absolutely love these things, I might be more concerned,” says Brodie Keast, general manager of the TiVo service, which expects to have its first quarter in the black at the end of this year.
But first comes the DVR lesson, mandatory in any such story. I will try to explain the fervor with as much dispassion as I, nearly as wild-eyed as the rest, can muster.
A DVR is, essentially, a dedicated personal computer. It contains a hard drive for recording and for running the recording software, a modem for dialing up the company’s listing service and downloading an up-to-date TV schedule, and assorted encoders and other electronics that allow it to work with a video signal coming in and to put pictures back out to your TV.
They cost, now, as little as $200 but more typically about $250 for a box with 40-hour recording capabilities, adding about $50 for each extra 20 hours. Plus, there’s a subscription fee for the listing service of either $10 monthly (ReplayTV), $13 monthly (TiVo) or $250 lifetime (both).
According to an amalgam of various estimates, TiVos are in more than 500,000 homes, in somewhere between a third to a half of them as a combination device with DirecTV satellite receivers. Replay units are in maybe 100,000, all as stand-alone devices. And then another 600,000 or more homes have generic DVRs that are combined with Dish Network satellite television receivers, for a total of between 1.2 million and possibly up to 1.5 million. This all means, somewhat ironically, that the biggest DVR company in America may not be TiVo, the Kleenex and Xerox of the product category, or ReplayTV, but EchoStar, owner of Dish.
Life without — unimaginable
Over more than a year, I have tested both TiVo and ReplayTV models, using the Replay regularly because it’s got a few extra features and a more straightforward command system.
I cannot imagine television life without one of these devices. People in the industry like to cite a survey in which users say they would rather give up their microwave ovens than their digital video recorders. I would throw in the toaster oven, both waffle makers and even, if pressed, my beloved surround-sound speaker system.
The essential attraction is that watching television becomes much more precise, much more efficient, much less inchoate. It’s the end of channel surfing and its frustrations. With a DVR, you’ve got the things you think are good — the latest “Sopranos,” a “Scrubs,” the steamy Animal Planet study of koala mating habits — stored on the hard disk, ready to be summoned up. Give Bruce Springsteen a TiVo and his song about 57 channels becomes a celebration of them.
“It’s like the first dishwasher you get,” says Syracuse’s Thompson. “You can never go back.”
So what’s the holdup?
Talk to experts in the field, and it comes down to several factors.
The first is understanding. A DVR’s function is complex, unlike the dirt-simple DVD machines, the rapid acceptance rate of which has been held up, unfairly, as proof of DVR’s comparative market failure. A DVR is a paradigm shifter, not a movie player, argue its proponents.
Yes, you can label DVRs with the common “VCR on steroids” description, and that would help foster understanding if most people actually used all the features of their VCRs. But — insert blinking 12:00 here — only 20 percent often or very often use VCRs to record, and 56 percent never do, according to a recent survey. A VCR is in almost every home now, but only to serve, as the TiVo executive put it, “as a Blockbuster playback device.”
And the DVR remains more complicated to set up than, say, a DVD player. It needs, for instance, a phone line so that the modem can update the listings late every night. It’s not hard to do when you — key phrase, here — read the manual, but setup is more painstaking than, say, making toast.
“The best summary of TiVo I’ve heard was from a young woman who said, `Oh, I really love it now, but it was in the box for most of the time'” after being purchased, says Thompson.
Then her boyfriend hooked it up.
“If TiVo in its current form is going to become the revolution, it’s going to have to put a boyfriend in every box,” Thompson says.
The second, and probably biggest, factor is price. Even if you can conjure up the benefits of better TV management, the cheapest early editions of the machines were $400 or $500 plus the monthly fee for the necessary listings service.
Now, Nikhil Balram, vice president of connected home products for SonicBlue, which makes ReplayTV, says hopefully, people say, “`OK, this is $249. I pay $9.95 monthly. What’s the harm in trying it?’ In the past, when it was $700, the consumer says, `I don’t even want to like it because I can’t afford it.'”
Swann, of tvpredictions.com, adds that “you’re starting to see both satellite and the cable industry starting to add digital recording technology” to their channel-selection boxes, which would also mean a cable guy to hook it up. “That’s ultimately the holy grail of the DVR industry. This thing has to be easier to have consumers bring it into their homes.”
The third inhibiting factor has been the reluctance of many people to add another device to their stack of electronics. This is part of the ongoing debate over what TiVo actually is.
“The bottom line, no matter how you look at it, it’s not a stand-alone product,” says Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst of Leichtman Research Group, a broadband media analysis firm in New Hampshire. “That’s what consumers have said for three years. We have empirical evidence,” including not only the sales figures but his calculation that some two-thirds of the current DVRs in homes are not standalone devices but combined with a satellite receiver. (That’s also where the best bargains have been, as satellite companies use the DVRs as an enticement to sell their service.)
The control factor
Leichtman wonders, simply, how much control most Americans really want over their TVs. A survey of 1,200 households Leichtman Research Group conducted found that 60 percent had, at best, only mild interest (1 to 3 on a scale of 10) in DVRs after the questioner described how they work, and certainly not when there was both purchase cost and a monthly fee.
“It’s not a product, it’s a feature,” he says.
His company, earlier this year, issued a report titled “DVRs — Next Big Thing or Betamax.”
The conclusion was somewhere in between. Leichtman projects that DVRs will be in about 15 million of the nation’s roughly 100 million homes by 2007. That’s nothing compared with more bullish projections of 47 million homes by then, but it’s not Betamax either.
In the retail world, there seems to be more optimism. For the first time almost since their introduction back in early 1999, you can find TiVo and ReplayTV units side-by-side on shelves in most major retailers.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a category that’s going to be here to stay,” says Philip Hannon, general manager of the big Abt Electronics in Glenview.
A Best Buy spokesman was similarly optimistic, citing the new pricing and TiVo’s efforts to simplify hookup, which have helped bring return rates down from the high end of product categories to in line with consumer-electronics averages, according to TiVo.
Still, even if sales are coming, TiVo’s Keast complains that, “It seems to me there’s entirely too much debate on why isn’t this growing faster and not enough on what is this going to mean to consumers.”
Given that there is so much question about widespread acceptance, it may be premature to even talk about the potential impact, except for the fact that it is so enormous.
At its most extreme, TV executives imagine a world where commercials-as-we-know-them are rendered ineffective, zipped and zapped past like so many dialogue scenes in porn movies.
“Don’t think for a moment that there is a free lunch somewhere involved in this,” Jamie Kellner, the head of Turner Broadcasting Systems, including CNN and the WB, told TV writers during the summer. He has predicted that television a decade down the road might come with a $250 annual fee, and that there will be less original programming developed if ads can’t be made to pay for it.
Many advertisers are similarly worried, although the general view seems to be that advertising will always find a way to exist. Predictions range from television programs going back to the 1950s model of sponsorship to more aggressive product placement, as has been seen in programs such as “Survivor.”
The results of Kellner’s arguments, says Swann of tvpredictions.com, have shown up in TiVo opting not, for instance, to add ReplayTV’s popular 30-second skip feature or its newer total commercial skip.
“There’s a line in the sand out there somewhere that we all need to be aware of,” says Keast, of TiVo. “We want to have inclusive business practices, not trash others’ business, all while not leaning into a left hook and inviting litigation.”
And, again, he says, such talk misses the big picture: “The balance of power is shifting right now from networks and studio content providers and towards consumers. This probably does mean the most significant change in TV ever, and that can be both scary and inspiring.”
But the revolution for now, like a program watched through TiVo while its owner takes a bathroom break, is on pause.
Four ways DVR technology changes your TV life
It records your favorite shows, without worries (most of the time):
It’s 9:10 p.m. on a Wednesday; you get home 10 minutes late for “The West Wing.” Is the VCR set? Is the TV on the right channel? Did you remember to put in a new tape? You used to have these worries. Now you don’t, because you have a digital video recorder (DVR), such as TiVo, ReplayTV or another type. You told your DVR box a few months ago that you love “West Wing,” so it’s recording the show right now. And because these recorders don’t use tape — all the information is stored to a rewritable computer hard drive — you don’t have to wait for the show to finish recording to watch it. You can start from the beginning right now. Though that’s not to say the system is perfect. DVRs follow the TV listings to the letter — so when a show runs long and bumps another (like when NFL games bump “60 Minutes” on Sunday nights), it won’t know to start recording later.
It finds your favorite stars and movies:
Guest-starring on “West Wing” this night is Christian Slater. You might think (though we’d understand if you didn’t), “Gosh, I forgot how much I like him. Wasn’t he in `True Romance’? I’d love to see that again.” Sure, you could run to Blockbuster and plunk down $3.99 for the rental. Or you could desperately comb the TV listings to find it. You don’t need to do either; DVRs can find the movie for you. Each week it downloads your TV listings and makes them easily searchable. Finding out when Christian Slater is on is as easy as spelling his last name. It turns out “True Romance” is on USA later this month; press one button and consider it recorded. No muss, no fuss. If it turns out you really, really love Christian Slater, you can also tell your DVR to record anything he’s in, whenever it comes on. Yes, even “Jimmy Hollywood.”
It pauses, rewinds and slow-motions live television:
A few nights later you’re watching the Bears on “Monday Night Football.” They’re driving down the field and look ready to score when, lo and behold, the phone rings. Sure, you could screen the call. But, come on, it’s Grandma! And she has just baked cookies! With a DVR, you can pause the game and come back to it. When you finish with your phone call (or bathroom break, or food run or whatever), pick the game up right where you left off. When the refs seemingly blow another call, rewind and do your own slow-motion replay to prove it — as many times as you want and without John Madden’s Telestrator messing everything up.
It samples shows you never thought you’d try:
Later on, after the Bears find a way to lose another one, you’ll need to relieve your sorrow. Why not try something new? A DVR keeps track of the shows you record and makes suggestions based on the ones you like (there are “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons on your remote for giving your preferences). Let’s say you set your DVR to record a certain NBC Thursday-night comedy about young, attractive urbanites living through comedic situations. It will find other shows like it — say, “Coupling,” airing on BBC America — and suggest them to you. It’s like having your own TV critic, without all that nasty reading.
— Jason McKean
