I love my Tivo, but I really do not understand how they are still in business as a company.

I agree with you. I think the only reason they are still in business is because of a patent judgment. Flushed them with cash for awhile. They are charging fees to other companies.

What do you think they need to do in order to stay in business (I never want to let them go)?

Become a subsidiary of apple, their product only available on a subset of apple models as a subscription?

TiVo is working to get the CableCard standard replaced with something better. TiVo has to stay in business long enough for the new standard to become viable, and it has to be good enough that people won't just give up and use bittorrent.

I think the only reason they are still in business is because of a patent judgment.

Oh right, I'd forgotten that.

I think they need to rethink their pricing model and start partnering with cable companies.

good enough that people won't just give up and use bittorrent

Do you think that torrenting could eat a significant part of their profits? I mean, most people are never going to torrent ever. And one of the reasons TiVo is attractive is because it lets you do less work. And it ends up on your TV. Again, for most people, getting a file that's on their computer to display on their TV is a fuss I can't see them bothering with.

I speak as someone who doesn't see one as a replacement for the other--I do both, each for different shows for different reasons.

I just need them to not go away. But if I need to pay $400 to get a lifetime service on a new TiVo, barring a windfall I'm not getting a new one until this one breaks, no matter the bells and whistles.

I was half joking about the bittorrent. But getting CableCards installed is a hassle that the cable companies make as difficult as possible, so most people give up and use the cable company's DVR instead.

Time Warner was irritatingly clueless when it came to the installation--they clearly had people who knew what they were doing, and others who were reading the installation steps for the first time in my apartment. You can imagine who I got the first time.

But, to their credit, they never suggested I get one of their DVRs. And I just kept asking for techs until the right guy showed up.

Given one of the main reasons I left the other apartment was that both Time Warner and the rental company disavowed responsibility for how weak the signal was, I am not messing around with TV. I want that how I want it.

But, good lord--Time Warner's training program is random as fuck. I make sure to ask each person who comes out what they did and why that was supposed to fix the problem, just to keep track. The *last* guy to come out disconnected the split that ran to a wall where I'd never had any device connected. And he said that should have been disconnected on day 1, since I was never going to have anything there, and just the split was going to compromise my signal.

I don't know if that's right--I just know it hadn't occurred to the four or five guys that had been there before him. A little consistency would be nice.

But for all the problems I've had, they've never been with the TiVo. But TiVo support has walked me through fixing some Time Warner stuff (yay, tuning adapter?). So I may dislike their sales model, but their support guys are okay by me.

I am frustrated by the interface and the scheduling algorithms, but I still want it forever and ever.

But getting CableCards installed is a hassle that the cable companies make as difficult as possible, so most people give up and use the cable company's DVR instead.

I know you're right, but my experiences with the Cablevision DVR were so terrible that they could have told me the CableCards had to be picked by hand out of a bowl of spiders and I still would have done it to be able to switch back to Tivo.