OK, on December 23rd I so a blog post (I read way too many blogs and listen to way too many podcasts) that said that Tivo was now offering to transfer lifetime membership from DirecTV Tivo’s to the new Tivo Series 3.? After talking to Kathy, she and I agreed that if I could get a certain price that this would be worth doing.
Part of this deal is that we have had a lot of issues with the Comcast PVR/DVR.? Some of the issues have been bugs and lack of stability.? Some of the issues have been UI complaints and usability complaints (or preferences if you want to be nice).
I understand that Tivo, as a company, needs to make money but I, as a customer, don’t like to have a perpetual bill so I prefer the lifetime subscription model.? I have purchased 5 Tivo units – 2 series 1 and then 3 DirecTV Tivo.? The 2 series 1 and 2 of the DirecTV have livetime subscriptions.
I still think that the price of $799 for the Tivo Series 3 (I got it for a little below $650 at Costco – also too high) is? just too high.? I think this price needs to be below $500 for sure and probably below $400 to really be widespread.
After hearing the news, I got on the phone with Tivo and verified the story and marked the person, date, time and even the fact that they verified it with a supervisor before I went and ordered it.? All was good.
The report from Tivo was that I could get buy the Tivo before 12/31 then I had 30 days to transfer my lifetime.
Of course the holidays got in the way and I didn’t get the Tivo S3 until 1/2.? I worked in parallel and had my Kathy call Tivo to get the lifetime transfer started and I ran to Comcast to get the cable cards before their office closed.
As I got out of the Comcast office with the 2 new cable cards, that began my bad news.? Kathy had spent a bunch of time on hold before talking with someone at Tivo who then told her that she would need to talk to DirecTV to get them to transfer the account (what? is this for real?).? DirecTV of course was insistent that this isn’t going to happen (well, duh?!?!)
I then had to contact 3 sets of people and spend over and hour on the phone when I got back home to get the right thing to happen at Tivo.? In the end, they did the right thing but they acted like it? was me who was getting something special when I was promised this up front.
Of course the madness didn’t end there and I got a call the next day because whoever took the account information didn’t put enough details in it.? I had to give them a bunch more and clarify some (directv info is separate from regular tivo info – as in different account with same name and address and such so they had to do some magic on their end that was confusing for the systems!).
In the end, it all worked out but wow that was a lot of work for something that should not have been.