Let's start with the very announcement itself. Sure they put out the press releases and had coverage on all the tech sites, but not a peep in email to a long-term customer. Barely a mention via their official Twitter account, except for some retweets of other coverage. Then finally a single post at around 12 noon EDT. Maybe there was something on Facebook, I stopped following them there because of the nearly negative signal-to-noise ratio.
Along with not giving any heads-up to paying customers, there is, of course, no incentive for existing customers either. Want a new box? Full price for everybody. No trade-in, no service discount, nothing. It's bad enough that the Series 3 box I have, with "lifetime" "service" hasn't received any significant software update in years.
And then there's the website. I logged in on tivo.com the other day, and I know I checked the box that said "keep me logged in for 45 days." But with the new hardware comes a new website, and not only am I not logged in, but that checkbox doesn't even appear. The new sign on screen has just two fields, email address and password. Since I've logged into tivo.com dozens of times in the past, I double-clicked in the email field so that Chrome could fill in the box for me. No dice. It's a different URL completely. OK then, I'll just type in the email. As soon as I type the first letter, an error message appears above the input field --
Invalid: This is not a valid e-mail.
Nice. That error message stays in place until I get to the "o" in ".com". Good to see that whoever programmed that completely unnecessary validation routine recognized a TLD other than com. For a company that's celebrated for the device UI, they sure bolloxed up that bit of user interaction.
I think I'll stick with my ancient TiVo HD and the even ancienter Series 2 DT in my bedroom, at least until all the early problems (and we know there will be problems) get worked out.
Don't even get me started on why only the base model offers an ATSC tuner. I'm sure there must be some reason, but I'm not interested enough to figure it out at this point.
