Planned Obsolescence of Tivo
Menu navigation on our Series 2 Tivo has been agonizingly slow for the last 3-6 months. My expectations are based on the actual performance of the Tivo for the first 2.5 years. But menu navigation has dragged since Tivo introduced - wait, imposed - advertising throughout the menus and in the deletion confirmation menu shown at the end of each recorded program. Each click on a menu item results in a 30-60 second wait for the next screen to be displayed. I think that navigating the Web on a 14.4 kbps modem would provide a better user experience than what our Tivo offers.
So, tonight I got around to calling Tivo Support to get some answers. First, our Tivo is connected to our home network using a wired Ethernet adapter so there's no chance of signal interference being an issue. Second, I've gone through the steps of forcing Tivo to reconnect to the service looking for an update, and have performed a power-cycle of the Tivo to make sure that memory leaks aren't at fault. Unfortunately, none of these helped. The support person who handled my call looked at all of these facts and said that the only thing I could do was "exchange" our Tivo appliance for another Series 2 model at a cost of $149. We purchased our Tivo for $50. How can Tivo justify the price of $149? I declined the exchange and informed the support person that they had been no help whatsoever, and that paying Tivo over $150 per year for simple television guide data is ridiculous.
I now have additional motivation to get MythTV or another open-source PVR system working. Tivo's business practices impose replacement of perfectly good hardware on their customers. I am nearly certain that the lag in our Tivo has been caused by recent system software upgrades forced by the Tivo company. Tivo has lost my support, and will soon lose me as a customer.