TiVo's Late Adopter Penalty

Hello friends, and welcome to today's Grandpa Simpson rant!

So TiVo's next big thing has finally been announced.  The TiVo premiere will be shipping in April and is being touted as the one set top box you need to provide a way to get all kinds of content on your living room TV.  Cool!  I've been a proponent of using a TiVo as a multi-purpose media box for ages.  The current TiVO HD units have a lot of options for content besides cable programming, TiVo has just never done a great job of beating that drum. 

Now the company has started figuring out they should really get into the integration game and push that existing stuff (and some new) front-and-center.  Even better, there will be a real, honest-to-goodness HD interface.

Hooray! I'm sure some of these things will get pushed to the existing HD units since they have that capability, no more ugly stretched SD interface.

Wait... What's that? Oh, so the new platform has a lot more processing horsepower, and they're not going to be refreshing the UI on the HD units?  Sure, it's understandable, the thing uses Flash after all, that's not gonna cut it with the HD's geriatric computing power.  After all, the HD and Series 3 units have been around for years, time for them to go.

Based on the way TiVo has dropped support for the previous platform as soon as the next new and shiny platform comes up, this doesn't bode well for those of us sitting on Series 3 and HD units.  I can understand that, except for one small thing, I just bought a unit in December for Christmas, so I'm not over here like Grandpa refusing to give up my Windows 98 box and dial up modem because it hasn't caught on fire just yet.

Fine, my fault for not waiting, for being a late adopter and all.  My unit will keep working no harm no fail. 

As long as I keep paying TiVo that monthly fee.

Gee, no new features, no update to the UI that was pretty much a stop-gap to begin with, and I get to pay for that privilege?  Awesome!  It's like the mob is running things over there.  We're sorry we can't really give you new features, but you should pay up, we'd sure hate for something to happen to your ability to access your videos over the network or your season passes.

Sure, stuff gets obsoleted all the time, and someone has to get stuck with holding the bag on legacy hardware, but even Microsoft and Apple usually keep supporting a platform at least past the damn warranty expiration.

I'm still a fan of my TiVos, mostly because of the convergence, I can stream my DVD collection, or online content right along side of the stuff I record from old school TV.  So far there's not really much that can compete with it (HTPC maybe, but it's still a bigger pain in the ass, and has a way lower wife acceptance factor.)

More and more I become filled with dread over the prospect of getting a new TiVo.  First there's buying the unit, then the monthly service charge which eventually will be to pay for nothing other than to be able to use the thing.  And that's after the dreaded 7th ring of hell which is getting the cable company to figure out how the hell to make the stupid cable card work.

I'm thinking maybe it's time just to live with a so-so DVR experience paired with a second, internet-enabled set top box to get all the modern content.