Thoughts on the new pricing plans

The new plans are for an 80 hour Series2. I wonder if they’re going to standardize on the 80-hour only, or if you could get a 40 hour for less, or a 140 for more?

These new prices encourage two things:
- Signing up for longer periods
- Pre-paying instead of paying monthly

If you pre-pay, you save a bit over paying monthly. The longer you commit to, the less it costs per month. Prepay for a year and save $15.40, two years and save $85.80, three years and save $141.20 compared to the monthly fees. From past conference calls, fewer than 20% of TiVo subscribers opted for lifetime. And that was on a downward trend, especially since they introduced multi-unit discounts. So this isn’t going to be a big deal for the overwhelming majority of users. And they did test pricing like this last fall, with a great deal of success. One thing that isn’t clear, yet, is if you can upgrade. Say you activate with the one-year plan, decide you really like it, and what to upgrade to the three-year plan. I’d think TiVo would want to encourage that kind of thing, locking users in, but we’ll see.

I am sorry to see it go away myself, since I’d prefer to pay once and never again – and have the equity in the box for resale. But I can understand that the demand isn’t sufficient, and the old lifetime pricing was too low for TiVo. Hey, TiVo, how about $549-$599 for the box and lifetime? :-)

Thomas Hawk also has a summary of the conference call.

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MegaZone is the Editor of Gizmo Lovers and the chief contributor. He's been online since 1989 and active in several generations of 'social media' - mailing lists, USENet groups, web forums, and since 2003, blogging.    MegaZone has a presence on several social platforms: Google+ / Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / LiveJournal / Web.    You can also follow Gizmo Lovers on other sites: Blog / Google+ / Facebook / Twitter.
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