More delays for the new DirecTiVo?

This is what, the fourth release date?  What makes this one any more credible than late 2009?  Or late 2010?  Or early 2011?  At this point I really have trouble putting any faith into any date they announce.  Now it is “I’ll believe it when it ships.”

There really isn’t much change in the feature set from what was previously announced.  The ‘integrated search across TV and VOD’ replaced ‘Universal Swivel Search’ in the description.  That *could* mean they’ve switched to the new UI, which has that feature on the Premiere, or it could just be the ‘TiVo Search’ HME-based interface.

Since KidZone is only available in the SD UI today, the fact it is called out is actually not encouraging for the HD UI.

DirecTV DVR Scheduler is a new item that I don’t think was specifically mentioned before, but it isn’t surprising.

But, in the end, nothing they list matters if the box doesn’t actually ship someday.

I was sure we’d have a summer announcement… until I read about the new language on Investor Village. Not in production yet? Optimistic? Perhaps they should just abort like the Comcast TiVo. Probably cheaper, long term, for DTV to just license TiVo IP and be done with it.

Can you provide a link to this contract? I searched for it but didn’t find anything but a couple of references to it with no links.

Either way, any contract from 2008 may not be the contract in place today. It is routine for companies to renegotiate contracts, especially if there is a delay or a change in requirements. Any terms from the original contract may bear no resemblance to the current contract. I’ve seen that first hand through my job, especially on long projects. Sometimes the final contract is unrecognizable from the first. The new DirecTiVo has been delayed so long I’d actually be surprised if they were still working from the original terms.

As for the other things you’ve cited – the Comcast & Cox OCAP software development is generally believed to have failed not due to problems from TiVo, but issues with the power available in the existing STBs that it was running on. Performance was never good running the native OS, the pre-OCAP middleware on top of that, and then the TiVo application on top of that. Not to mention delays in getting the head end updates done that were required to deploy the boxes. Remember Comcast was supposed to have OCAP fully deployed by July, 2010 – it is July, 2011 and there is no sign they’re even proceeding let alone near completion. The ‘soft-TiVo’ was dependent on the cable MSOs updating their infrastructure to support OCAP to use the software deployment mechanisms, handle two-way communication, etc. When that stalled the soft-TiVo was already pretty much doomed.

Your claim that ‘every TiVo production[sic] has been deleted[sic] incredibly’ (I presume you mean every TiVo product has been delayed) doesn’t hold up. The Premiere shipped when they said it would. I won’t argue that it had issues – it certainly did, and still has some – but they shipped what they said they’d ship, when they said they’d ship it. The Virgin Media TiVo has been a huge success. They delivered MSO hardware to RCN & Suddenlink as planned. They’ve developed the Premiere Elite and Preview and had stated they will ship to MSOs later this year – retail is still up in the air, waiting on the FCC.

I don’t know about software updates ‘trickling’ out – TiVo has long had a pattern of one or two major software updates a year, with a couple of minor updates in between. If anything they’ve pushed more updates since the Premiere launched than they did with prior products. I do think that’s partly to deal with issues the Premiere has had, but I definitely would not call it a trickle.

There’s no argument that DirecTV has improved their products – that’s to be expected. I would not say they’ve pulled ahead of TiVo though. They still lack some basic DVR features that TiVo has, and nearly all of the networking and OTT features.

Your claim that Tivo is ‘completely hacked and insecure’ is weak as well. You forget that the DRM on TiVoToGo transfers – reverse engineered or not – was approved. And there are other options DirecTV could use – like DTCP-IP. Just about every DRM system has been cracked – DVD CSS, Blu-ray AACS, iTunes FairPlay, etc. That’s a strawman argument. Even TTG doesn’t allow transfers of content if it is flagged to disallow it, and I’m not aware of any hack to get around that. The current TiVo platform has comparable security to other equivalent CE devices. They had to do so to get their deals with the likes of Netflix and Hulu.

It isn’t ‘DirecTV HW’ – it is Technicolor HW. DirecTV isn’t designing or producing the HW. We’ve never officially been told what the HW will be. There have been rumors, such as that it would be similar to the HR22, but nothing official. Even if HR22 HW was used in testing, it may not be the final box, I’ve seen that before. Or HR22 chassis could be used with new internals – I’ve seen that as well. Or it could be that the original HW, for 2009, was based on the then-recent HR22 but things have changed.

But no matter what you say, in the end it is a DirecTV product. The original DirecTiVo is also considered a DirecTV product – by both DirecTV and TiVo. The Pioneer, Toshiba, and Humax units that used TiVo software were not TiVo products – they were products of their respective vendors. Yes, they carry TiVo branding – but a Dell PC is not an Intel product just because it says ‘Intel Inside’. Or a MS product because it runs Windows. Or a Western Digital product because it uses their hard drive. Get the point?

TiVo is a component vendor and contractor to DirecTV. The component they’re providing is the software, and they’re contracted to do the integration with the hardware. The new box has less TiVo content than the old units – the old units were designed on TiVo reference platforms.

But lets put all of this aside and say you’re right, they’re working from the 2008 contract with no modifications. DirecTV basically hands TiVo an existing box and says “put your software on this, and this is what we want it to do”, and sends them on their way. And all DirecTV is doing is QA and final approval. They could still drag it out by delaying payments, unless payment schedules were dictated. (Of course, this is presuming they’re sticking with the contract, remember – in the real world they could do it by renegotiating the schedule anyway.)

Or they could be unrealistic in QA. Every product has bugs. Everything. They could drag out testing to be ‘extra thorough’, and then pick nits, sending the software back to be reworked. Of course, you’d have to be a bit conspiracy minded to think that they’d do this – but some people believe they’ve doing exactly this to burn time to see how TiVo’s legal battles play out. And now to wait for the poison pill to expire later this year. If TiVo is about be to acquired, potentially by a competitor to DirecTV, it might give them an out in the contract. Say EchoStar acquired TiVo, for example.

I don’t know that I buy into these theories, but they’re within the realm of possibility. I’ve seen some bizarre things during my career.

Personally I don’t think the 2008 contract is still in force. I think the terms have been changed as well as the product specifications. I flat out do not believe that it would take TiVo over three years to integrate their software with the existing HW, unless the HW had some serious limitations that blocked them, or there were other, external, factors holding them back. They were able to port the TIVo software to the Cisco platform and have it deployed to customers in just over a year. The deal was announced in November 2009, and it deployed to customers in January, 2011. And the Virgin Media box is more advanced that what the rumors report the new DirecTiVo to be.

I think it is most likely that, given the long delays, they decided to scrap the original product and try again with an updated box. At least I’m hopeful that’s the reason – TiVo did announce an independent deal with Technicolor to develop advanced DVR solutions in May of 2010. Perhaps that’s feeding into the new DirecTivo effort as well.

In the end this is all speculation, of course. None of us knows the facts – and the people who do are under NDA and unlikely to share them in public. I’m just going on the bits I’ve heard through the grapevine, the rumors I’ve read, and my experience. I could well be completely wrong. You could be right. We could both be wrong and the conspiracy theorists right. Only time will tell.