Hybrid TV CEO Robbee Minicola Explains TiVo Australia Maintenance

OK, first of all I should say that I can’t prove it is actually the Robbee Minicola, CEO of Hybrid TV Services, but that’s the claim. I do know the comment came from an IP address (192.148.117.103) handled by Telstra in Australia. And I just tossed a Twitter @ message her way to seek confirmaion; I’ll update if I get a response either way. (Or maybe she’ll see this post as well and contact me.)

---

EDIT: Robbee responded in a comment here as well as via Twitter. And, again, the IPs are via Telstra in Australia. It’s a nice change having a company responding to posts, let alone from the CEO level.

---

So, anyway, last Saturday I posted about Hybrid TV Services warning ANZ TiVo customers that there would be a week of sporadic outages as they worked to upgrade their IT infrastructure. As you may know, I cross-post TiVo-related posts from this blog to the TiVo Lovers LiveJournal Community, which I also run. (And, in fact, originally gave rise to this blog as TiVoLovers.com.) On Wednesday the following comment was left on that LJ post:

hey zonereyrie

coupla things to note … you can buy a TiVo and activate it just not during certain daytime hours. so you can certainly activate at night – which 80% of our new customers do which is why we are carrying out the maintenance in the daytime and on weekdays

also – you are right, it’s a heck of a lot of time to bolster the service for our increased customer base – but the other thing we are doing is switching our network provider which caused a load of IP changes across TiVo and CASPA – so we opted to do the lot in one hit seeing as we brought people from TiVo in the US and people from Ericsson overseas to do the upgrade work

my sincere apologies for the hassle – but it does mean we are solid going forward.

cheers
Robbee Minicola
CEO
hybrid tv

The comment was left by someone not logged into LJ, so I only have the IP address, no email, etc. Now, it does seem a bit unusual for a CEO to be commenting on an LJ post, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen such a thing. Especially with smaller companies, and Hybrid is fairly small. Same goes for the fairly informal language, I’ve had past exchanges with other C-level execs that were equally informal. And the information provided makes sense. I could certainly see Robbee, or someone at Hybrid, having an automated search running looking for any mentions of Hybrid and/or TiVo, and/or monitoring known TiVo user communities. (I have several such automated searches setup to help alert me to news for the site, as well as flag mentions of the site elsewhere.) And I’m not surprised that the LJ post would come up before this site did – given the hiatus I lost a bit of Page Rank. And the comment does echo an update I found on an iGadget Report article about the outage:

Update: Minicola says the times chosen for the maintenance were selected because they will have the “least impact” on the majority of customers.

We chose those dates/times because we knew they would have the least impact as the majority of our new customers install and activate their new TiVo at night or on weekends and they will not suffer from this maintenance work.

As for our existing customers, their TiVo will function perfectly as per usual during our maintenance – just CASPA goes offline and again that is only during the daytime which has proven to be the lowest usage period.

So we chose these days/times specifically with our customers needs and habits in mind.

So while I wouldn’t swear to it without confirmation, I think this probably is the real Robbee Minicola, CEO of Hybrid TV Services. And, if so, I think it is pretty darn cool that she responded to a post out in the community.

(And yes, I’m ‘zonereyrie’ on LJ. I just barely missed snagging ‘megazone’ for my username, it having been grabbed for a community – ironically, given the subject of this post, out of Australia. Said community has been defunct for nearly seven years now, but the name is still tied up.)