Morons.

Wow, and now it crashed back to live TV without ever even getting into the new feature.

Crap job Tivo.

UPDATE:  I ranted some with the VP of Product Marketing at Tivo.  He claims the craptacular results are the result of unrelated network issues.  The fact that no one on his dev or QA teams thought of the test case for “network failure at Tivo HQ” doesn’t impress me.  I pointed out that Tivo-of-today doesn’t do things to make customer life easier, they do it because someone paid them to.  Like  skipping a 3-thumbs-up program, in favor of recording some mid-season replacement crap pilot, on a network without a single show I’ve ever given a single thumbs up to.  If he thinks I should try it out, that’s almost a guarantee that it’s not worth my time.

I upgraded to a series 2 a while back; the two tuners were just an un-ignorable temptation.

When they offered me a tivoHD with lifetime contract, I jumped for it.

Oh how I reget that decision so far.  Let me count the ways. or woes. whichever…..

1.  TivoHD is crippled until you install a cable card.  literally 90% of the functionality you’ve come to enjoy, like remote viewing, tivoToGo, rhapsodpy music…none of it is even visible to you until you install your cable card, and nothing in the documentation warns about this.  I spent the first 26 hours after receipt wondering what horrible mistake I had made.

2.  TivoHD’s cablecard installation instructions are worthless.  They leave out many important details…really any sort of detail, about the setup process.  Comcast cable does NOT come out to install the cable card, and will deliberately mislead you as to what you have to do to get the card working.  Turns out, no matter what lies the rep at comcast tells you, once you’ve installed the card, you still have to call comcast, wait thru their stupid auto-menu, then another 10-50 mins of waiting for the card to ‘activate’.  Don’t bother trying the test-channels menu option, it doesn’t actually work.  It’ will make you think most of your channels aren’t there, but they are, just fine, once you finish setup.

3.  TivoHD acts broken the first 26+ hours.  You go thru their silly rigmarole to activate the lifetime subscription, and the first thing you’ll notice is that the name you gave the tivo during activation doesn’t take.  At least not so far.  Second is that 90% of the primary Tivo menu is missing until a cable card is installed, even though things like TivoToGo and Rhapsody music have NOTHING to do with the cable card.

So far, I hate my Tivo HD, and wish I’d never been suckered into believing Tivo was anything but slime.  At least I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for this suckage.  Oh yeah, big anti-props to tivo for requiring a phone call to turn off my old, no longer to be used, tivo 2′s month to month subscription.  Talk about slimy behavior…you have no problem setting up the monthly account without a phone call.

Guess it’s time to start making sure I waste way more of their phone support’s time, than my lifetime subscription will ever cost.  This I swear to you, as long as you deliberately mislead your customers, I will make sure that my lifetime subscriptions cost you far more than you gained by deceit.