I have been a Tivo customer for over ten years. My original Series 2 Tivo was a great product at the time, but since then every unit I've owned (Series 3 HD, Premiere XL, Premiere XL4, Stream, Mini and now Roamio Pro) has had so many bugs, including the service outage by Tivo’s servers all night yesterday.
You can browse the support forums here at Tivo Community and on Tivo’s own website and see numerous problems users have been experiencing due to poor engineering and software bugs. When is Tivo management going to get its act together and get the engineers and support staff to resolve all of these problems everyone is having in a timely manner? Does the management board even know about these problems? Do you use Tivos the way most users do on a daily basis to know how many problems there are, or is this just another case of a company being run by a board of executives with business degrees and no depth of understanding of the product that they’re selling?
Among the long list of problems I've been experiencing: Padding time to Season Pass recordings creating a 2nd manual recording, numerous problems connecting to Wifi, frequent problems connecting to the Tivo outside my home network, Tivo Desktop for Mac not having been updated in several years, Roxio's Tivo Transfer not working at all with the Roamio Pro, the iOS Tivo App showing the wrong disk percentage, the inability to transfer some older recordings from another Tivo. The list goes on and on. When Tivo’s servers went down last night, there was no way for Tivo owners to know that the errors they were getting were a result of the servers being down. This information should have been made available on Tivo’s website. This shows an incredible lack of communication between Tivo and their customers.
These are issues that have been ongoing for months, and in some cases, years. The Level 1 phone support staff doesn't know how to solve these known issues. Incredibly, many aren’t even aware that these problems are known issues. They make you go through their canned troubleshooting guide over the phone, which is an incredible waste of everyone’s time. The Level 2 support staff seems to know about some of the problems, but the Level 1 staff makes it really difficult for Tivo owners to get through to them. It seems that the only decent support for Tivo owners is on their website forum and here at Tivo Community, but we only have the ability to make each other aware of known problems, not fix them.
This is completely unacceptable for an $1,100 product (Roamio Pro with Lifetime Service). I wish there was a better alternative for a standalone DVR besides the cable companies’ DVRs, which have far fewer features. Currently, I’m only a Tivo customer out of a lack of better options.
Tivo management, please take the necessary steps to recognize the numerous problems Tivo users are having and find a way to get the engineering and support staff to fix them and communicate with customers in a timely and efficient way.
You can browse the support forums here at Tivo Community and on Tivo’s own website and see numerous problems users have been experiencing due to poor engineering and software bugs. When is Tivo management going to get its act together and get the engineers and support staff to resolve all of these problems everyone is having in a timely manner? Does the management board even know about these problems? Do you use Tivos the way most users do on a daily basis to know how many problems there are, or is this just another case of a company being run by a board of executives with business degrees and no depth of understanding of the product that they’re selling?
Among the long list of problems I've been experiencing: Padding time to Season Pass recordings creating a 2nd manual recording, numerous problems connecting to Wifi, frequent problems connecting to the Tivo outside my home network, Tivo Desktop for Mac not having been updated in several years, Roxio's Tivo Transfer not working at all with the Roamio Pro, the iOS Tivo App showing the wrong disk percentage, the inability to transfer some older recordings from another Tivo. The list goes on and on. When Tivo’s servers went down last night, there was no way for Tivo owners to know that the errors they were getting were a result of the servers being down. This information should have been made available on Tivo’s website. This shows an incredible lack of communication between Tivo and their customers.
These are issues that have been ongoing for months, and in some cases, years. The Level 1 phone support staff doesn't know how to solve these known issues. Incredibly, many aren’t even aware that these problems are known issues. They make you go through their canned troubleshooting guide over the phone, which is an incredible waste of everyone’s time. The Level 2 support staff seems to know about some of the problems, but the Level 1 staff makes it really difficult for Tivo owners to get through to them. It seems that the only decent support for Tivo owners is on their website forum and here at Tivo Community, but we only have the ability to make each other aware of known problems, not fix them.
This is completely unacceptable for an $1,100 product (Roamio Pro with Lifetime Service). I wish there was a better alternative for a standalone DVR besides the cable companies’ DVRs, which have far fewer features. Currently, I’m only a Tivo customer out of a lack of better options.
Tivo management, please take the necessary steps to recognize the numerous problems Tivo users are having and find a way to get the engineering and support staff to fix them and communicate with customers in a timely and efficient way.