Well that's just flat out annoying. Last year when we got the new Series 3 HD TiVo we were gifted service on the old TiVo for a year. That year is now up and we decided there was no reason to renew the service. The Series 3 has two tuners and the old Series 2 only has 1, and with the dearth of new shows due to the writer's strike there wasn't a compelling reason to spend $10 a month to continue service on it since we were more than able to capture what we needed with the two tuners on the Series 3. And so I thought no problem, I don't need listing information and I would just use it as a VCR and have it record stuff like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. The biggest problem with the previous sentence is the "I thought" part since today TiVo informed our Series 2 that it didn't have service anymore and that was the end of that idea. Here's a snippet from TiVo's service agreement that I evidently didn't realize.
7. Your TiVo DVR Won't Work Without the TiVo Service! A subscription to the TiVo service is required in order for your TiVo DVR to have any functionality. No functionality is represented or should be expected from the TiVo DVR without a paid subscription to the TiVo service.
Little did I know that the Series 2 TiVo's without a subscription service is little more than a glorified paperweight. You can't look at what you entered on your season pass, you can't set up recordings, you basically can't do anything other than watch live TV. So it's a channel changer that degrades the quality of the picture slightly. I guess I should count myself lucky that it's letting me continue to watch live TV with the 30 minute buffer (and you do have the pause, fast forward and rewind capabilities on that 30 minute buffer). So there's really no reason to even bother keeping this thing. Now from what I hear, the old Series 1 TiVos can still funcion in VCR mode without service, so it's only the Series 2 that's the problem (which I suppose is why they seemed to be practically giving away the Series 2 models there at one point). When I checked online about what you can do with the Series 2 with no service (okay, I admit I was looking to see if anyone had mod'ed it so that it would work in VCR mode, but either they haven't or they're being tip lipped about it) the one suggestion I found amusing was "try and sell it on ebay to someone else that doesn't know any better".
2 comments:
That is how they all work. When we had a cable service outtage once we couldn't watch movies off of the hard drive on our cable-company-supplied DVR because the box couldn't confirm that we had service while the cable was out!
If you had posted your plans before canceling your service you probably would have found out the truth sooner. :-)
Well, you can at least scavenge the hard drive. 120GB (or whatever it has) may be chump change nowadays, but it is still usable.
You could also take out your frustrations by throwing it down the hill a few times or taking a sledgehammer to it (after saving out the HD, of course). Have fun!
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