If you've been thinking of buying a TiVo, their lifetime service deal is about to go away. No firm cut-off date has been announced but TiVo dealers are saying that the rumored date is March 15, which is next week. After that, you won't be able to buy lifetime service for any amount of money and certainly not for the current price of $299.
To make sure we're clear on this: When you get lifetime service, it's one machine's lifetime, not your lifetime. When TiVo originally started, they didn't make this clear so they allowed a lot of us early subscribers to transfer our lifetime subscriptions to another machine…once. It can no longer be transferred.
$299 is a great deal if you're going to keep your TiVo twenty-four months or more. I've had two of mine for more than four years and will surely be using at least one for another year or two. If I'd been paying by the month for those two machines, I'd have spent around $700 on each for the service.
A few years ago, there was little question that you would keep a TiVo for more than two years. Today, it's a bit more arguable. The current Series 2 TiVo machines do not handle Hi-Def. The Series 3 machines, which will allegedly be out at the end of the year, will have that capability, as well as the capacity to record two shows at once and there'll be other nifty features, as well. The grapevine suggests, however, that the Series 3 TiVos will lack certain existing features like multi-room viewing, which is the ability to transfer shows from a TiVo in one room to a TiVo in another, assuming you have two TiVos and that you have them networked. If you're thinking you might dump your Series 2 TiVo for a Series 3, lifetime service might not be such a peachy idea. On the other hand, it might be very easy to sell that Series 2 TiVo with lifetime service to someone who doesn't care about High Def.
So the decision's yours. All I'm saying is that if you're going to get lifetime service, you'd better get it now. You have to have the serial number for your TiVo and then order the service from the TiVo website.
You know, for all the touting I do of their products here, you'd think I owned stock in TiVo…but I don't. Maybe I should because one of these days — who knows? — the company might even start showing a profit.