How to Deal with the Customer Service Hotline

TiVo is a prime example of a company that created a transformative technology only to watch it get copied and have those copies transform an entire industry while they went out of business.

We had a TiVo, and much preferred it to any DVR any cable company offered. But then the cable companies changed to a transmission technology TiVo couldn’t support out of the box. Legally, the cable companies had to make an adapter available. They didn’t have to make the adapter easily to use, inexpensive, or reliable.

We called the cable company’s tech support many times over problems with that adaptor box, and their response was always some version of “Yeah, they do that. The best way to fix it is to rent one of our DVRs instead!”

There’s a reason that if you go to TiVo’s website, you’ll see they concentrate on streaming and over-the-air broadcasts these days.

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