It should not be this difficult to watch TV.<\/p>\n
D bought her Mom a TiVo box for her birthday, which box we’re going to deliver this weekend when we visit. D also wanted to include a gift subscription, so she went online and placed an order. However, the order confirmation didn’t give her the redemption code needed for activation.<\/p>\n
After more than half an hour on the phone with agents both unhelpful and clueless, “Megan” finally told us that TiVo doesn’t distribute those codes online or by email anymore. A visit to the web site confirmed this sad fact. My emphasis below<\/p>\n
That was then<\/a>:<\/p>\n After you purchase a TiVo service gift subscription directly from TiVo.com, you’ll be given a 9-digit redemption code… During checkout, you can choose to send the recipient an e-mail<\/span> with the 9-digit redemption code automatically included.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is now<\/a>:<\/p>\n The gift certificate with the 9-digit redemption code will be shipped<\/span> to you directly… If you want, you can also have TiVo send the gift certificate directly to your recipient–just enter their address as the shipping address!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Yes, I might think that was convenient, if I didn’t know how much easier the old process was. For a company that wants its customers to do everything online– including activation<\/span>— they’re sure doing their best to screw things up. I mean, they don’t even offer support by email<\/a>. You’d think that a company still struggling to be profitable<\/a> would look to do something more cost-effective than running a call center.<\/p>\n I love our TiVo, but I have a bad feeling that the company is going to wither and die slowly, just as Palm<\/a> has been– by starting out with great technology, but later squandering their goodwill with users by running the business badly. And now that I have an HDTV, I’m just waiting to see whether DirecTV or Dish Network wins the race to upgrade to MPEG-4 transmission and produce a non-lame, integrated DVR receiver, so I can get all my channels– including local-into-local (LIL)<\/a> stations– off the same cable.<\/p>\n It should not be this difficult to watch TV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It should not be this difficult to watch TV. D bought her Mom a TiVo box for her birthday, which box we’re going to deliver this weekend when we visit. D also wanted to include a gift subscription, so she…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[1,133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}