DirecTV reports strong Q4, but many long time customers ticked off

Last month, DirectTV reported that their profits had risen to $1 billion for the quarter ending 2007 and they reported 275,000 net subscriber additions in the US.

At the same time, there is a growing wave of customer dissatisfaction. Take, for example

Or DirecTV Dumps TiVo, I Dump DirecTV:

Or this one:

That pretty much sums up my take on it as well. DirecTV had a perfectly reasonable service and they decided to “fix” it and here’s where it goes awry:

1. Must lease the box - cannot buy it - adds to the monthly cost
2. Additional fees for channels users already used to get
3. 2-year contract - With the service going down hill, the last thing people want is to get locked up with DirecTV for two long years.

It sort of makes one think maybe we should just wait for AppleTV or some form of on-demand or IPTV. The worst part for me personally is no HD football or other sports in the mean time.

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DirecTV - all good things must come to an end

Until recently, DirecTV is one service I was mostly happy with. How many services can you say that about? Cell phone? Landline? Cable TV? Internet? When News Corp acquired DirecTV, I was worried and rightly so, it turned out; but when News Corp sold off their stake last year, I was optimistic again.

I’ve been a customer since the mid 90’s. I paid something like $1,000 for the initial setup back then. I have been a mostly happy customer all this time (even if I was “worried” at times) - but now with the forced migration to their DVR box, involving significant loss in functionality and reliability, this blissful situation may be coming to an end. Here’s what they are doing to a long-time loyal customer:

1. Forcing me to replace my TiVo-based HD DVR with a buggy DirecTV-designed DVR with a junky remote, terrible user interface, severe limitations, and reliability problems.
2. Forcing me into a two-year contract, even though I have been a customer for over 10 years!
3. Charging me an additional $4.99/mo. to keep HD channels I receive now (UHD, HDNM, etc.)
4. Charging me $20 for the unwanted swap.

I guess at this point my options are:

1. Keep the HD TiVo and wait until DirecTV stops sending it signals it can receive.
2. See if I can get HD Cable service with a stand-alone HD TiVo (this may not really be an option, since the cable company [Comcast] has told me in the past that service in my area is not very good and they don’t know when or if they will fix it).
3. Buy a DVR on Ebay and see if DirecTV will support it to avoid the 2-year contract? These are supposedly “lease-only” units, so this may also not be a practical option.
4. Accept the new DirecTV DVR with all the limitations and 2-year contract (What do I do then, if this new DVR really is unusable?)

I guess we customers are just not supposed to actually like the services we pay for — Cell phone, landline, cable TV, Internet service. And now Satellite TV too. Maybe they get their jollies by showing that we suckers will continue to subscribe to their crappy services, no matter how much they screw us over.

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Video on the N95

I keep trying out more things on the N95, as my schedule permits.

I can guarantee I at one time have said something like “who would want to watch TV on a two inch screen” when all the hype around video on mobile phones started up a few years ago.

I pretty much felt that way even as I ventured into a project to try loading my own home-brew videos on the N95 and see if I could get them to play. I should note that there is a “user friendly” way to put videos on the N95. Specifically, there is the Nokia Video Manager (I could only find a link on the European Nokia site). But I figure that has already been talked about elsewhere. I wanted to see if I could create my own files that played on the N95 from video content I have.

In short, to tip the ending, I have successfully taken videos from Tivo and played them on the N95. I did it on the Mac and on the PC, just to show that it’s possible (Nokia’s official Video Manager only works on the PC). I have to say, I was (a) amazed it worked the first time (figuring I’d surely get something wrong) and (b) shocked at the quality.

So assuming you already know how to get video off your Tivo (an exercise for the reader), that gives you a pretty high quality MPEG2 file at roughly 700 x 500. After reading around, I found that the format the N95 seems to like is MP4 at 320×240 encoded with the H.264 codec. I was able to successfully convert my MPEG2 video to mp4 and load them into the N95 using the following tools:

• PC
  Videora iPod Converter

• Mac OS X
  ffmpegX

I believe both of these use the open-source ffmpeg tools underneath the covers (which explains why it worked on both the PC and the MAC), but it was nice to know it could be done on either platform.

I was surprised that the resulting 320×240 MP4 file was nearly the same size (in megabytes) as the original Tivo 700×500 MPEG2 file. A 30-minute video was about 320MB. The settings I used were:

file format: MP4
video encoding: H.264, 320×240, 30 fps
audio encoding: AAC, 44100 Hz, 96 kbps

I can tell no difference between the playback of the files made on the PC versus those made on the Mac. They both look and sound TERRIFIC on the N95 player (Realplayer).

When it comes to actually getting the large video files on the N95, I used both Bluetooth and a cardreader directly attached to the PC. The latter is much faster, but still slower than you might expect (about 10-20 minutes to load the MMC card with a 30-minute video). Bluetooth is much slower - I think it took almost an hour to transfer a 30-minute video.

With the 1Gig memory card I have, it looks like I could put about two hours of video at this quality on the N95, or certainly a 90-minute movie. I don’t know yet if the N95 battery would play a video for two hours straight.

Overall, it takes a rather painful couple of hours to perform all the video file conversions and write a 30-minute video to the phone. But I have to say, it is pretty cool to take a program off my TV and have it on the N95. Now that I have this capability, I’m torn regarding what shows or movies I want to load onto the phone.

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DirecTV loses 10 million subscribers

Well, that’s my headline for sometime in the next 12-18 months, or whenever Rupert forces his Tivo owners to switch to his “new” DVR.

Here’s what I’m expecting so far, based on all I’ve read about the DVR DirecTV is going to shove down our throats:

1. No more “peanut” remote. It sounds trivial, but that remote is very comfortable. If you haven’t used it, you can’t relate. And the new DirecTV remote supposedly doesn’t control the on/off or volume on many makes/models of TVs, so you you end up needing two remotes.

2. No multiple live buffer streams to select between. With TiVo DirecTV units we can jump back and forth between two live programs, with buffer. Supposedly not so with the new DVRs.

3. GUI sucks. Comments include “hard to navigate” “a whole new horror” “not intuitive at all” “It BLOWS” “It is a fancy VCR, but not a Tivo” “amazingly difficult to use” “All the software people should be fired” See examples here.

4. Lease-only going forward, means higher monthly fees.

The tech support line apparently has an automated voice that tells you “most problems are resolved by rebooting.” What does that tell you about the quality of the software (and DirecTV’s contempt for their customers).

I’ve been a DirecTV subscriber for over 10 years. When DirecTV abandons all support for TiVo it looks like I’ll be stuck switching to cable (which totally sucks around here). Apparently I won’t be alone. Nobody that’s used TiVo for more than a few months is ever going to move as far backwards as DirecTV is trying to send us. It’s looking like it will be a mass exodus. What an effective way to take perfectly happy customers and send them straight to your competitors.

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News Corp Screws TiVo

A lot of us feared this would happen. DirecTV officially dropped TiVo. News Corp, the parent company, owns a firm that has their own DVR, so that’s what DirecTV is getting stuck with. Of course it is going to be garbage compared to TiVo, but it doesn’t matter. Users will be stuck with it just the same. According to the LA Times, two-thirds of Tivo’s 3.3 million subscribers are from DirecTV and 77% of TiVo’s new subscribers are coming from DirecTV.

As I mentioned when News Corp first acquired DirecTV, this is not unexpected. For my part, I’d say it’s bad news for us DirectTV subscribers. Cable (Comcast) where I live is awful, so my options are limited and I have no idea what my TV experience is going to be like in the next few years as our TiVos start to die off (or be killed by DirecTV).

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News Corp buys DirecTV

News Corp is the parent of Fox and yesterday the FCC and DoJ gave their stamp of approval to the $6.6 billion takeover deal. As a DirecTV and TiVo subscriber, I have a very bad feeling about this. I have no idea how they will mess this up, but in my experience, when Rupert Murdoch’s Fox moves in, things tend to get stupid.

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