Five things to get Tivo back on top.

These are all good points. Tivo is a slow-moving company…slow to add features, slow to follow-through on customer suggestions, slow to innovate.

“Just being slightly better than the cable company’s garbage won’t cut it for much longer — again, the Media Center PC kicks your ass right now, and the high-end customer on which you’re currently relying is going to figure that out soon.”

It took Microsoft two years to add Xvid and DivX support to the Xbox 360. That seems like an eternity, but Tivo’s been on the scene for ten years and still hasn’t added this – or even considered it enough of a priority to mention that it’s being worked on. When Microsoft does something better than you, you’re probably doing something wrong!

The list of five leaves out one pretty glaring omission in Tivo’s strategy – they’re really only set up to handle cable and antenna customers.

Want to use Tivo in HD with your satellite service? Unless they can work out a deal with your satellite provider to manufacture integrated hardware, forget it. And even if they do, expect to be months behind your cable-subscribing friends in receiving software updates.

Want to use Tivo in HD with something even more proprietary like FIOS or UVerse? Good luck with that, buddy!

10% of pay TV customers get their service from the phone company, 30% get it from satellite, and the remaining 60% get it from the cable company (source), so I guess Tivo’s targeting the right people. But to just ignore 40% of the market…that doesn’t seem like the greatest plan either.