DirecTV Admits Issue With TiVo

Posted Monday, January 15, 2007

It looks like DirecTV is up to its old tricks again: it’s TiVo service is broken but the primary-level customer service techs are telling customers a different story. While TT has confirmed an ongoing problem with DTV’s TiVo, specifically, the Season Pass function, which stopped working properly for many customers in December.

While a company spokesman admitted to the problem last week in various media outlets, the situation doesn’t appear to have been fixed as of this writing, despite claims it would be sorted out by last Friday night.

While users are frustrated by this latest episode, it is just the latest in a series of glitches the company has suffered since it took over control of all its hardware. In particular, DTV’s HD receivers have had a very high failure rate in the field and the hardware transition to MPEG-4 has been slow and troubled. The company’s HD DVRs (digital video recorder) were late and slow to come to market, which stalled some transitions.

Along with the technical glitches, many customers and media members have been critical of DTVs lag behind other satellite, cable and phone TV operators in adding HD channels and the service has been hammered over excessive compression of its current HD channel lineup.

DTV is currently in the process of being sold to Liberty Media by current owner News Corp. While many in the industry think Liberty will keep the service, persistent rumors of a sale to AT&T or Verizon remain rampant.--MM