By Casey Muller
TiVo is one of the first generation Personal Video Recorders (PVRs),
and the one that I've had the most experience with, so I was interested
to see what they'd done with their web presence. The designers did
an excellent job in providing different levels of content, and managed
to cover all the important aspects of the product and interested consumers.
The first and most obvious purpose of the website is to sell you a
TiVo. The front page is very much oriented towards telling you about
the TiVo and helping you purchase one. To this end they even mocked
up portions of the interface in Flash so you can experience it on
the webpage. This purpose covers the 3 of the 4 main subpages, but
the 4th is where things get interesting.
"TiVo Fun" leads to the juicy stuff on the site. At first
glance it appears to be a somewhat successful attempt at creating
original content for the site, with program suggestions, in-depth
customer testimonial, and television reviews. It even has a TiVo skin
for Winamp, but nothing that would coalesce a community or really
hold your attention.
However, an unemphasized link on the page leads to a pretty sophisticated
webchat system, and this is where stuff gets juicy. The discussions
are active and wide-ranging. As a technical person, I was immediately
drawn to "TiVo Underground" where I delved into the community
of the more energetic TiVo owners, and saw the remarkable reverse
engineering and modification efforts that were ongoing.
By keeping TiVo hackers tied to their main site, TiVo encourages
amateur enthusiasts to improve the product, with almost zero cost
to the company. Conversely, they can quietly suppress efforts that
are not beneficial to them or their relationship with advertisers,
i.e. commercial skipping. More eyes also means more webpage advertising
revenues that would instead go to small TiVo related sites that would
spring up in the absence of an official central depository.
This technical forum also worked as very effective advertisement
for me, since I immediately wanted to get involved and try some of
the stuff myself. By allowing different user groups to talk amongst
themselves TiVo harnesses the power of internet communities.
Stepping back for a moment we must remember that TiVo is basically
a smart VCR, and is generally targeted towards intellectuals who like
toys. This is the kind of person that will almost certainly check
out the webpage at some point, and read a few of the discussions.
TiVo is competing heavily with a number of competing PVRs, and it
is clear that eventually one will win out and the others will die.
By encouraging an active user group, they contribute greatly to their
chances of being the one on top.
In closing, I find TiVo's website to be an excellent companion to
what I would consider an excellent product. It provides plenty of
straight marketing information, while at the same time allowing interested
parties to really delve into the community.