I happen to agree with Saturn. It’s hard to find a bigger TiVo fanboy than me. For seven years I’ve been raving about TiVo and how it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.

And last week I was forced to take every last season pass off my S3. It is an inert box, useless, because of 9.1 and how it caused my cablecards to stop working. The most important feature TiVo has is reliable recording of shows. Everything else is secondary.

If it won’t record the shows, it doesn’t matter whether there’s 30 second skip or not. It doesn’t matter if it has Wishlists or pixelation or anything else. Trick plays on a blank screen are not interesting. ToDo lists filled with “This show was not recorded because the video signal was not available” is not interesting.

My TiVos have never missed shows in the 7 years I’ve been buying them. And then they started missing all of them. That’s a pretty serious problem, wouldn’t you agree?

So, right now, I have a $1000 paperweight, with lifetime service. And for the first time EVER, I don’t trust that my TiVo will do what I told it. And I’ve moved to somebody elses DVR because missing shows is unacceptable. Sure, the interface isn’t TiVo. The features aren’t TiVo. But when I get home at night, the shows I want to watch are there, and THAT is the most important feature.

Trust is very hard to win, and even harder to regain. I used to trust my TiVos, unconditionally. Now I don’t. How do you fix that?

You fix it with communication. Back in the old days, TiVo would have done exactly that. They would have been in here answering questions. They would have told us that they were working on it. They would have told us that they had a potential fix and it was in testing. They would have told us that they were sending the fix out to a small group of users for field testing. And they would have told us when they were flipping the big switch to send it to everyone.

No offense to TiVoPony, who I like, but Richard Bullwinkle would have been all over this forum telling us what was going on. I suspect that TiVo itself is different now, and Pony is more limited in what he can say, and that it’s not his fault, but as a company, TiVo is far more tight-lipped than they used to be.

This isn’t the first time we’ve had a significant bug. Read the archives for previous times. What’s different this time is the almost total silence coming from TiVo.

When someone like me, who even came in here to defend TiVo for price changes, to turn his TiVo off and declare it to be “useless” means TiVo has a serious problem, and a company who lives and dies off it’s reputation for reliability cannot ignore a problem like that, and certainly will not win new “Raving Fans” by refusing to comment on the issue.

I’m still here, but my TiVo does not record anything I actually care about any more. Simply because I cannot trust that it will do so reliably.

Even if TiVo doesn’t want to give us “detailed release notes”, they absolutely should acknowledge the cablecard problem and let us know if it’s fixed. Until we KNOW that it’s fixed, my S3 will remain a paperweight. And I damned sure won’t be buying another one. And I won’t be recommending to my friends that they do, either.