Just seven months after launch, TiVo has gone back to the drawing board on Bolt pricing. While we don’t yet know every detail, based on new packaging Best Buy shipped out prematurely, the included year of TiVo Bolt service is no more.
New white box:
TiVo service subscription is required and sold separately.
Prior black box:
First year of of TiVo Annual service included.
TiVo’s likely goals are to limit potential customer churn (when that first year is up) and to lower the barrier to entry. As such, leaked dealer pricing indicates both the TiVo Bolt 500GB and 1000GB units drop by $100. Of course, this is mostly smoke and mirrors… as, after one year of service, new customers would actually end up paying more, should monthly and annual pricing remain unchanged — which I suspect will be the case, when everything gets official May 2nd.
Fortunately, you have a few days to get in on the original TiVo Bolt and service dealio during what looks to be a ReplayTV-esque transition should you want to roll the dice. $232.40 for the Bolt, with a bundled 12 months of service, is extremely compelling… unless you were holding out for that possible pro-level box next fall.
View Comments
That 'v2' in the dealer documentation likely refers to packaging, versus hardware changes.
(If the post looks a little disjointed, it's because I tried to salvage the original writeup ... after receiving the pricing data. Probably should of rewrote from scratch. But who has time for that?)
So this makes it more expensive for monthly/yearly subscribers. Since at $150 a year for service, the price is higher(for the Bolt and first year of service) than the Bolt that had the year of service included.
But for the people that want to get All IN it works out better. Since you don't lose that year of service that was included with the previous Bolt.
Had the launch Bolt been $200 plus $400 for ALL IN, I would have probably gone that route. But since I paid around $240 for each Bolt with a year of service included, I will continue to use the $150 a year subscription plan. At least that is the plan for me in the short term.
I like the cheaper price-point for the hardware, but as you mentioned, service pricing is where they get you unless something changes. I remember my Series 1 Lifetime pricing 15 years ago, and how cheap it was, and makes it difficult to swallow the current pricing structure.
If they were cheaper, it seems they could sell more units, and bankroll more customers, which would offset the need for higher pricing per sub. At the current (well, as far as we know) pricing, it costs close to a grand to get up and running, and that is just way too much to entice customers to drop the $10 per month cable co DVR. I have close to $2000 in S2 hardware and lifetime subs sitting in my closet collecting dust (if they even still work anymore), but most people don't want to spend that kind of money for something that they will upgrade every few years.
I'd also like to see TiVo go with a software-only solution that could be sold at reasonable rates, and get apps for Roku, AppleTV, Windows, SA, and even home brew hardware to run the software in some form (even if only SaaS). Maybe doing a cloud-based storage solution with a TiVo Mini like hardware component, worst case (depending on how or whether unlock the box ever goes anywhere, which I don't get a great feeling about).