TiVo Stream Activation Bricked

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If you were unfortunate enough to purchase or factory reset a TiVo Stream 4K this weekend, your online video plans are on hold. Potentially until July 5th. You see, TiVo, in their infinite wisdom has taken their entire customer portal down for several days… to include TiVo Stream’s requisite web-based activation, which redirects to this maintenance page — leaving one with an unusable device.

I stumbled upon this news at the TiVo Community forum and took one for the team by factory resetting my own device as a test, confirmed the issue, and have entered streaming purgatory for the time being. On the flip side, as this TiVo Android TV device lost its launch partner, requires you disable its selling feature to prevent black screens, and its security patch level is dated 11/22, I may be better off leaving the dongle offline.

This serves as another reminder for me that TiVo’s decaying consumer business largely exists to beta test B2B solutions, such as their delayed (of course) but still upcoming overseas television sets. Good luck to them?

5 thoughts on “TiVo Stream Activation Bricked”

  1. Idiots. I am glad that I am finally free of my TiVo DVRs. I would never buy one of their stream devices.

  2. That’s so sad to hear. We loved our TiVo DVRs back in the day. Of course, I miss my BetaMax VCRs, too. Yeah, I’m old. We still have a little TiVo Guy stuffed doll around the house somewhere.

  3. The TiVo Stream is still my go to streaming device — mostly for the number keys on the remote! It’s handy for entering parental control PINs without needing to navigate the on screen displays.

    Thanks for the tip on the black screen issue! That has been plaguing me for months. Now if I can just figure out how to get the storage expanded…

  4. From the Facebook comments, if your credit card expired, you can’t update that and your consumer TiVo DVR ceases to record. I also assume anyone who bought a new (or used) DVR, if that’s still a thing, wouldn’t be able to activate. Good work, TiVo!

  5. Shortly after I woke up at about 5:30AM EST, activation was still offline. But when I checked again at 8:15AM, it had been restored and my dongle is back in business … although still with a propensity to black screen and a 11/22 Android security patch level?

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