At the time I had my FIOS installed, they only had FIOS Internet and FIOS Phone Service.  No Cable.  Last week after 10 months of waiting, Verizon FIOS Cable was finally available so I had it installed. The cutover from Comcast was fairly straight forward.  My Series 2 Tivo was replaced with a Motorola QIP6416-2 HD DVR.  Although my wife was a bit skeptical and wanted me to go grab a new HD TIVO, after playing with the new Verizon DVR for a week we both agreed it was time to retire the TIVO for good.  If it did Netflix streaming, I would be set.  Oh well, I have an XBOX 360 so I’ll just use it to stream my Netflix movies. ANYWAY, today I called TIVO to cancel the TIVO subscription.  I tried to cancel it from the TIVO website but quickly found they require you to call into their call center for disconnects.  

3:00pm call 800 # and put into Disconnect queue3:10pm – Call disconnected (yes, I’m using a land line, no mobile phone).3:11pm – Called back, put back into disconnect queue3:22pm – Call disconnected….  Ok, I’m pretty annoyed at this point.3:25pm – Confirmed you can’t disconnect service.  Decided I would skip the Disconnect Queue and try standard customer Service.  Automated service said hold time was 10 minutes…3:40pm -  Robot lady was 5 minutes off.  Anyway, I finally get a human.  .  I explain I’ve been trying for 40 minutes to cancel my service.  He apologizes, takes down my phone number (to pull up my service) and explains he needs to transfer me to the billing dept.  I say Noooooo and I hear the click.  I’m back in Automated PBX hell with that annoying music waiting for the Inevitable. 3:50pm – Click…  Disconnected3:55pm – After taking a look around the website thinking perhaps I can send an email.  Decided to try the 800 # “1 more time”.  Dialed into the TIVO phone system again…4:02pm – Just 7 minutes on hold in the Disconnect queue!  And I have a HUMAN!   The customer service gentleman introduced himself and asked for my phone #.  I of course explained my previous 62 minutes and made him promise to call me directly on my mobile or land line should we become disconnected again.  He had to promise before I allowed him to move forward with my disconnect.4:08pm – Although he’s a nice enough gentleman, he all but calls me crazy for not going with a TIVO HD unit.  I have to give him creds on that one.  He did a nice job trying to talk me into remaining a TIVO customer.  Couldn’t fault him after all, that’s his job.4:10pm – I hang up the phone.  Mission Accomplished.  After just 70 minutes, I successfully cancelled the TIVO service subscription on m Series 2 TIVO unit. 

  So, the question is, why did it take me 70 minutes to kill my TIVO service?  I understand why you can’t cancel the account via their Web Page (they want the opportunity to talk you out of cancelling).  For TIVO, this is easy money every month once they get you signed up.  So, do you think they purposely bounced me around to prevent me from cancelling the service? My guess is no.  That being said, had I not been tracking the timeline for this blog post, I probably would have given up until Monday.  Even so, I don’t think TIVO cares about keeping me on for another 3 days.  So I’m going to call it a faulty phone system. What do you think?  Anyone out there have problems killing their TIVO service? called, cancelled followed up with letter, cancelled got charged, had amex challenge and halt now they have no credit card, but they are trying to send to a collection agency i called again, they won’t budge ive been fb’ing and tweeting on how much i hate them worst company ever ive gotten 10 people to cancel their service, and 5 people won’t sign up now. Wow, God intervened, it is 3:41 and he claims I am cancelled and will get an email in 5-10 minutes. Well I got the email, but the Bastards aren’t cancelling it until 3 weeks from now. June 27. I guess they want that last $13…scummy if you ask me. Time to post to Facebook and Tweet just for the satisfaction. I can honestly say – been there, done that… unfortunately. I would have hoped that TIVO would have figured things out by now but I guess not. Honestly, by now Tivo must be in their death thralls anyway. They are currently losing over 50 million a year so it’s only a matter of time. My TiVo unit just went belly up (bad caps in the power supply) and repair/replacement is not a reasonable proposition given the other options in the marketplace nowadays. Comment

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