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AT&T Series2 Tivos in Circuity City?
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Posted by: brianld

I called my local AT&T Broadband repair department yesterday poking around about getting 7.54 on my DCT-2000 for serial support. I know, I don't have an AT&T-branded Series2, so it won't work for me yet, but I wanted to try and be 1 step ahead when Tivo does eventually turn it on for all units.

Anyhow, I went to some length to explain the whole "only the AT&T-branded boxes have it, but I will need it ..." scenario to the repair rep.

In the process, she said "Oh yes, I know all about Tivo, we just had an all-day meeting preparing us for Circuit City selling them, and talked about supporting them ..."

I got the impression from her that they (Circuit City) were going to be offering AT&T's 40hr Tivo sometime in the near future. I didn't ask her directly, but that's the impression I got.

We all know how misinformed / confused care reps can be sometimes, but has anyone heard anything on this? I couldn't find any previous threads on it, so I thought I'd ask.

Posted by: Dan203

I haven't heard anything about this, but AT&T is definitely free to make such a deal, so it's possible.

Dan

Posted by: Metaluna

Circuity City used to, or maybe still does, have kiosks set up in their stores to sell AT&T Broadband Internet cable modem service (and the modems), so it would not be that far-fetched for them to offer other AT&T-branded products and services for sale.

Posted by: eweu

quote:
Originally posted by brianld
I called my local AT&T Broadband repair department yesterday poking around about getting 7.54 on my DCT-2000 for serial support.

Did they give you any information on that?

Posted by: KermitTheFrog

*sigh*

As i've said in other threads on serial control.. this is the EXACT reason why we don't have serial control right now on all boxes... Cable companies REALLY don't wanna be harassed about firmware on their settop boxes... As long as theres the possiblity that customers will call and try to "stay ahead of the curve" thus costing the cable comany money (and it's not a small amount either... phone calls into call centers cost customer care centers alot of cash per call - i think the average is $4 - $8 bucks a call for most centers from my experience in the field) then Tivo won't feel the need to push serial control to us.

Therefor.. you tring to stay "ahead of the curve" is pushing everyone behind the curve.

Kinda sucks for us who happen to live in a footprint that has the right firmware.. but are being held off by people who don't and are calling in.

The answer is... you'll get the new firmware when they get around to it.

KC

Posted by: DJRobX

quote:
phone calls into call centers cost customer care centers alot of cash per call - i think the average is $4 - $8 bucks a call for most centers from my experience in the field

Curious: How are you figuring $4-$8 per call?

Obviously, if someone hangs on the line with an operator being paid $8/hour it's gonna cost more than that, but do people really spend that much time on the phone with operators on average? Maybe I'm just antisocial, but I rarely spend more than a minute or two on the phone with a rep once I'm connected. There is, of course, the line charges and equipment fees too.

I'm not at all trying to say your figures are wrong, I'm just curious as to what other factors are going in.

-- Rob

Posted by: aciurczak

I'm always skeptical of the cost per call figures. It's as if someone took the salaries and overhead of all customer service reps, and divided that sum by the number of calls coming in. That methodology isn't completely flawed, but it certainly doesn't mean that the instant someone calls = "cha-ching, $40 wasted". Whether or not a call came in at that instant, the call-center person is still sitting at the same desk, getting paid the same amount.

I have the same skepticism of the hundreds of millions of dollars supposedly lost/spent on each major virus outbreak. Typically this includes lost productivity. The same IT folks are getting paid the same amount as usual to fix this problem before going on to what they were working on before. Their salaries don't go up, the overtime charges, if any, aren't major, so where do the hundreds of millions of dollars come from?

Posted by: wmh2

Ok, being a tech support person, I can answer the question about virus costing companies money.

Yes, it is true, I am paid the same amount weather or not I am dealing with a crisis. But what most users don't get is... I don't sit in my office just waiting for you to call me to handle your one problem.

That being said, we had reboot a server the other day because of a locked up piece of hard ware. All the users had to log out. The server didn't come back up correctly and was down for 1.5 hours.

Now in this example, I am being paid the same amount. But I have other duties that didn't get accomplished which pushed back other projects which eventually affects other people in the office. This does have a cost to it. Not as much when you look at just one time, but time after time it adds up.

Now lets factor in the 50 people in the Minneapolis who where directly affected and the 20 people in the Chicago Field office who may or may not have been so directly affected and about a hand full of people in the St. Louis HQ who may or may not have been affected, who where unable to work on their projects for 1.5 hours. I know this fact painfully as I was reminded by our VP afterwards. When we guess about work lost, we can say that it was the equivalent of about 2 people who skipped work for about 1 week. But the company continued to pay them.

Now let’s factor in a virus! <Note: They aren't so quick to fix.> I was working in HQ when the Melissa virus it a few years ago. For the record we have over 5000 employees in HQ and they are running Anti-Virus. But the DAT files for Melissa wasn’t distributed as quickly as the virus was. We actually sat there for a few hours while we waited for McAfee to release the files. <Note: some companies actually shut down their external email gateway for 3 days, Anheisure-Busch being one of them!>

Our help desk was fixing and repairing files on workstations as quickly as we could but a still getting back logged. Which meant these people could not work until someone could disinfect their machines. Now our help desk regularly took about 300 calls a day. Note that now none of these other trivial issues were being addressed.

Three people slipped through our net to stop the virus. Their machines deleted over 20,000 files from a few primary servers. These files were mostly Microsoft Documents on active projects. It took 3 days to restore these files.

Why three days? Well, first of the servers had other useful documents so we couldn't just take them down. <we couldn't just send 5000 people home> So we had to restore in batches as not to overwrite newer files with ones from the backups. Some of the users had documents locally so they put them back onto the server to continue working. Though it saved certain individuals some time, it made the whole restore process more complicated.

Now let’s look at prevention. How much do you think Anti-Virus software costs to license for a company with over 10,000 employees worldwide? Or the amount of time spend making sure everyone has updated Virus Definitions? Depending on how often you keep your machine updated, it may take you only a few minutes a day/week/month, but factor in thousands of employees and how we have a hire a few people just to deal with this issue.

The field office that I work in only has 50 people, but it still requires about 15 minutes 3 times a week (WITH AUTOMATION). And that is when we aren't being attacked, that time goes up to hours when we do detect a virus. We have to investigate what it does, how it is transmitted, and weather or not our current definition files catch it.

Now if we have to actively pursue removing the virus because the software can't you can tack on some extra time and be sure that that employee won't be do anything on their computer until they are clean!

Posted by: aciurczak

Wow! Thanks for the reply. I do realize that virus protection/prevention/remediation is a significant cost. The licensing, the time required to establish anti-virus procedures/policies/programs. I understand the damage that some of the more nasty virii have caused over the past few years.

But IT spending didn't go up by the hundereds of millions of dollars that is reported after each outbreak. Corporate productivity was not hurt to that level. We live in a knowledge economy. If a company makes widgets, and they make 1000 widgets a month, and a virus (or its aftereffects) caused them to make 900 widgets that month, then OK, there's a pretty direct correlation. But lost productivity, especially in IT, is pretty hard to directly relate to corporate losses. If Melissa had never happened, your firm would still have paid for all the licensing. They still would have the same number of IT support folks, and those IT folks could have been working on other projects for the 2-3 days of hell that instead were taken up by dealing with the virus. I've seen the number $10B assigned to melissa's damage. Sorry, not believable. If that were true, companies would be severely financially damaged by its impact. And they weren't.

If there really was a hit to the top line or bottom line as significant as is stated by the virus vendors, it would have needed to be in company annual reports around the globe. "We had an unexpected charge of $10M because some teenager wrote a virus that rendered our systems unavailable for 2 days this year".

Believe it or not, I am not discounting the significant spend and time that is required by IT to deal with the virus threat and other security/privacy threats, I just don't agree with the actual additional costs that are assigned to individual events. Just like I don't believe it really costs $25 - $50 for a support call. A company needs the appropriate technical support for its products so people will continue to purchase their products. If the support is so inadequate it will hurt sales, the company needs to spend more on support to balance its overall costs against the expected sales of whichever product. That balance might work out to a certain overall cost, divided by the number of calls. But the "every time they pick up the phone, it costs the company $25 - $50", is just too simplistic, and inaccurate.

Posted by: soundguy

There would be ZERO costs involved with a virus 'outbreak' if all these dumbass corporate IT departments would rip out all HTML email clients. There is no reason that anyone needs scripting or style sheets or any of that other virus-enabling crap in a corporate email.

Give 'em Agent or Pine and tell 'em "we're switching to 'text only' - don't like it? Find a new job!" Also, create a company-wide policy that states "anyone who attempts to install any kind if instant messaging or file-sharing utility will be fired, beaten, re-hired, beaten some more, and then fired again."

Posted by: NeZorf

quote:
Originally posted by soundguy
Give 'em Agent or Pine and tell 'em "we're switching to 'text only' - don't like it? Find a new job!" Also, create a company-wide policy that states "anyone who attempts to install any kind if instant messaging or file-sharing utility will be fired, beaten, re-hired, beaten some more, and then fired again."

OMG!! Are you saying that the sales staff that they can't bold and multicolor their sig's anymore? :)
It would be easy if you started out that way, but in a real office evironment, IT Depts doesn't have that much control of what the sales people want, especially if they have been given something for a long time...

Posted by: d_anders

quote:
Originally posted by soundguy
There would be ZERO costs involved with a virus 'outbreak' if all these dumbass corporate IT departments would rip out all HTML email clients. There is no reason that anyone needs scripting or style sheets or any of that other virus-enabling crap in a corporate email.

Give 'em Agent or Pine and tell 'em "we're switching to 'text only' - don't like it? Find a new job!" Also, create a company-wide policy that states "anyone who attempts to install any kind if instant messaging or file-sharing utility will be fired, beaten, re-hired, beaten some more, and then fired again."

I heard similar arguments in the 80's that stated that nothing of corporate use will utilize PCs, with the exception of word processing and spreadsheets..."We will utilize our business computing environment with our investment made in terminals and terminal emulation".

I understand your sentiment, but it's unrealistic. IM, to my disdain, is already making some inroads in the corporate enterprise. The technology just needs to evolve and get better.

Posted by: donvickers

Hey Dean...I agree with you about not using "suggestions". However, would you explain to me "how you use WISHLISTS"? Thanx.

Use WISHLISTS instead! They are one of the best things about TiVo.

Posted by: d_anders

quote:
Originally posted by donvickers
Hey Dean...I agree with you about not using "suggestions". However, would you explain to me "how you use WISHLISTS"? Thanx.

Use WISHLISTS instead! They are one of the best things about TiVo.

Sure, but I'm not sure what the real point of your question is...I thought using Wishlists to place content into one's TiVo is a fairly obvious process. Perhaps, I'm wrong and I'll be glad to highlight why they are great and how I use them.

My wife and I have wishlists for actors (Cusack, Sean Connery, etc.), director (Spielberg, Hitchcock, etc.), and topic interests (adoption, home repair, etc.). I then set them to autorecord, and then prioritize them (usually lower) along with other Season Passes in the Season Pass Manager.

Once you have a good number of wishlists, then your TiVo unit is then usually recording things in priority of your specific and particular interests rather than using a high-end algorithm to figure it out for you.

Don't get me wrong, I still have "suggestions" still turned on, and still get a good show every now and then.

In the end, I don't worry about Suggestions getting things right, I use WISHLISTS instead. Using Wishlists are one of the best things about TiVo.

Posted by: soundguy

>>I understand your sentiment, but it's unrealistic.

Baloney! Go stand up at a shareholder's meeting and tell the assembled masses that viruses enabled by HTML email clients cost them $XXX million in dividends last quarter. See how fast Outlook hits the trash can and see how fast the a-holes in marketing get told to "sit the F*** down and shut the F*** up!"

"Money doesn't talk, it swears"
-Bob Dylan-

:D:D:D

Posted by: donvickers

Thanx...I haven't looked at "suggestions" since the first week I had TiVo 2 running 2.0. I don't remember seeing the "autorecord" feature. Back to basics...(g).

quote:
Originally posted by d_anders

Sure, but I'm not sure what the real point of your question is...I thought using Wishlists to place content into one's TiVo is a fairly obvious process. Perhaps, I'm wrong and I'll be glad to highlight why they are great and how I use them.

My wife and I have wishlists for actors (Cusack, Sean Connery, etc.), director (Spielberg, Hitchcock, etc.), and topic interests (adoption, home repair, etc.). I then set them to autorecord, and then prioritize them (usually lower) along with other Season Passes in the Season Pass Manager.

Once you have a good number of wishlists, then your TiVo unit is then usually recording things in priority of your specific and particular interests rather than using a high-end algorithm to figure it out for you.

Don't get me wrong, I still have "suggestions" still turned on, and still get a good show every now and then.

In the end, I don't worry about Suggestions getting things right, I use WISHLISTS instead. Using Wishlists are one of the best things about TiVo.