My EyeTV programming subscription expired today — but it died the evening of Feb. 5.
I was away, so I didn’t know it happened until I came back and found an empty screen where the TV listings were supposed to be. The thread about its unexpected demise is the longest in the discussions forum for EyeTV.
I suppose I should consider myself lucky to have had it as long as I did (a month short of nine years). The EyeTV hardware was discontinued four years ago and all product stuff and software was sold. Since then it was a case of renewing a subscription through the European subsidiary of a Chinese company for something specific to North America. One thing or another was bound to come along. And everything I said about streaming in 2015 is an issue today, only many times more so.
Users have looked for other ways to populate the TV listings, but all of them involve deep work in Terminal and other fiddling with things. There’s a workaround that requires minimal effort to set recordings, using the TitanTV site, although I have to have the EyeTV application open to realign the channel it’s looking for. The downside of this is that stumbling upon new shows is pretty much non-existent, so I didn’t find out until Wednesday that “The Amazing Race” was back.
The search for answers shows how much this service was still used. But the abruptness of the service termination (it’s looking for a TV Guide server) and the non-communication from the company was disgusting.
There are better ways to save $22 a year.