Tivo

I love Tivo. If you don't have a Tivo, you won't understand. I don't mean it as if it's some secret, exclusive club, but unless you've used a Tivo, you just don't believe us Tivoites when we gush and go on and on about how great they are.

They are a great time saver. You can watch a 30 minute show in 20 minutes, and more imporantly, you can control what you want to watch when you want to watch it. I live in the Central time zone where TV shows are on an hour earlier than the other time zones. Having a Tivo lets me watch the shows that come during prime time later in the evening when I actually have time to watch TV.

I have 3 Tivos. That may seem like a lot, but it's just one on each TV. One in the bedroom, one in the living room, and one in the kid's playroom. My favorite Tivo is a Pioneer that has a DVD burner integrated in it. It's easy to archive shows onto a DVD, and I don't need a seperate player. I wish I had one of these for each room, but they were fairly expensive when new, and they are no longer made. I've been considering picking a couple up on eBay, but my beer budget gets in the way of my champaigne taste.

Unlike most Tivoites, I do have a few minor gripes about the sacred black (or silver) box. First, part of the greatness of Tivo is that they can be networked. However, until just a month ago, they did not come with a network connection. You had to purchase a USB network connector seperately. Duh. What makes it worse is that the large files involved with transferring the video from Tivo to Tivo is limited to the speed of the USB connection. Therefore, it doesn't matter how fast your network is, the USB connection bottlenecks your transfers. Double duh.

I also have a gripe about the "Season Pass" feature. Each Tivo has to have the passes set up individually. Aside from it being a pain to manage each one individually, if the networks move time slots, the shows can conflict with one another. Depending on how you have them set up, you can wind up missing a show even if you have two other Tivos sitting idle. It's a bit too much trouble to manage all the shows in great detail, so sometimes I just wind up missing some shows.

About a month ago, Tivo released their latest box. Basically, it's what they should have come out with a couple years ago. Dual tuners, integrated ethernet, and no phone line needed to set it all up. This is what they should have come with a few years back, and by now they should have dual (or more) tuners, cable card for On Demand video from your cable company, integrated gigabit ethernet, and HDTV capability.

Tivo has been putting all its efforts into expanding the software of the boxes, and the hardware is being neglected. You now have access to several different types of downloadable content, but most of it amounts to a bunch of advertising. They've got a great interface, but if they don't get their act together, they are going to lose out to the cable companies' proprietary DVRs.