We have DirecTV with TiVo or DirecTV DVR in three of them. Two have TiVo, one has DirecTV DVR. TiVo rocks. DirecTV DVR is better than nothing, but it sucks in comparison. It's slower, harder to read, more complex, the buttons don't even make sense and I swear sometimes I can't figure out how to do something as simple as set up a season pass or delete all the recordings in one group without having to navigate up and down and all around.
Regular TiVo is so easy, my toddler - sadly - can figure it out. Frankly I don't know how we did without it. Besides being able to pause live TV and then skip the commercial breaks if the recorded part exceeds the total length of commercial time (example - last night we were watching Jeopardy - my dad calls, talks for ten minutes - we re-start Jeopardy and watch all of it without commercials, because the ten minute break was sufficient to cover the commercials) - if you watch any channel for any length of time, it's already recording. It will also "pause" for a whole hour before it resumes - which means if you pause a show and come back 45 minutes later, you can skip the commercials over the time it takes you to watch the programmed part of your recording.
And it does two at a time - but you do have to watch ONE of them IF you're doing two at once.
We can record pay-per-view with a button and the rest is automatic, and we can keep it on the TiVo indefinitely. When there's a conflict, we can just reschedule the pay per view recording for way late at night when we're asleep.
Until the writer's strike, we almost never watched a TV show that hadn't been recorded already. We'd just go down the list and pick any one of a dozen shows we'd had it record already. Last year we let it record all of 24 so we didn't have to wait between shows.
It is so worth it.
Please explain why?
