bcp said:
Daughter wants me to get it because one of her friends have it.
so, being not up to date on this wonderful technology, I have no idea if it is worth my time and trouble to actually buy it and put it on my line.
I did see that there was a monthly fee associated with TIVO, why?
Can I still use the thing without paying the monthly fee?
I have no clue what it is other than it can record shows. I have a VCR still that can do that, so whats the difference?
by the way, since sports are never turned on in our house, I doubt that the instant replay during football games would be of any interest to anyone here.
We have three of them in our house. I used to think they were pointless - now I can barely see why I bothered to watch TV without it.
Now for us, we have DirecTV - the TiVo box *replaces* the cable box, so there's no *additional* charge. We buy the box outright, and pay the 5 dollar or so charge for the box, which we would pay anyway. I'm still not sure if we pay for the additional line that comes in (because TiVo needs TWO incoming lines) but it really doesn't matter to me.
There's probably about three or four features I use which makes it invaluable to me. By far the best is to set up for all the shows you regularly watch - or want to watch. I'll set up one of my boxes to record Heroes, 24, CSI, Battlestar Galactica, The Unit etc. - I might have as many as twenty shows but there's really no limit. I can have it record all of them - up to 5 each - only first run - or include re-runs - whatever I want. The only limitation is that I only have about 60 hours of programming at any given time - plenty of storage.
What this DOES for me is allows me to watch my shows whenever I sit down to watch TV. So, when I get home, I can watch last night's "House", edit out the commercials. Or I can watch both parts of a two-parter if I let enough time elapse, and that's easy to do when you watch TV for 2.5 hours at night and you have 60 hours of programming to work with.
I can also record Pay-Per-View. My wife does this all the time. She uses the control to order Pay-Per-View and it records its at whatever time she picks. And she doesn't have to watch it then. So if "The Lake House" comes on on Pay-Per-View at midnight, she just clicks it, it's ordered, and she can watch it anytime afterwards, as long as she keeps it on the TiVo.
A couple other features which I use - stopping it for bathroom breaks, phone calls and so on. Regular programming has lots of commercial breaks. If you pause "live" TV when you go to the bathroom or run to the kitchen, you'll "lose" a few minutes of TV time - but that means at the next commercial, you can skip over it until you catch up. So TiVo means you don't even have to wait for a commercial break - you just pause when you feel like it.
Our TiVo has a couple other minor functions I like - one of them has an automatic "backup" - it assumes when you scan forward, you'll just miss the spot you want - so it will back it up about ten seconds for you. It has the ability to just back up a set amount of seconds if you just missed something - like a comment you didn't hear right.
We plan to let our TiVo record most of the new season of 24 before we start watching it - so we don't have to deal with the cliffhangers. And I can't tell you how cool it is to record a whole miniseries just by clicking one button and getting it all in when it runs, especially when they re-run it till late at night in one marathon burst.
Lastly - we don't buy premium cable channels. But they DO run "freebie" weekends a few times a year. TiVo tells you about these most of the time, and I usually sit down and mark all the free movies I want to record. So every few months I get about a couple dozen movies to watch for free.
I think I'd go nuts with TiVo if I was a sports fan. I'd probably have one for every TV in the house.
