TiVoLutionary! A Gadget that can change your life? Yes!
Written: Jun 10 '03
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Pros: The ultimate television recording solution. Hackable, reliable, wonderful!
Cons: A con? For TiVo? No way!
The Bottom Line: I don't know how I lived without my TiVo. It's one of the top five inventions ever. I'm serious!
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| mrs-j's Full Review: Sony SAT-T60 DIRECTV Receiver with TiVo Service |
Overview
When I first heard about TiVo my reaction was like a lot of other people who had lived with VCR's all their life. "What do I need a fancy-schmancy super VCR for? Only idiots would pay that much money for something that just records shows."
Here's the thing, I completely didn't get it. I totally didn't get it. And I continued to not get it until I had a roommate move in with me. He had put his TiVo in storage and hounded me for months to purchase a TiVo. He kept on telling me how much I would love it and he even said he'd help me hack it to 100+ hours.
One day while we were at Circuit City we found an open box special on the SAT-T60 TiVo. He talked me into purchasing it (he always was really good at convincing me to spend money) and then he directed me on exactly what hard drive to buy from Best Buy, and what hard disk mount to buy from an online vendor to hack the TiVo.
Within a week I had a 101 hour recording monster.
Features and Specs
The thing about TiVo is you never have to worry about missing a show and once you set up season passes you don't even have to think about the show any longer. If the show changes times, so will your season pass.
TiVo subscribers pay around $10 a month for a service that manages the shows and lineups and guide data for them. When you pay that money each month, you are paying for TiVo to know when your show changes nights or is moved to a different time slot.
Season Passes
The easiest way to record a show is to set up a season pass for it. When you set up a season pass for a show you can choose how many episodes of a show you want to see, what quality you want the show to record in, and how long you want to keep each episode for. You can also specify if you want TiVo to record the first run only or if you want it to record repeats of your show.
Season passes follow your show around. If your show moves, so will your season pass.
Keyword Searches
You can set up a keyword search but you should use this option with care. My husband set up a keyword search for "Murphy Brown" because we couldn't find a regular showing of Murphy Brown to set a season pass for. Suddenly we found ourselves getting strange shows recorded because there would be producers, directors or actors with the last names "Murphy" and "Brown" involved.
Search by Program Time or Channel
You can also search for a specific program by the time or channel that it is on. Once you find it you can set up a season pass for the program or set it up to record only the specific showing you are looking for. This is very useful if someone tells you they really liked a program but they can't remember the name of it. "It comes on around 5PM on the Discovery Channel", etc.
Suggestions
Based on your viewing habits, TiVo will suggest programs that it thinks you might like. You can set up the TiVo to automatically record these programs or mercifully, you can disable this feature. TiVo once thought that I wanted nothing but children's programs after I started recording "The Simpson's". Presumably, one cartoon on Fox meant that I wanted every cartoon on Nickelodeon!
If you don't like the suggestions that TiVo is giving you but you don't want to turn off the feature fully you can "Thumb up" or "Thumb down" each suggested title. Supposedly this will give your TiVo a better idea of what you might like to watch, but I didn't find that it made much of a difference.
A Word on Disk Space
As I wrote earlier, I hacked my TiVo so that it could record up to 101 hours at Basic quality. Most people won't opt to do this and so if you've only got 30 or 60 hours on your TiVo, you will need to pare down your suggestions and do some "TiVo Maintenance" on a regular basis, deleting programs you aren't going to watch, and deleting suggestions you aren't interested in. About ten minutes of TiVo Maintenance each week will keep your TiVo in top shape with plenty of space to record new programs.
TiVo - At Work
Okay so you know the features, but how great is the TiVo really? Well, in a word it's fantastic. I haven't missed an episode of "Survivor" since I got my TiVo. (This, many might argue, could be a bad thing!) I can now watch any show I want, no matter how late or early it comes on. Can't stay up to watch "The Daily Show"? Just set the TiVo and it'll be waiting for me anytime I want.
Customer Support
Okay, so TiVo is great and TiVo is wonderful and I'm running off at the mouth about its greatness, but how is the customer service?
Well, customer service at TiVo has been pretty decent in my experience. Not great, but not awful either. The wait times on hold are fairly long but once you get through to a TiVo representative, you'll have someone who knows what they're talking about on the phone with you.
Bear in mind that if you hack your TiVo as I did, the hardware is unsupported. (Since my purchase was an open box buy, the hardware was already unsupported, so I figured I wasn't losing much.)
Summary
I can't believe I used to roll my eyes at the notion of owning a TiVo. That's almost as ridiculous as when I used to roll my eyes at the notion of owning a computer, telling my father instead that a word processor would be a "much better purchase" instead of a full-fledged computer. We're all stupid at one time or another.
TiVo has truly changed the way we watch TV and yes, it's also changed how we live our lives as well. There is no more rushing home to catch some television program, or turning down plans or scheduling around something we want to watch on TV. If we want to watch something on TV, we will catch it when we want to catch it. It's really nice to have TV bending to accommodate your schedule, rather than the other way around.
TiVos are still expensive, but if you can find one, particularly this model, for a reasonable price... You owe it to yourself to try it out!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 250
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mrs-j
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"Man was made for something better than disturbing dirt." - Oscar Wilde
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