I have come to the point that I am now officially sick of dealing with the endless commercials that pollute prime-time TV, especially sporting events. (I’m looking at you, Monday Night Football.) I figure that getting a DVR such as TiVo would make my life much easier. They have them at Best Buy starting at $249 for up to 80 hours of recording time, which seems like plenty to me. So, TiVo owners, is it really the greatest thing since penecillin? Would would ever go back to your non-TiVo days? Thanks in advance for your responses.
I never watch TV “realtime” any more. Even when I’m going to watch something when it’s on, I’ll wait 10 or 15 minutes into the show before I start watching it. For sporting events, I wait longer.
You can have my Tivo when you can pry the remote from my cold, lifeless grip. Watching TV the old-fashioned way annoys me now.
You can skip commercials. You can watch shows when you want, without having to fool with a VCR or tapes or worrying about taping over something. You can tell it via the internet to record something. You can stop a show or game mid-play when your mom calls and just wants to chat.
What’s not to love?
I love my Tivo. You will take it from me when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. And even then, you’re not getting the remote. I don’t ever watch live TV anymore.
Just having that pause button available is the best thing in the entire universe. Or, like tonight, watching one show that airs from 8-8:30 and then switching immediately to the beginning of another show that started recording from 8-9, and watching it without having to wait for 9 to roll around, and of course zipping through the commercials of both.
We just finally got one (dual-tuner) last summer, and I honestly don’t know how we managed all these years without it.
How cool is TiVo?
TiVo is cooler than Def Leppard defeating the forces of tyranny with nothing but the raw power of Rock.
TiVo is cooler than the rumored offspring of The Fonz and David Hasselhoff if he was zapped with a coolness ray.
TiVo is so rad it has to be monitored with a Geiger counter.
You know that really hot supermodel? The one who you daydream about at work and you can’t pronounce her name? Yeah, that one. TiVo is sexier than that.
TiVo is so awesome, it’s the kind of awesome from before when pizza could be called “awesome.”
TiVo tastes better than the finest Beluga caviar spread lightly over a slice of sweet, sweet victory.
You remember that news story from a few months ago about a guy who battled a giant deer to the death in his house with only his bare hands? Well, it turns out he only used one hand. Because his TiVo remote was in the other one.
TiVo is so boss it can totally fire your boss.
One time I was nervous about asking out a girl. I consulted the TiVo and within seconds I was participating in an orgy with hot female porn stars. There’s a chance that the TiVo simply recorded something from the Playboy channel but I’m pretty sure it was real.
A friend of mine named his cat TiVo. The next day, the cat got run over by a Hummer. Serves him right for calling something a TiVo that isn’t actually a TiVo.
TiVo is so slick, it has a negative coefficient of friction.
Using a TiVo is like shooting heroin but without the side-effects. Also, it’s twice as addictive.
Some people may tell you that your cable company’s DVR is just as good as a TiVo. These people are Al-Qaeda terrorists.
TiVo can be used as a floatation device in the event of a plane crash.
Also, I really like my TiVo, so it has that going for it.
I really like you.
Everything Friedo said, and these two double.
-Lil
I would give up the internet before Tivo.
Make no mistake – if you go with TiVo, or even with a much-maligned Comcast DVR, it will change the way you watch television. Forever.
If you’re an archivist, TiVo is a dream come true. I used to record lots of television programs “live”, resulting in really crappy edits where I tried to cut out the commercials. No problem with TiVo…even if you fudge up an edit, you can always back up and start over.
It’s even better when you upgrade to a DVD Recorder. I’ve got 73 2-hour DVDs of music videos from VH1 Classic (I can scan through an entire day’s worth of programming in under 30 minutes!), 29 DVDs of Iron Chef (4 eps per disc) and over 100 DVDs of miscellaneous stuff, from Mythbusters to obscure foreign films on the Sundance Channel.
Be sure you get a unit with the most recording space available – trust me, you will use ALL of it.
Also, when recording sports programs, be sure to record an extra 60-90 minutes (yes, there’s a setting to do that) since most games tend to run long. (Come to think, I have a feeling that TiVo is what killed my interest in NASCAR…those five-hour races get so boring, I wound up fast-forwarding through the whole event, stopping only for crashes and pit stops. Eventually I said to hell with it…)
There’s no downside.
We got ours from DirecTV. No upfront cost, but there’s an addition to the monthly bill. I think it’s $5 plus $6 for the warranty/maintenance thingie. We get confused with cords and plug-ins, so the extra cost is worth it.
If they ever offer a DVD recorder, I’m on it. I’d get one, but I don’t trust myself to hook it up right.
TiVo was offering a free 80 hour box when you bought 1 year of service. Check out their site for good deals.
I love our TiVos. We have 2 and they talk to each other and live in peace and harmony. His and hers TiVos. Life doesn’t get much better than that.
Note that tje “up to” time on the box really is a maximum. You get to choose the quality from 3-4 different levels for each show, and you’ll only get close to the spec number if you choose “basic,” which is moderately bad.
However, if you have a wireless computer network that the Tivo can be on, you can use Tivo Desktop to cache shows “offline,” in which case it matters less. In any event, my wife and I have the 80-hour, watch a fair amount of TV, and have never filled it to the point where it failed to record something we wanted, or tossed something we were interested in seeing too early.
Here are just two examples of why I love my Tivo:
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I’m interested in travel, and want to watch just about anything travel-related. So I just tell Tivo to watch anything travel-related. Now, if Tivo were dumb, it would simply record everything on the Travel Channel. But Tivo is smart. It knows that some shows on the Travel Channel have very little to do with travel (e.g. Vegas, poker playing, haunted houses, etc.) and it doesn’t record these. And of course, it records travel-related shows on other channels.
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I’m a big fan of Adrien Brody, and I told this to my Tivo. So it records everything Adrien Brody is in: Movies, Talk shows, SNL appearances. Regardless of the channel or time, it just automatically records them.
When I first got Tivo, about a year ago, I got the unit and the service directly from Tivo. I got my first year free, and a unit that will record up to 300 hours.
I do not know if I could live without it again.
The coolest things are wish lists and season passes. You set a season pass for a a show on a channel and it records that show no matter when it plays.
If you set up a wish list for a show, actor, director or even a keyword (like ballroom dancing) and it will record any show that has it, no matter what time or channel.
And it records stuff* it thinks you will like*.
It’s too cool for mere words.
I tend to watch tv when I don’t have other things to do; that is, I don’t make time for tv shows, but if I feel like watching tv, I’ll watch tv. Which generally consists of me flipping channels for an hour looking for something to be on.
With a dvr, when I feel like watching tv, it’s collected stuff for me to watch. So I can be more efficient in my tv watching, which means I actually spend less time watching tv now than I did before dvr. And, as others have said, the pause button is an incredible thing – you can get up for a cup of tea whenever you want. I can’t stand watching tv in real time anymore, because you have to sit through commercials!
Having said all that, I think that if you’re a tv junkie, this thing could be a tool of satan. It does record what you tell it to, but it also records other things it thinks you’ll like. Which, I understand, has been the ruination of many people.
My tivo is set to record Grey’s Anatomy for a friend; but it also records, say, Oprah, when a Grey’s Anatomy cast member is on; or Rachel Ray, when they’re on there. So a simple hour of Grey’s Anatomy can become almost 2 hours of tv.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone who got TiVo and just said “meh”.
Almost all TiVo users are like people on this thread. The endorsement doesn’t get any greater.
I’d probably stop watching TV if I couldn’t have Tivo. I might get 3-5 shows per week off the internet, but that’s it.
I don’t have a TiVo but I have something similar. With any hard disk based DVR, you get some major benefits over VCRs, such as not having to mess around with tapes or remember what you recorded where, ease of setting timers, and the ability to pause and rewind live TV.
But smart PVRs like TiVo take things to another level. It’s like having an invisible friend who knows what TV shows you like and automatically records them without you having to do anything. If they move to a different time or day, or come back after being off the air for a while, it doesn’t matter.
I have the much maligned Comcast DVR, and while I can’t say it’s as good as Tivo, it’s good enough for me. Like many have mentioned, I never watch anything in real time anymore, even if I’m home. Why watch commercials if I don’t have to? My DVR doesn’t have the feature where it indpendently records everything I *might * like, but I don’t really want that, since I *already * watch too much television! A girl’s gotta leave the house every once in a while!
What’s not to love about being able to settle in on a Sunday afternoon, and watch all your favorite shows right in a row? Never again will I be the woman trying to break up the PTA meeting so that I don’t miss Veronica Mars!
Just now, my husband was making a big loud noise upstairs while the traffic report was on the news. Because of my headache and the early morning hour, I didn’t want to turn up the tv too loud (so as to disturb my neighbors). I simply hit rewind when he was done and watched the traffic report again (this time with sound).
The other day, I started watching a rerun of the Simpsons on our local Fox affiliate (which doesn’t put episode-specific descriptions into the TiVo system). About a minute in, I realized it was the “Blinky” episode, one of my favorites. So I simply hit record and it recorded from then on, PLUS the part of the episode I had already seen. So now my saved copy of the episode is complete. With a VCR, it would be missing the first part.
There are so many little wonderful things about it. You just need to buy one to discover the joy that is TiVo ownership.
Another very cool thing about TiVo: you can program it over the Internet! Say you’re going to be working late, but you wanted to record a show you just heard about at lunchtime that you will otherwise miss. As long as TiVo has an hour’s notice ahead of time, you can go to the TiVo website and program your TiVo from there. Even if you know only the name of the program, and you don’t know the exact time or the channel.