“Maybe” i can get a new 40 hour TiVo set for $10 using my superhuman abilities to spot a good deal. Wish me luck. if not i’ll hold off for the next good deal.
Amoxicillin is a frivilous human pleasure? I mean, I know people weren’t dropping like flies before it came about, but come on…
As for me, I worship my Tivo. There’s two tivos in the house, wirelessly connected so they can share shows. My mother is also addicted. Totally.
-Lil
It really is nice to have the lifetime service. We watch a lot less tv, but enjoy it more, have watched more good movies too. I can’t wait to get another Tivo, ours is too small. There are weeks we ignore the TV and sometimes let a good portion of a series we are watching build up. It was great to be able to watch 3 west wings in a marathon, but then if the Tivo is full of save until deletes, we don’t get those mad Tivo picks, like “Kiss me, Guido!”
A co-worker described Tivo as Crack-TV. I assumed that he was exaggerating. Nope. Not at all. I can’t go back. I’ll never go back. The only drawbacks to it is that you hate watching TV on “inferior” systems and that when I listen to the radio, I can’t rewind.
Of all of my technology purchases, it is the best by far. No contest.
I dont’ have a tivo and I hate watching anything with someone who does have a tivo.
We had an Oscar party last year and the two people with tivo’s would not shut up. Then they would say “What did we miss? Why can’t we rewind it!” “Waaa Waaa, Next year we have to watch it at my house!”
What is this “TiVo” of which you speak?
TiVo is a honking huge hard drive for your TV. It monitor the secret codes in the TV Guide and can do neat tricks like record every Star Trek as it comes over the cable whether your TV is on or not.
Then you can watch Star Trek while it record another one. You can watch Enterprise live and pause it when the popcorn is done. Get back in your barcalounger and fire it up where it left off. It can even record and zap the commercials.
My only question is if it is easy enough to use to buy one for my silver-haired mother for Christmas.
I was in a hotel earlier this year watching something on TV (Law and Order, probably) and I missed a line of dialog and then spent about thirty seconds looking for the remote, only to discover upon finding it that it didn’t have a replay button! I probably missed a whole minute of dialog because of that.
TiVo totally changes the way you watch TV. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is a good thing: it makes the TV your servant instead of your master.
I think so. Everything is pretty much in straight forward English. When you have to press a button it tells you which one. All the commands are clear. To pick the programs you want by going to “Pick programs to record” You can then "Search by Title, “Search using Wishlists”, or “Browse by time or channel.” No codes to enter, you just select what you want. Wishlist is about as technical as it gets.
Indoor plumbing. Sure, I could pretend I’m a bear and go in the woods behind my house, but nothing could be finer than the frivolous joy of flushing my merde away.
I don’t have TiVo. It has been nine years since I even turned on the idiot box, so it is unlikely I’ll ever need the service it provides.
Ha! I’m forever going to rewind the radio “WTF did he just say?!” and then :smack: oops, no radio Tivo.
Old Radio Tivo threads:
Sirius satellite radio. Commercial free music at near CD quality from any genre I can think of, plus a bunch of news/entertainment content, including two comedy streams and two each of liberal and conservative talk. It makes a 12 hour drive bearable.
Now if only it had a “radio TiVo” built in…
You know, it’s odd - I have never met a single person who has TiVo, and I work at a radio/TV station. You’d think, by the responses of the owners in this thread, that anyone who had one would be raving about it, or at least bringing it up often in conversation. I’ve never heard anyone mention it. I don’t need one myself, I don’t watch television, and haven’t with any regularity since the 1970s. My wife and I have three VCRs, but I can’t remember the last time any of them were even turned on.
What frivolous technology could I not do without? The internet. That’s my TV, and there are no annoying commercials on it. I’ve got pop-up blockers, graphics blockers, and I don’t generally surf the web, I use it like a reference library. And I read the Dope. This goes hand-in-hand with computers, which are, IMO, the most interesting invention in my lifetime.
What kind of quality can I expect? If you get the lifetime membership, can you upgrade your Tivo once the third generation recorders come into being? How can you wirelessly connect two Tivos and does that mean you only need to pay for one subscription?
You can set different quality levels, depending on how much space you want to use for each hour of TV. I use High or Medium quality exclusively, and can’t tell a difference from normal broadcast tv. Of course, I tend to watch shows like Blind Date and the Simpsons, where it doesn’t really matter.
Lifetime membership means for the life of the TiVo box, not your lifetime. If you want a new box, you have to buy a new subscription. Typically, though, as long as you keep the same box for over a year, the lifetime subscription is cheaper than the monthly.
Best quality is indistinguishable from the original broadcast, IMO, and High quality is nearly as good. Medium is fine for cartoons and tolerable for live action shows, and even Basic quality is better than VHS if there isn’t too much fast motion.
No. You can “upgrade” your TiVo by installing a bigger hard drive, and it’ll automatically download software updates, but the lifetime subscription is only for one box.
You can use a wireless USB adapter to connect TiVo to your WiFi network. I think you still need a subscription for each box, but additional subscriptions are half price.
Actually, TiVo did allow you to move your lifetime subscription from your TiVo series 1 to a newly purchased TiVo series 2, for a limited time at the start of the TiVo series 2 release. While there’s no guarantee that they’ll do the same with TiVo series 3, there’s also no reason to believe that they won’t.
A lifetime subscription will also add about $150-200 to your TiVo’s value if/when you sell it on ebay and buy another one with the proceeds.
Basic quality is somewhat grainy I have noticed. Best and High are almost indistinguishable from each other. Medium isn’t bad but you can tell there is some lack of definition. However after viewing TV for a few days on basic or medium quality you stop noticing the lack of definition.
Now that I am in the TiVo club I say ‘eh’. TiVo is nice and worth the investment (especially considering that a lifetime subscription greatly increases resale value and I had a $100 MIR) but it really is just a smart VCR. I have noticed that I actually spend alot less time watching TV now that I have TiVo. I would rather go to the woods and meditate or hike or go study or something like that than watch TV now. Maybe its the lack of suprise over ‘whats on’ or something that is making me lose interest in TV, I already know what is on days before it comes on and i can watch it anytime I want. Two episodes of the simpsons come on at 6 and 630pm everyday of the week here. I used to try to get home at 6pm so I could watch them, now I just TiVo them and after reading the description I don’t even watch at least half of them.
I missed the word “frivolous” in the OP :smack:
My actually frivolous modern pleasure is probably my laptop.