So what happens if I don't pay Tivo $12.95 a month?

Factual Questions
21

This might be a vendor licensing thing. The TiVo site mentions only the $12.95 & lifetime subscriptions. This listing on Amazon is a Pioneer with Tivo Basic Service. The price is high enough to make a Tivo and a lifetime subscription affordable, though.

Here’s a Toshiba that’s more affordable and includes “No Fee” Tivo service.

Last night I was trying to watch “Enterprise” for the first time in months. My three kids made it so i got about 30 minutes of viewing spread across the 60 minutes of show. I missed the ‘exciting conclusion [sup]TM[/sup]’ and got back to the screen in time to see the Enterprise sailing into the depths of spaces to the final chord of music. sigh

I hate to spend $300+ to feed a TV habit but it’s damned annoying. It helps that most of these non-Tivo units are also progressive scan DVD players. I can sell it to my cheap-ass, penny-pinching brain as a necessary upgrade (as long as I get an HDTV - which I won’t until my current TV goes belly-up).

22

Some interesting comments here. It so happens that it was my TiVo involved.

In any case, I’m up-and-running without a phone line now, but with an ethernet connection instead. In short, TiVo is not the same without the subscription. We’d let the guide lapse by only two days, and it screwed everything up. We’re not TV addicts; what makes the TiVo great is we’re not slaves to the TV, but it becomes our slave. If there’s something worth watching, it can be done on our terms.

In the linked /. article, a few people mention that after 30 days of no guide data, you can’t record anything at all, even manually.