I’m completely sold on the concept of TiVo. I would buy one today if they worked to their full capacity in Canada. Unfortunately, they do not. To my understanding, it is some problem with purchasing the rights to the TV listings. However, I’m curious, would a TiVo without connection to the TiVo service still function in its primary way, ie be a digital VCR? Can you manually set it to record, eg “Channel 8, Thursday, 6:30”? kind of thing? Would it constantly nag like a shareware program that you need the TiVo service? Would it work with those digital cable boxes we have with Shaw cable (Motorola brand)?
It’d be annoying to not have the fun features of season passes and such, but it would be so much better at time-shifting for me.
I know the Bell PVRs (analagous to the DirectTiVo units I’ve seen) exist, but they’re quite expensive and for various reasons I don’t want to get a satellite dish right now.
Raygun99 if you know what channel # corrosponds to the same chanell # on a television station in the states there are custom scripts by hackers to let you alter the lineup. But you are better asking over in the link dirty1 provided
Early models of Tivo allowed some limited pre-programming. More recent models limit you to like a half-hour at a time “now”.
Tivo loses money selling their PVRs. They hope to eventually make money on the subscriptions. Paying a monthly fee is what holds most people back from buying PVRs but no one wants to buy a $$ fully programmable one when there’s a cheaper non-programmable one on the shelf. (American consumers are so paradoxical.)
I have heard an American exec from a Large Japanese Consumer Electronics Firm use Very Bad Language at Tivo for “polluting” the marketplace for PVRs.
My TiVo allows you to use it as a digital VCR as long as you know the time and channel you’re interested in even if you don’t subscribe to the service. I do subscribe so I don’t know exactly what happens, although I do know that if you don’t make a program data call for a several days it displays a warning message at the bottom of the menu screen (but not during viewing of programs). However, my TiVo is about three years old so if there have been hardware changes of the type ftg describes I wouldn’t know about them. (I probably would notice similar software changes because I get automatic system software upgrades, and I haven’t seen anything like what he describes.)