I am about to buy DirecTV with an integrated Tivo Receiver. Tell me, what do you think about DirecTV? Is it better than cable? Worse? How often do you watch the chanels beyond the basic packaged ones? If you have an opion on DirecTV, please share it, thanks.
Ok, I see that there was a previous thread sort of about this, but hey I like new things, so what’s new with DirecTV and Tivo that hasn’t been said before?
We like our DirecTV - we dumped Dish Network for it so my husband could get the NFL package.
I guess the one disadvantage satellite has vs. cable is that when the weather is bad (thunderstorms, hard rain), the satellite goes out. This was particularly annoying once when we’d bought a pay-per-view movie and missed about 15 minutes of it right in the middle due to a storm outage.
We don’t have the choice of cable now (we live out in the sticks), but back when we lived elsewhere, I was really annoyed by the constant rate increases of cable, along with the rather crappy service, and we were seriously thinking of changing to satellite. Moving pretty much made the decision for us.
OESGal, my TiVo and DirecTV are the first and second best things to come in to my life. All right, that sounds pathetic, but you know what mean… I REALLY love both of them, and think the price I pay is well worth what I get.
I really can’t recommend them highly enough. DirecTV is better than any cable system I’ve ever had, and I’'ve had lots. I have never had a reception problem due to weather, but I live in L.A.
I have no experience with Direct TV, but TiVo is awesome!!!
No more commercials EVER!!! You can watch your favorite shows in about 15 minutes less for an hour show, and 10 minutes less for a half hour show.
You can watch them on saturday mornings when nothing else is on. You can watch them at 3 am if you want to.
It’s the best!! I watch about 1/4 the amount of Television that most Americans do, and even I still appreciate the time savings you get with it.
Not to mention doing away with the aggravating commercials.
No direct experience, but a guy in the next office has what he calls “DirecTiVo” and he won’t shut up about it. He seems to be a reasonable person, so it’s probably pretty good if you like watching a lot of TV.
My inlaws have DirecTV because they live in the middle of nowhere. The main problems they’ve had have been technical issues with the dish itself, mainly from high winds pushing it around (they get a lot of wind where they are). They also have satellite internet, since it’s their only option, and it’s worked reasonably well.
I have questions about TiVo. I have friends who just rave about it, but I don’t see that it has any advantage over just taping shows, and it has quite a few disadvantages. First, how many shows can you save, and for how long? I tend to tape many episodes of my favorite shows over a long period of time and then watch them all at once when I have a free day. Would TiVo allow this? And it’s my understanding that you have to pay a monthly fee for the service on top of equipment costs. How much does that cost, and is it really worth the money? Why? Can you save more than one show at a time and, if so, can you save two digital cable (or DirecTV) channels simultaneously? Can you watch whatever you want while saving something else? We have two VCRs hooked up, along with digital cable, and we can tape and/or watch one digital channel at a time, since we have just one cable box. We can tape and/or watch a regular cable channel through one of the VCRs simultaneously.
Well I can answer part of the question why Tivo is better than a VCR. Let me ask you a question. Obviously you have a VCR. You could watch every single program you wanted time shifted. You could watch everything at your leisure, pause to take a leak or get a sandwich at any time since it’s recorded. You could watch something that was on when you were in work or asleep later on. So given what I just said and the flexibility it’d give you why don’t you just watch everything off of a tape? I can name a few reasons
- I can’t watch and record at the same time.
- I’d have to juggle tapes to do this
- I’d have to cross reference with a TV guide for taping times.
- My vcr is a pain the ass to program
- I have to baby it since it won’t even change the channel
I think those are the major ones and that’s the major things Tivo takes care of. Since I can watch a recorded program, since I don’t have to juggle tapes, since it has a built in tv guide that the Tivo reference when I tell it I want to record something and since I don’t have to baby it I generally watch EVERYTHING time shifted. (Hell, I would have never seen Kids in the Hall on comedy central if I didn’t have a Tivo. I didn’t even know it was on but my Tivo “knows” I like comedies and recorded it for me.)
Dave_D, that may be fine for you, but as demonstrated by Tivo’s relatively slow market penetration, the majority of viewers simply do not deem those facets reason enough to purchase an unnecessary devise and obligate themselves to a subscription service to enhance an activity that’s essentially non-essential to their lives. VCRs more than suffice for most.
Tivo has changed our lives. We love it and rarely watch anything not off the Tivo.
VCRs may suffice for most, but they never did anything for me except allow me to watch movies. Taping was too much work, tapes are too big and bulky. Now the “movie” watching happens from the DVD player and the TV watching happens from the Tivo. We have a VCR (actually replaced our broken one recently), but its the least used piece of electronics next to the turntable in the stack o’ electronics. I suspect that Tivo will be fairly slow to acheive really good market penetration, and - as long as you can get a $40 VCR - will be a luxury item for a long time.
Tivo is expensive. You need to commit to the subscription service to get more out of it than you did with your VCR. But it is very easy to use, learns your behavior, allows you to follow your favorite shows as they are moved to obscure time slots, allows you to start watching a game half an hour in and skip forward through the commercials to end about the same time the game does. We’ve never misprogrammed the Tivo or forgotten to put the tape in.
We paid for our subscription service up front - and were fairly early adopters, so our Tivo was cheap (we’ve since upgraded to Tivo 2, but kept our subscription). Its been worth far more to us than we paid for it and the service.
I can’t remember how many hours our Tivo holds, but more than enough for us to have 3 Dora’s, 3 Blue’s Clues, 3 SpongBob’s, (can you tell I have kids) 3 Justice Leagues, 3 Samari Jacks, and a ton of other stuff at the same time.
(We don’t have direct tv, we have cable).
We’ve had DTV for about three years, just bought a Tivo combo and installed it about 3 months ago. Love it for reasons already mentioned.
Well, from what I have found out about TiVo (my father has DirecTV and TiVo), you can tell it to save any shows you want up to a certain amount, I think it’s like 40 hours of storage space. Think of TiVo as a computer hard drive because that is essentially what it is doing. Also, what I’m really looking forward to is it’s capability to record a certain show whenever it comes on, no matter if the network moves it around. You can also tell TiVo to only record new shows or include all the reruns if you want.
You can watch TV and record something on another channel if you get the DirecTV dish with two receptors (is that what they are called?). TiVo will also, if it already has two things recording at once, look for the same show on another channel or at a different time, so you get the show you want, but maybe not until a couple days later or something like that.
I am having DirecTV with TiVo installed in my house next Fri 15th, and this is what I have found in my research so far in answer to your specific questions 
Anyone else had experiences that are not talked about on the official websites, etc?
The “never catch reruns” thing can be kind of flaky. Tivo only works with the information it has - so if the data doesn’t let Tivo know its a rerun (or if its a rerun you want to see because you missed it the first time) your Tivo doesn’t know. Same thing with time switches. As long as the data is updated, Tivo will follow the show around. When things get moved because of football games going long, Tivo doesn’t know. Nickeloden did this thing this summer where all the shows were offset by ten minutes - Tivo couldn’t deal with it. Bothered us - but we blamed Nick for the data that its show started at 10:00 am and ended at 10:30, not Tivo for not realizing that they were lying.
Thanks, Dangerosa, good to know.
Tivo gives you the option when recording to “overrun” by 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes (maybe more). This is good to keep in mind if you are recording something is on the same channel that a sporting event was on earlier that day.
Tivo is easily the greatest advance for mankind … ever.
There’s a lot to like about TiVo. Sometimes my S.O. and I like to watch programs that are on at the same time. If we’re both out of the house, we can tape both. The catching the program whenever it’s on thing has already been mentioned.
But I think the true beauty of TiVo can be seen from a recent experience. Through a process too complicated to explain, jeevdawg was in a teaser promo for a local TV station. We were able to tape the program during which the promo appeared on our TiVo, and quickly and easily make many tapes for our friends and family. We can also, with two or three clicks of the button, show this program to anyone who comes to visit. (And we do. Often.)
With a VCR, it would have been much more of a pain to make copies.
Now, my S.O. thinks that the TiVo is limited because you have to watch the program at the TiVo’s location (unlike a tape, which can be popped out and watched anywhere). She thinks it’s basically nice, but not “all that.”
I like the programming on DirecTV. There’s enough on the basic $39.99 package to keep us entertained. There’s usually some good music thing going on, either a “freeview” concert or something on the small arts channels (Trio, Link, etc.)
I discontinued the premium movie channel packages because I found myself flipping through the same old handful of movies spread out over 30 or so channels. I thought it was a waste of money.
When their promos run out they’ll just keep the services going and bill you for it, so be careful of that. For instance when you start up they might throw in a bunch of movie channels and NFL Sunday for free. Once the promo period is over they’ll just leave all that stuff on and bill you for it so your $39.99 bill is suddenly a $132 bill. You can just end it with a phone call, though.
Reception has been fine. It went out when hurricane Isidore went through last year but that was about it as far as I can remember.
I recommend it!
Great, now all I need to do is wait for mine to be installed next friday This sounds like the best thing since sliced bread!
One other thing to keep in mind is that it is possible to…enhance the hard drives on Tivo units, so that you can record more programs. I know that on the series one, you could also extract the video, so you could digitally archive things, not sure about the series 2 Tivo’s.