Saturday, September 24, 2005

TiVo First Impressions....

Well I just got my TiVo. I can't believe that I waited so long to get one of these. I was living in Silicon Valley when TiVo and ReplayTV came out and was fascinated by the idea of their products. It was one of those "why didn't I ever think of that" deals. But they aren't cheap and so I just never got one.

I got the 140 hour version because of the recent $150 rebates figuring that I'm going to fill it up for atleast a little while. We'll see whether this makes me watch a great deal more TV, or whether it does what I think it will eventually and that's that I'll actually watch a little less. I'll only watch shows I actually want too and not the stupid 30 minute sitcom that comes between two shows I do want to see. We'll find out soon enough.....

So far I'm loving the ability to pause live TV. I've been watching some of the President's Cup golf matches while doing dishes, eating, laundry, etc and I just keep pausing the show and then picking back up when I get done the current task. It's awesome to fast forward through the commercials and get caught up to the play live if I want too.

The thing that definitely is a short coming of the system is the fact that it doesn't have a second tuner built in. This is something that I would definitely pay extra for. I know I can wire up my home theater to act like that, but it's going to be a real pain and I still lose the functionality of my cable box because TiVo needs that in order to be able to get to the pay channels like HBO and such. I've got to think that it wouldn't be a huge price hit to add the second tuner to the TiVo box and would certainly provide a nicer interace to the user. You wouldn't need to have two sets of Audio and Video cables floating around all over the place. That's a big feature if you have a cable nightmare like I do!!

So perhaps in the future TiVo will go that route. Right now I think they've got to be feeling some serious heat from the local Cable companies offering the same service with their own digital cable boxes. I believe some of those new ones even have the second tuner built in and that's a definite plus!! I didn't go that route mostly because I wanted to support the TiVo idea and I wanted the extra functionality that it offers such as the TiVoToGo features.

So at this point I'm very happy with my purchase. We'll see how it keeps going as we move forward.

-Kent

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