If you haven’t been following my television equipment journey, I purchased a new TiVo a couple months ago. I had been struggling with this decision for a while and took a circuitous route to get there. Some time ago I was lamenting that my then current TiVo could only record one channel at a time. And we all know that just doesn’t suffice. I had a recordable dvd player that had replaced my final vhs recorder but it was time to take the next step.
I loved my TiVo and I loved the lifetime service that I had gotten with it, unfortunately it’s not transferable from one box to another. I weighed the costs of a new box and new monthly service against the monthly rental of a Comcast box, the phrase penny wise, pound foolish comes to mind when I reflect back on my decision. I should note that I was also at that time finally going to pay for cable and figured if they were already coming out it was worth a risk free month to month trial.
The problems started immediately but I can sum them up by touting my favorite feature about my new TiVo. It does not malfunction when I set it to record a show. Pretty fancy stuff, right? The Comcast dvr was so problematic that it wasn’t the interface issues that caused me to revolt, it was my desire to see the shows that I wanted to record.
So now that I’m back what else do I heart about my TiVo:
- Ffwd/Rwd – Hit the buttons and it lands where you meant it to land without a weird jump, I missed that.
- Incredible storage – You get what you pay for, but knowing that I can record all of the stuff I generally watch in a week, plus piling up a couple series that I can get behind on, and seeing it still at 15% makes me happy… come vacation, tennis tournaments, or Olympics I feel like I’ll be in good shape.
- Other services – This is available on other stuff besides TiVo but I’m now streaming my Netflix with no effort, plus I have access to Amazon, Blockbuster, and Pandora among others.
- Advanced guide – I use my guide, the search capabilities, and the episode displays as a constant research tool and the advanced features on the guide are great, did I miss an episode, let me just check the episode guide.
- Episodes to go – So I don’t quite have this working yet but you can download shows from your TV to your computer and watch wherever you want.
I’m still playing with it so there could be more fun to be had. Though to be fair there were a couple things that I liked a little better on Comcast:
- On Demand – I could probably still get a box but the additional shows were a nice option in addition to stuff I recorded.
- Picture in Picture – The transition from small to full screen was just smoother on my old Comcast, for whatever reason.
- Recording shows in guide – The old guide showed right in it that it was something being recorded (now I seem to have to select the show to tell).
- Not recording shows in to do list – The old guide also clearly showed what items weren’t being recorded due to conflicts, but the TiVo shows each episode not being recorded including those that are duplicates or repeats (if my setting is to not record them) which makes it difficult to weed through what I’m really going to be missing.
And here’s what I want next:
- All online video – I can watch shows for free on network and cable sites and on sites like Hulu, it would be great to have that all centralized instead of returning to my computer, all in good time I assume.
- Ability to delete part of a recording – This goes back to the recording long shows, shouldn’t you be able to delete part of it, though I suppose now that I have so much storage it doesn’t matter.
- Record more shows – And of course I’d like to record more than two shows, darn it if I don’t still have conflicts that make me sacrifice a recording.
So the TiVo will soon be out of date with the latest technology, and tech will always leave me wanting more… But for now I am delighted to return to see TiVo’s little smiling face.
