I was just checking it out vs. TiVo.

I told myself I wasn't going to get involved in a debate about religion... but as a TiVo user for more than two years now, I felt I just had to add my two cents worth.

[disclaimer]This is a biased account -- I have never used, nor even seen a picture of a Replay unit. So all I can do is tell you the things I love about the TiVo.[/disclaimer]

The user interface is far and away the best I have ever seen in a complex consumer product. You can throw away the instruction manual and completely master the thing in an hour. The power and the flexibility of programming is staggering. My TiVo will never record anything that has to do with professional wrestling, for instance; but it will record everything that has to do with (I blush to admit it) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to the point where if Alyson Hannigan is a guest on the David Letterman show TiVo will record it. All of this happens week after week without intervention on my part other than the initial setup of preferences.

My local PBS station does a wonderful thing: They replay their very best shows daily between midnight and 6am. So I get Nova, Scientific American Frontiers, Frontier House, Nature, Rough Science, National Geographic, etc. without having to worry about conflicts with prime time programming -- and again, TiVo is smart enough to do this without intervention on my part.

On the rare occasions that TiVo does schedule to record a program of lesser interest at the expense of one I would prefer to have, I can look at the "Recording History" list which shows everything that it might have recorded but couldn't because of time conflicts; and also everything in the next two weeks that it would like to record but won't be able to because of conflicts. Conflict resolution is easy.

There is no auto-skip of commercials; if there were, I wouldn't use it. I have had auto-skip functions on VCRs, and found it unreliable. TiVo fast forwards at 60x playing speed -- I can skip through a four minute commercial break in four seconds, but still have the option of stopping, skipping back, and watching a commercial that interests me. (Some commercials are more entertaining than the programming)

TiVo is to VCR as empeg is to cassette player. It has changed both what I watch on television and the way that I watch it. Maybe I am just living in an ignorant fool's paradise -- but I cannot imagine how the Replay could possibly be as good, let alone better.

That said, I would spend serious money to have a dual-tuner standalone TiVo. Does anybody think that will ever happen?

tanstaafl.