Would it be better to get a Tivo or DVD Player/Recorder?


There is no room for dispute on this: Get the TiVo.

I have never owned anything that changed my life as much as TiVo. But you must understand that the hardware isn't what you're paying for. What makes TiVo valuable is the TiVo service.

Here are just some random thoughts in praise of TiVo, in no particular order.

1) Imagine never missing a TV show you wanted to see, no matter what else is going on in your life.

2) You like the show "<Fill In The Blank Here>" ? Then add "FITBH" to a wish list, and no matter what time, what channel "FITBH" appears on, TiVo will grab it for you. If David Letterman has one of the actors from "FITBH" as a guest, TiVo will even record that Letterman show.

3) You will never watch television again. You will only watch TiVo. Because while most of the time there isn't anything particularly good on television, there is always something good on TiVo. TiVo just sits there happily, unobtrusively recording things, and after you've had it a month or so there will always be about 30 hours of stuff worth watching.

4) You will discover television shows that you really like -- shows that you never even heard of before. Because TiVo looks at the things you tell it to record, and then all on its own it records similar programs. So if you tell it you like "Nova" on PBS, then you can bet it will pick up "Scientific American Frontiers" without your having to tell it to do so.

5) You will never be tied to a TV schedule again. Not only do you not have to know that "West Wing" is on NBC on Wednesday nights -- you won't even care. All you have to do is tell TiVo to record a program called "West Wing" and it will take care of the rest. You don't need to tell it what day, time, channel, or anything else. You could even tell it to record any programs with Martin Sheen, and it would pick up West Wing for you.

6) The TiVo has the best user interface of any consumer electronic product I have ever seen. It is impressivly powerful and versatile, yet so logically laid out (menu driven) that after a brief perusal of the manual to make sure you have the cables and the nightly dial-up routine hooked up correctly, you could throw the manual away and in half an hour of menu exploration you will have mastered TiVo.

7) You will never watch a commercial again, unless it is one you really want to see. TiVo will fast forward at 60x viewing speed. This means you can skip through a 4 minute commercial break in four seconds.

8) TiVo has a feature called "View Recording History" that allows you to look back and see any "discrepancies" -- that is, why a program you might normally have expected it to record didn't get recorded. No big deal there. But... the Recording History also lets you look two weeks into the future and find out why programs you want to record aren't going to record, and it allows you to resolve these discrepancies. (Programs will fail to record usually because there is a conflict with another program you want -- TiVo will only record one program at a time.)

There is more. The TiVo is a lot like the empeg -- it is really hard to "get it" without a hands-on demonstration. Then it becomes a must-have item.

Let me put it this way... without exaggeration or hyperbole, I state this as an absolute fact: If I were to go home, and find a smoldering pile of ashes where my house used to be (don't laugh -- this actually happened to me once) the very first purchase I would make, before clothes, food, or anything else, would be a new TiVo.

tanstaafl.