TiVo Party Tonight

You won't catch me spending money on cable or satellite TV (at least not on my current budget). Heck, until I inherited my grandmother's 21-incher a few years ago, I was still watching the same 13-inch rotary-dial-on-the-front TV I got as a Christmas present in 1982. But one TV-related expenditure I've made in the last couple years, and one which I appreciate on a weekly basis, is a TiVo. I've been programming it again for the new TV season, and figured I'd chat about it a little.

TiVo is actually two different things: it's a piece of hardware, and it's a service. Each is worth looking at separately.

1) It's a digital VCR that replaces tapes with a hard drive. The computer industry stopped using tapes - except for removable backup storage - a couple decades ago. Now that hard drives have reached the gigabytes of capacity that video needs, using tapes makes no sense for anything except removable backup storage. Before I got the TiVo I used a VCR for "time shifting" TV programs (i.e. recording them to watch later at my convenience), which was insane. One of the key advantages of this is that it means you aren't limited by the linear access of tape. For example, if you come in 15 minutes after a show starts, you can have the TiVo start playing it back to you from the beginning, while it's still recording the remaining 45 minutes in the background. Or you could watch a completely different already-recorded show while it's recording this one. That's an amazing convenience over using a VCR right there.

TV broadcasters moan about TiVo users being able to skip commercials, but it's not really anything new in that regard. I'd been fast-forwarding through commercials on my VCR since the 1980's, and the process with a TiVo is fundamentally the same: you hit "fast-forward", you watch the adverts at high speed, and you hit "play" when the show starts. TiVo does the job better than a VCR - you can select different speeds for fast-forward, and it's programmed to automatically back up a little after you tell it to switch to normal speed on the assumption that your reflexes are a little slow - but it's the same thing. (I understand that ReplayTV, another similar product, actually has a feature for easily skipping the commercials altogether.) For those shows that I watch "live", I actually make a point of sitting down 15 minutes late, so I can speed through the commercials and reach the end of the recording at about the same time the show itself ends. Before TiVo, I did the same thing with my VCR, but had to wait until the machine was done recording.

2) It's a program guide service. If nothing else, TiVo frees you from having to buy TV Guide, looking through the listings in your local paper, or checking one of the various web sites with this info. It's not as convenient as a sheet of paper for answering the traditional question of "what's on TV tonight?", but it's far more convenient when it comes to recording the various regular shows you want to watch, because it picks them up automatically, even if they get moved to a different time slot, and it can skip them if they're re-runs. So the question instead becomes "what's on the TiVo tonight?" and it gives you a convenient list of everything it's recorded.

The TiVo folks make a big deal out of the fact that their system is smart enough to figure out what kinds of shows you like, and (if you want) automatically record similar shows for you. I haven't found this very useful, mostly because the question is so subjective. As a machine, it can't tell that, while Malcolm in the Middle and Full House may both be sitcoms about families, one is clever and funny, and the other is Full House. I've had better success by telling it to record anything by certain movie directors I like.

For reasons I can't really fathom, TiVo hasn't been a huge commercial success, which of course leaves many TiVo owners nervous about what will happen when/if the company shuts down. The fact that Microsoft is trying to take over this market with their UltimateTV service adds to that fear. It doesn't appear to be happening. And the TiVo people have promised that before the worst-case scenario came to pass, they'd offer an update to the software that would enable the machine to still function without their nightly program-guide feed. So at least you'd still have a really cool digital VCR to use.

Incidentally, TiVo has some distinct advantages over Microsoft's UltimateTV. The main one is that the standard TiVo boxes will work with nearly any program source in existence. So if you switch from cable to satellite to digital cable and finally back to broadcast, you can keep using the same TiVo box. Also, the machines are upgradable. TiVo doesn't actually authorise it, but because the system is based on some fairly standard technology (such as off-the-shelf hard drives and the Linux operating system), it's fairly easy to add a second hard drive or replace the current one with a bigger one. I bought a second-hand 14-hour TiVo and upgraded it to 80 hours for just the cost of a slow (5600rpm) 60GB hard drive and a mounting bracket. You can also do funky stuff like connecting it to your cable modem or DSL network, so it doesn't have to phone TiVo every night for updates to the program guide.

The one trick that UlimateTV does that a standard TiVo box can't do (the dedicated DirecTiVo units can) is recording one show while watching another one that's on another channel at the same time. (Remember that TiVo can let you watch a show from a previous time slot while recording something else.) But if there are two shows on at the same time, there's an easy solution: use that "obsolete" VCR. If you have standard cable service, it's easy enough to split the cable between the TiVo and the VCR, and switch between the two. Otherwise, if you get your TV from a satellite or digital cable service (which won't work with a splitter), odds are one of the two shows is on broadcast TV, so all you need to do is hook up a pair of cheap rabbit ears (or maybe a powered antenna) to the VCR. It's how I record both Ed and Star Trek: Enterprise Wednesday nights at 8pm.

I'm not in the habit of shilling for for-profit corporations. While I guess that's what I'm doing here, it's only because I think they've got a product and service that will actually help free people of being slaves to the networks. It costs some money, but if you've got it, I think it's well worth it. Given a choice between A) conforming my weekly schedule to fit the network's programming, and B) juggling VCR tapes to watch things when I want, option C is the only choice I'd make. By the way, this page has info about some of the alternatives to TiVo.