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Rabid TiVo Fanaticism
surfacearea writes "The New York Times [free reg] is running an article that, without sounding like over-the-top blatant product placement discusses the reasons why TiVo owners are at times frighteningly fanatical. Personally, I won't bother to find out first hand until they slap a recordable DVD drive in there."
You don't realize how much you love it, until it is dead.
My Tivo died this morning. WAH!!!
Back when TiVo was new, some friends of mine got it. They tended to say things like "TiVo has lots of minor usability bugs and YOU HAVE TO BUY ONE RIGHT NOW ANYWAY!!!". As hackers, of course, they wanted to be able to change things, but the improvement in their TV viewing experience was the big appeal.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Since I added digital cable, I've lost the PIP functionality on my TV, (not that I could use it even with a second tuner) and I still haven't figured out how to patch my VCR to allow recording easily.
Splitting the cable to drive the VCR and digital box is out too. The cable line spits before it hits the digital box, and the signal is so weak that I need an amplifier to get *most* of the digital channels (some still drop out, but not as bad as before)
Why is it so hard to have *one* box that does everything?
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
...that are sitting on 100Mbit connection (hello student home, yes I mean you) and where most stuff is availible on the local network at blazing speeds. As far as I can tell, they basicly don't watch much TV at all. They're so used to having stuff on-demand they don't adapt to any schedule, and when they do find the time (no VCR/PVR since they watch so little TV) the ads bugs them. I think they and the TiVo users are pretty much the same group, ignoring certain legal differences.
Like most other things in life you grow used to it, like so many people have gotten used to banner ads. Like, I never felt my ISDN line was that "slow" until my friends got DSL (not in this street, thanks for nothing) and I got myself a laptop and hooked myself up to the Uni internet. Now this line feels like a stinking slow modem, barely good enough to reload slashdot, nevermind actually downloading Game demos/Legal music/Movie trailers/Linux Distros and whatever else I might like to get. Nevermind thinking of those pay-per-minute charges ticking, it wasn't that much an issue until everybody else started having 24/7 connections.
In short, once you've tasted something better you won't let go.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I agree with your sentiments entirely.
;-) 'Get out less' indeed :-)
The poster could as well have said "I won't bother to try it until it can play MP3's, Ogg Vorbis, DivX's and VCD's".
I don't think market is yet ready to support such a device (PVR manufacturers are having a hard enough job convicing consumers to purchase a PVR as it is). The added resources required to add DVD burning functionality, in relation the likely level of adoption of such a costly device, would mean this unit would end up costing the same as - and, after a short period, due to the falling prices of DVD writers, ultimately more than - a seperate DVD writer & a TiVo.
It should be pointed out that TiVo has quite an elgant interface for saving to an external recording mechanisim (tape, DVD, or video-in card in a PC), and even has an extra SCART socket for this very purpose.
As for the article, it can be summed up by saying 'people harp on about TiVo because it's really great and want other people to try it because they know they'll like it too'. And I don't think anyone needed an NYT article to spell that out.
I'm a bit dissapointed with TiVo in the UK as of late. My major niggles being slow speed of updates, UI issues (poor UI design in a few key of places force minor but regular menu furstration) and - of course - the fact that TiVo sold out to the BBC with regard to preferences. The latter nearly enough to make me cancel my subscription, though I do relish the oppertinuty to mark all the crap on the BBC as three thumbs down (hopefully they are getting some useful feedback - the show they pulled the 'spam all the TiVo users' trick with was so dire and unanimously dispised it's never seen the light of day again).
The other thing that really gets me is that it's not nearly as good at finding similar shows with terrestrial TV (Freeview) as it is when you have Sky channels. I've gone through a couple of periods of having Sky, and not having Sky (moving, On Digital going bust, etc). When I have Sky, it's been really good at finding other stuff I might like, when I have only Freeview it find's not nearly as many matches and doesn't record stuff I have 3 thumbs up for (the maximum) unless I specifically tell it too.
I think this may have something to do with the program data - the BBC (and other non-Sky) channel data is often not right, of course the company who handle the UK channel data - and who you actually pay our monthly subscription to in the UK - is of course Sky. I assume it's a case of Sky trying a bit harder to get their own stuff right (and the BBC not being nearly as arsed to provide them with correct data or to ensure they use the correct data). A tech support rep informed me once they have another company provide some of the BBC-and-non-Sky-related channel data (during a period when BBC 1 was without channel data for a couple of weeks).
Don't let that put you off though (unless you are both (a) in the UK and (b) don't have Sky). If you watch around around 6 or more hours of televison a week you should really get a PVR. You'll watch MUCH less crap TV and get to see loads of cool new shows you've never seen. The only downside is you'll find yourself staying in more to watch all the neat stuff it's recorded.
Which of course will end up making you even more, antisocial, braindead and even more of a sad git than you are already
This may sound horribly blaspemous, and risking flaming out the wazoo, but has there yet been any software similar to MythTV, FreeVo, etc... That is Linux & Windows (and perhaps Mac?) ported?
I made a tough decision a while back, to put my only tv-tuner into a windows box that sits in the living room. Reasoning is that most guests don't know Linux, and I don't have the time or patience to even teach them the basics of KDE or the like. You all know it's true...
So the ability to use PVR software (*NOTE* Must Have Canadian Content Listings... in all my searching I've yet to find any open or commercial source that does) on that machine would be fantastic.
Anybody know?
Just in the last 3 weeks, I replaced the dead HDD with a 120GB Maxtor in the HDR112 I bought in February, d/l'ed and restored a pristine image to it, expanded the capacity (the right way), and just last night added TurboNet, setup telnet, ftpd, and switched the daily call over to broadband. Next week I expect to add the Linksys 802.11 bridge and move it to the big tv. I'm already thinking about starting the next project unit. This one was fun. I strongly recommend hacker-types to take this route. It is **EASY**. My unit died the night it came in from E-Bay and I'm kicking myself for waiting so long to repair it.
I also installed TivoWeb, but I expected more out of it. I thought I would be able to browse the whole tv schedule much like Yahoo! TV, but no can do. I guess I'm going to have to integrate network-based remote control of the TiVo from my Misterhouse home automation box, since it already does Yahoo! TV-style schedule browsing and "click here to record"
I'm only home on the weekends, so the TiVo is just incredible for those early Saturday mornings when I get to catch up on all the missed shows. The only disconcerting thing (and reason enough to get another one) is that when my wife and I are watching the same channel on two different tv's and we can hear each other's set, the quarter-second delay between the two tv's is unnerving.
Hey, can anyone tell me if TiVo charges *per* unit or per address for the standard services? Thanks..
dead HDR-112-$99@Ebay
120GB Maxtor (144 hours)-$99@Best Buy
TurboNet-$75@9thTee
TivoWeb-GPL software
Intelligent Life on Earth
I watch TV programs, but only by downloading the Divx(s) and playing them. I'm in Australia, and I watch Six Feet Under which is not available here in Australia. So far I'm half way through season 2.
Beyond just the Tivos, I wonder if the commercial TV industry has file trading on the radar. With DVD player out there now that play Divx and Xvid, why would someone wait for Thursdays at 8:00 ?
"Must See TV", is becoming commercialess, "anytime I'm Free TV".
I have no pants and I must scream
Did you know, only 20% of the male population reads novels after 13? This figure actually predates PVRs...I don't think it will be improving...
I finally got a TiVo earlier this year. I wish I would have bought one the day they hit $300/40 hrs. It's just great, plain and simple. Remember the first day you got broadband? How much better it was than dialing up? Even if you had a big pipe at work, how great it was to have an always-on super-fast connection at home? TiVo is like that. Even though you know the benefits--pause & rewind live TV, super-easy recording--you just don't know how good it is until you experience it first-hand. Just like sex--you can hear all about it, you can tell yourself, "Yup, I bet it'll be pretty good" and be right, but you just don't know how good until you do it. (Although, unlike sex, I can just about guarantee the first time with a TiVo will be great.) I don't know how else to describe it.
:-)
Fellow TiVo owners, mod me up so the nonbelievers can be enlightened.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
You know what TiVo feature I'd like? I'd like the ability to specify that I only want X episodes of a show recorded, but to not keep replacing those X episodes unless I've deleted them. Right now, you can specify that you want 2 episodes, but the TiVo will keep recording the latest aired episodes regardless of whether you've touched those two.
I live in Canada.
Therefore I only have 1 Sattelite choice. CRTC Approved, (in 2 flavours, BEV, and Dish).
BEV does have a PVR but without any of the goodness that TiVo offers.
Is there any hope for me? Are there any choices out there that I am missing?
Help me please.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
This alternative allows saving to removable media- primarily CD-ROM.
EyeTV is a drive sized box that attaches to the USB port and either/both the cable wire or AV cables (DVD players, VCRs, DV cameras etc). It is also a software interface that is easy to use. It does the usual stuff like letting you watch live or recorded TV on your monitor in a window size you choose.
It can wake or turn on the computer for a timed recording. It can copy from cable and DVD, but not at full DVD quality. The two quality options are roughly equivalent to regular TV and VCR quality EyeTV can save programs on hard drive, or inexpensive video CDs (readable with DVD players, 70 minutes each), or QuickTime format for use anywhere.
It doesn't require a paid subscription, but a free web link allows convenient scheduling for most US and some Canadian users. I just do mine manually, which is quite easy and reliable.
EyeTV software has been frequently updated and improved. It is now possible to edit (remove commercials, etc) recordings within the program. Editing an hour of commercial television takes me about 5 minutes if I want to save it permanently. It's wonderful for taking clips from SNL or other variety programming which can then be forwarded to others or stored for future reference.
I've been using it all year and I'm beginning to trust it to work correctly. I set it to record and forget about it. Whether I'm using the computer or not, it quietly does its thing in the background.
My understanding is that this uses a standard chip set so that similar devices should be available to PC and 'nix users.
http://www.elgato.com/ about $200
...omphaloskepsis often...
I've been wondering - why is that I still have to pay $12.95/month for the service fee, even though all of my data downloads are done over broadband? Isn't it a helluva lot cheaper for TiVo to deliver them that way, rather than needing the modem pool capacity (provided by Worldcom/MCI, btw)? Even if I was able to go back to a $9.95/month fee, I'd be happy.
Important note: With a single tuner Tivo (read: not one for satellite), you can watch one recorded program and record another; but you cannot watch live TV at the same time you're recording something. It's very much not a VCR.
Actually it's exactly like a vcr in this respect.
With a vcr, you can only watch a second program by bypassing the tuner of the vcr. So if you are recording something on HBO (for example) you patch the cable box into the vcr and set it for HBO's channel. Now you want to watch something else? fine, but you can't change the channel on the cable box. so you run a second cable feed directly into the TV and watch that. If you had another cable box, then you could watch HBO on it as well. TiVo is exactly the same way.
You're too cheap to get a second cable box so you can watch and record at the same time, but you won't consider a PVR until it has features that will drive the cost to about $2,000.
Let's see, I had something that cost me $50 a month and gave me X functionality. The cable company shifts channels around, so to get the same channels I have to pay $80 a month and get X-1 functionality. I have 1 tv. Paying the cable company even more money to get back the functionality I had a year ago, that I use maybe once every two months, is ridiculous. They *took* functionality away from me. And I can't believe it would cost $2000 to implement the digital cable descrambler circuitry.
It isn't so much the money as the principle of the thing. What really got me was when they started advertising that satellite tv was worse than cable because it had the same features as digital cable.
While commercial skipping is far from the whole picture on a PVR, it alone can cause you to justify buying one of these things today, rather than waiting for any improvement in it.
Consider if you watch 1 hour of TV per day that you don't watch on videotape, which is quite low for the average viewer.
That means about 20 minutes saved per day. Or 10 hours a month. If you watch more TV, multiply it out.
How much do you value your time? You should value it as much as others will pay for it. Are you a $50/hour consultant? That's $500/month, enough to pay for itself in ONE MONTH. Are you a $6/hour burger flipper? Still a $47/month gain (after monthly fee.) and enough to pay for it in just a few months.
You are absolutely crazy to wait, and the commercial skipping is just one of the features you will want. Every month you don't buy it you are wasting money.
Of course you can videotape everything, and watch it at lower quality with incvonenience. But most don't. But with the Tivo you record everything, you almost never watch live. So it really makes this difference.
There is one caveat. When you first get it, you will watch more TV for a while. If you have discipline, you will bring it back down over time.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
I mean, how was anybody supposed to catch it the way Fox schedules their shows?
Futurama is just one example: TiVo knows I like Futurama end of story. I don't care when it's one or what channel it's on. TiVo takes care of it for me. It's an amazing simplification to your life to have a device that trolls the tv listings watching for your favorite shows.
TiVo isn't the voice activated intelligent agent downloading and archiving high def digital content that we all can imagine...but its 80% of that for $300 available today.
If you watch tv you need to scrape together the $300 and get one. It's seriously that cool. -IronTiki
Do we really need DVD Drives or Media to store our programs on? With HD's getting cheaper and cheaper, why not just take all your media content and put it onto a dedicated HD and use something like the Xbox media player, or other media devices to mount your HD and just play from there. No need for DVD dics (great for back up and to take over to a friends) but I think eventually it will just end up going to a HD and streaming from there in your home.. just my opinion.
Pocket Girls. Mobile Adult Mini Mags for your Phone.
I recently cancelled my TiVo subscription, because my unit has a defect. I bought a series 2 Tivo from an online company, and it died, so I sent it back for service. They fixed my TiVo (took about a month) but left off the id chip.
;)
Basically my TiVo doesn't identify itself properly when it calls in, so I don't get any of the software updates (mine is still on 2.0). It gets the guide data just fine. No home media option, no broadband, etc. I found this out by calling up Tivo and talking to one of their guys for a long time.
Anyway, they suggested I cancel my subscription while I have my system fixed, it might take a couple weeks to get the fix turned around.
Not to be cheap, but I'm thinking of just not having it fixed until something more drastic happens. I can live without Tivo recording suggestions, and can replace my season passes with manual recording (I mean, hey, how often do shows move around?). I would still get the benefits of time-shifting and large recording space.
Plus, I'm half thinking about building my own Tivo for fun, using a shuttle pc, ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder, etc. Then I would have access to the files for archiving, be able to easily add disk space, possibly add extra features like HDTV decoding, etc. Funny thing, I don't mind building a PC but am squeamish about opening up consumer electronics