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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."
Heck... I'd very gladly into the fanatiscism if only they'd offer Canadian guide content on most of the common (but few and far between) PVR's out there. Can't even be done with most software, darnit! :)
You don't realize how much you love it, until it is dead.
My Tivo died this morning. WAH!!!
Personally, I won't bother to find out first hand until they slap a recordable DVD drive in there.
Huh? What a bizarre, ill-informed remark to make. The cost-benefit ratio would be ridiculous.
Why not just buy a recordable DVD drive and record TiVo programs on to that? Oh, you probably don't want to check out recordable DVD drives until they make one that has a MiniDV deck built in.
Alright, that didn't work, do the Google Affiliate I guess.
There, this one works.
Sorry about that, but still, it's not too hard. There should be no more straight links that require registering in the main story, just get the Google affiliate.
The RIAA can take my TiVo from my cold, dead hands!
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/fashion/20TIVO.h tml?ex=1051416000&en=a77422bb2a91649e&ei=5062&part ner=GOOGLE
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
"...why TiVo owners are at times frighteningly fanatical."
I can't say it's a huge surprise. Tivo (and variants, I have a Replay TV for example...) has this way of making your TV work within your schedule. It's just a glimpse of how cool TV really could be. Sadly, the broadcasting companies think it'll hurt their ad revenue.
Personally, I can't wait until I can easily exchange shows with friends. (that would include knowing a bunch of people with a similar device...) If I had this capability a couple of years ago, who knows what Futurama's fate would have been? I mean, how was anybody supposed to catch it the way Fox schedules their shows?
"Derp de derp."
1) Be able to watch one program and record another. With the gol darn digital cable, I can't do that any more. My VCR was cable ready for regular cable, why can't I get a PVR that's digital cable ready? As it is, I can get around this for cannels in the regular cable line up by bypassing the digital cable box, but since my cable provider puts all premium channels on digital, I can't tape a movie and watch Junkyard Wars at the same time. It also makes the timer feature on the vcr practically worthless.
I love the hypocrisy of our local cable company; they have anti-satellite dish commercials that point out that you can't tape one show and watch another without a separate descrambler. No different than digital cable.
2) Like the poster said, it needs a dvd recordable. I'll still buy the dvd collections, but sometimes I want to take a show on the road or loan it to a friend. I can do that just fine with my vcr.
3) HDTV ready. Just to be future safe.
You give me those things and then we'll talk price.
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
Personally, I won't bother to find out first hand until they slap a recordable DVD drive in there.
Yeah, it would be such a shame to lose all those old Will & Grace episodes. But seriously, how many add-ons does it have to have before buy it? mp3 and ogg decoding? programmable from any computer? hackable? Id be happy if it does what it does efficiently and reliably. What's the facination with bloating products, adding unnecessary features? My fire extiguisher doesn't heat up hot pockets, nor do I want it to. It's a fire extinguisher.
I have also felt the same way about my TiVO. I feel like I have broken the shackles from the schedule. I don't know what times certain programs come on, because I watch them when I want to. Now, I haven't gone and convinced anyone to buy one, but I have always spoke positively about them when people asked me about mine. I had not realized that TiVO hadn't advertized in two years.
Off Topic (tm), but how did NYT figure out how to make a popup activate under mozilla? That (VISA Gold) was the first popup I have seen in months! Moz guys, you need to look at that code some more!
Pop in a 10-hour tape, and tell it to play all those Farscape episodes while you're at work, and you can free up the space on your disk while keeping the program content manageable. It'd be nice to have it record stuff at 8x speeds onto a DVD burner instead of 1x, but remember, this is mostly the TV you haven't watched yet, or the episodes you've seen already plus the one from the last week or two. And if the software's at all bright enough, if you do want to watch the tape later, you should be able to spool it back into the TiVo for random-access play rather than just using your VCR's fast-forward and reverse and such.
(I don't own TiVo myself; we kept dithering about whether we'd rather improve our TV watching experience or stick the TV in the garage so we don't watch it at all, and buying a TiVo would have committed us to one of those strategies :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
One thing people rarely talk about is the fact that using a tool like Tivo actually subtly changes your outlook on yourday to day life.
Local news, TV advertising, radio advertising and the like play to our basest insticts, vanity, sex and fear. We naturally pick up on these things and they use it to their fullest advantage. Tivo, NPR and other methods of controlling advertisings impact are hugely valuable.
I'd go into the benefits but it would sound to Ra Ra Ra. I would most likely stop watching TV without my Tivo. Watching TV without Tivo is a completely depressing and morbid experience that, overtime, leads to depression, anxiety and even MORE consumerism.
I picked up a Tivo that patched into my Direct TV dish. Doing a little homework, they persist the encrypted stream on the local hard drive rather than something that could be ripped. Disappointed, I bit the bullet and picked one up anyhow.
My god, does that change satellite TV.
First off, it makes 'VCR programming' bonehead easy. Get a list of all sci-fi shows for the next couple weeks, pick what you want, and eventually they will be waiting there for you. Pick a show like Futurama or Cowboy Beboop, and it will snag every episode. The only downside is how good of a job it can do if you set it for Dora the Explorer, Blues Clues - a couple marathons later and you will have more shows than I'll let my little one watch. As for persisting files, I prefer to push stuff into my computer to strip out the ads before ripping them to removable media. Turns out the downside - not ripping direct to dvd-r - was a major plus. Good Eats or Serial Experiments: Lain fits soo much better after taking out the credits, ads, and all the other things that gets shoveled in the non-premium channels.
Second, there is no prime time. Time and channel has no meaning at all. I don't spend a lot of time watching TV, so what I was interested in - it is two clicks away. Think of Tivo as limewire - you find the content you want, queue it up, and let it download whenever.
Lastly, the pause and fast forward are handy. Once you get in the habit that most of your viewing is a local file rather than something you happen to catch at the right moment and channel, you start expecting the same from live TV. Nothing is more aggravating than hitting FF, only to find you are on the tip of a live feed.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
"Hell my wife was skeptical when we got married but now even she is hooked."
Is this in reference to you> or the Tivo?
Why slashdot? Why not?
...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
Today at 12:30 pm I was at my grandmother's house who does not have anything other than over-the-air TV. The same Ronco infomerical was running on both the Fox and UPN stations in town. In fact, the only stations that were not showing infomericals were PBS, the ABC affiliate who had barely-watchale public interest drivel, and the three Spanish-speaking networks running in an area where most of the population doesn't speak that language.
It's over for the purely commercial-supported TV. Over the air TV now consists of local news and access to the "major networks". At times when there is no news or national program, the station effectively puts on a program of negative value just to keep the tower warm.
We're already paying subscription rates for most of the TV programs we get. The loss of ad revenue to the TiVo-ish technologies is simply going to mean that they'll have to raise those subscription rates a bit, and that some of the marginal projects that are going forward today won't be able to go forward in the future. (Does the world really need ESPNews?)
Just because there's a change in business models forced by technology doesn't mean it should be blocked, the businesses involved just need to learn to adjust.
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
Jeff
Amen to that last statement. After several hacks to Tivo-Tivoweb-Turbonet-etc.. I find it almost impossible to watch television the old way.
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
Personally, I won't bother to find out first hand until they slap a recordable DVD drive in there." Why stop at a recordable DVD drive? I am holding out for an integrated Bluetooth connectivity, PS2, coffee-maker, GPS and magic 8-ball. I also want it to be solar powered and to be totally waterproof at depths of up to 5000 meters. It shoud also cost less than $20 and run Debian. These are the reasonable consumer demands of me, Joe Slashdot.
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.
Do you want this because you want to "share" what you've recorded with friends? If you sell what you've recorded, that's clearly illegal. If you don't profit by this activity, it's not clearly illegal, but it's not clearly legal, either. In the past, it's been unlikely to be enforced; but the times, as you may have noticed, are changing fast.
Time shifting is legal. Tivo, as is, is a wonderful machine for time shifting. Beyond that, the ice gets thin.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
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...
Combine a 120GB HD and a DVD recorder capable of recording DVD-RAM and DVD-R and you have all you'll ever need. There are tons of models that combine DVD and HDD here in japan.
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.
What am I missing here?
:)
1. With DirecTiVo, you can watch one live show while recording another one. (Okay, you can do that with a VCR) With any unit (even one-tuner standalone ones), you can watch a prerecorded show while recording another one off air. You most definitely cannot do that with a VCR. I often watch a prerecorded show if I come home in the middle of a show I'm recording and I'm not in the mood to watch it at that time.
2. There are no VCRs that can store 100's of hours of programs. I'm away from home all week and have tons of shows that I like to have ready for instant playback when I get home.
3. If you come home in the middle of a recording and you want to see the show, you can start playing the show from the beginning even while the TiVo is still recording the remainder. And you get to fast forward thru the commercials to boot!
4. If you pause live tv to take a call or a shower, you get to FF thru the commercials when you return and "catch up" to live tv. Works great during auto racing and hockey games when you want to FF through slow periods. Same if you rewind and replay exciting action -- all that time is spent building up record-ahead time. Rewind and replay enough times and you will be able to FF through the commercials when you're ready to move on.
5. TiVo also displays descriptions of tv shows while you're channel surfing.
6. Since the video is not accelerated to the television, even during fast forward, the TiVo actually plays closed captions in fast forward!
7. Forget about all the networkable features such as digital extraction of content recorded at DVD quality suitable for burning to recordable media.
8. Um, profit?
Intelligent Life on Earth
I had my TiVo modded to add 2 120 gig HDs [can't go bigger because of a BIOS deal...] and have over 300 hours of viewing goodness. That's over 10 DAYS of programming. That's a lot of SpongeBob. If I wanted, there is an Ethernet add-in that ostensibly allows the"daily call" [for programming info] to be made over your broadband connection. It also allows you to telnet to the TiVo and take programs off the unit to your computer HD for transfer to CD or DVD. Pretty much they are MPEG files with additional info for the TiVo OS. Try Ninthtee for info.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
For TV? A VCD or maybe SVCD recorder maybe.
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.
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
Or pass a honey in short-shorts, and just catch a quick glance. Let's go to the replay, Jim!
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Then hit the button to the lower right of your pause key.
"Population 1,656"
Tivo sucks all my time. I used to watch 1-2 hrs TV a week; now (because Tivo catches all the stuff I want to watch) I watch 2-3 hours a day .
Good God. I used to have something resembling a life.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
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
Tivo's suggestions are crap. Truly crap.
Shrug. My suggestions are pretty good, on both TiVo's. In fact, we regularly watch stuff from the Suggestions. The key is to not go overboard with thumbs up and down -- if you like a show, give it one or maybe two thumbs up. If you don't like a show give it a single thumbs down. Three thumbs up or down is severe overkill and will certainly screw the Suggestion engine in a nasty way.
This should be improved, and they should really bring back TeachTiVo (which was a backdoor into editing the Suggestion engine - it let you see exactly what the TiVo thought you liked and disliked and allowed you to modify the values). Realize that when you give a thumbs up/down to a show (particularly multiple thumbs) you're not just giving it to that show -- you're also giving it to the genres, the actors, the directors, etc.
ts also is in desperate need of a smarter season pass
That's not a TiVo issue, it's a Comedy Central one. Bitch at them for not giving Tribune Media jack shit for info on their shows -- they don't even give the most rudimentry episode information. Without this there's no way for TiVo to know if it's a rerun or not.
There's a workaround, if you watch it every day though - you can simple change Keep At Most to 1. It'll record every one of them, but only keep one. Obviously no good if you miss a day.
They need to optimise the code or do something to avoid the long 20 seconds of lag I get pretty often
I suspect you have a Series 1. It's running on a 30 MHz CPU. It's doing far more than was ever anticipated for it. It's slow. That's life.
Lastly, it needs some kind of user level password protection.
I do believe that rating based content protection is available. Look under Settings.