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It’s strange to consider that I routinely divide my life into pre-TiVo and post-TiVo, but it’s a convenience that makes quite as big a difference as pre- and post-Computer in the way that I do things and conduct my life. As a result of the TiVo, I can actually be a better TV-watcher, first because I can actually follow shows that get moved around by the networks and syndication and sports programs and whatnot – I’m freed from having to check TV Guide and worrying about whether I will get home in time for something, and I can be much more spontaneous about what I decide to do, and when I go to bed and all that. And secondly, I watch less crap TV just because it happens to be on when I want to watch something. I suppose I come across fewer great shows that way, since I’m not flipping the channel changer all that much… but I have a greater percentage of hits in the stuff I want to watch. I wouldn’t have discovered Stargate, for instance, which I’d missed the first two years worth of syndication because it’s on a local station that never has the same schedule two weekends in a row, because of their sports programming!
Also another benefit of the TiVo: I can now actually archive TV shows like never before… why? Because instead of fussing with the tape start and stop and trying to get it right, I can cue up the tape and start knowing exactly what’s coming on, where it starts and ends, and I’m not trying to rush to get the tape in at exactly the right time! Now I get stuff moved off to tape just exactly as it comes in, with the nice slides that the TiVo puts on for five seconds before beginning to run the episode – with the name of the episode and other vital data… it’s like magic!
And this doesn’t even begin to mention what the TiVo does with Suggestions and Wish Lists and To-Do lists and all that. Oh, and also, I can easily play Tape Fairy for friends who missed the latest Buffy or whatever… I keep the last few episodes of that show and Angel and Firefly (when it was on) around, both in case I want to see something again – did I mention that fast-forwarding on a TiVo is really really convenient? – and against the chance that somebody will need a tape from two weeks ago!
So, no wonder my personal history divides roughly back to my first acquisition… I wasn’t an early adopter, only an early-ish one, since I won it in an essay contest about a year after the TiVo was first introduced, and if I hadn’t, I might well still be wistfully thinking, “Geeze, that would sure be a Neat Thing.” Well, as it turned out, it’s really a neat thing, so neat that a year later I went and bought a second TiVo, to add to my available disk space, but also to handle scheduling conflicts.
My first TiVo is a 14-hour model, the second is a 30-hour, and now you can buy 40-hour models for less than half of what I paid for the 30-hour. I really need to up the storage capacity of the first, but I confess to having had thoughts of buying a third TiVo, to keep upstairs here in my study, since I now have a cable connection for the cable modem up here, and it would make it possible to network-connect the TiVo to the computers and then be able to dump the recorded shows to nice shiny VCDs… but that’s maybe a little bit more obsessive than I want to go….
Also another benefit of the TiVo: I can now actually archive TV shows like never before… why? Because instead of fussing with the tape start and stop and trying to get it right, I can cue up the tape and start knowing exactly what’s coming on, where it starts and ends, and I’m not trying to rush to get the tape in at exactly the right time! Now I get stuff moved off to tape just exactly as it comes in, with the nice slides that the TiVo puts on for five seconds before beginning to run the episode – with the name of the episode and other vital data… it’s like magic!
And this doesn’t even begin to mention what the TiVo does with Suggestions and Wish Lists and To-Do lists and all that. Oh, and also, I can easily play Tape Fairy for friends who missed the latest Buffy or whatever… I keep the last few episodes of that show and Angel and Firefly (when it was on) around, both in case I want to see something again – did I mention that fast-forwarding on a TiVo is really really convenient? – and against the chance that somebody will need a tape from two weeks ago!
So, no wonder my personal history divides roughly back to my first acquisition… I wasn’t an early adopter, only an early-ish one, since I won it in an essay contest about a year after the TiVo was first introduced, and if I hadn’t, I might well still be wistfully thinking, “Geeze, that would sure be a Neat Thing.” Well, as it turned out, it’s really a neat thing, so neat that a year later I went and bought a second TiVo, to add to my available disk space, but also to handle scheduling conflicts.
My first TiVo is a 14-hour model, the second is a 30-hour, and now you can buy 40-hour models for less than half of what I paid for the 30-hour. I really need to up the storage capacity of the first, but I confess to having had thoughts of buying a third TiVo, to keep upstairs here in my study, since I now have a cable connection for the cable modem up here, and it would make it possible to network-connect the TiVo to the computers and then be able to dump the recorded shows to nice shiny VCDs… but that’s maybe a little bit more obsessive than I want to go….
