Anybody with a family and cable TV is likely familiar with the “battle for the remote”. Until Tivo the only solution was to place multiple TV’s in different rooms throughout the house, and each family member can then watch their favourite show in isolation, without a family battle. Perhaps this is why the modern family unit is so screwed up, but I won’t get into that. Probably the best solution is to throw your TV out the window and actually talk to each other, but if TV has entrenched itself in your life, then perhaps you should consider Tivo.
A friend of ours was telling us about her Tivo, which I hadn’t really known much about until a few days ago, but this is an interesting device. Tivo is yet another “set-top box”, and it takes up where the venerable VCR left off, and does what a DVD player simply cannot do – record TV shows. However Tivo has taken TV recording to a higher level – with Tivo you can watch a TV show in real time, pause the action while you take a phone call, record another program or even several programs at the same time, and fast-forward through commercials. Tivo also has an idiot-proof on-screen guide which also incorporates a search engine, allowing you to search for your favorite programs by genre, actor name, show name, director name etc. You can also refine your programming so that, for example, you can specify that you only want to watch first-run programs, never repeats. Tivo has partnered with TV Guide, so that you never have to thumb through a paper copy again. All TV Guide’s listings are available through the Tivo interface up to two weeks in advance, so you can set your Tivo unit to record anything you want that is available on TV Guide. With the Season’s Pass feature, you get your favorite series to record for its duration, giving you the power to go beyond TV Guide’s two week ahead limitations. As a Soprano’s fan myself, this would have been a great thing to have last year, as I always wanted to watch it but couldn’t because the language wasn’t appropriate for our nine-year-old. I wound up missing most of the final season last year because of this.
Another cool feature of Tivo is the ability to join your computer network. This means that you can connect Tivo to any of your household computers and use it to view photos or play music that resides on one or all of your PC’s; now you can show your photo collection on your TV, or play your MP3 music collection over your Hi Fi system. I have never actually tried Tivo, but I am already convinced that I cannot live without it.
Microsoft has done what it does best and stolen the Tivo concept by introducing a new version of Windows XP, called Windows Media Center Edition, which does exactly the same thing as Tivo and even trumps Tivo with a few tricks of its own. By adding a computer with Windows MCE to your entertainment system, you can actually burn recorded programs onto a DVD, and you can run the computer on your TV if you want to. It’s a neat trick, but I wonder if it’s really necessary, as anybody with Tivo will have a computer anyway.
The whole secret to all of this is the ubiquitous availability of Hard-Disk storage. Hard-disks are so big and so cheap, that they can be used to record many hours of TV, something only dreamed of even five years ago. For more information on the Tivo phenomenon, visit www.tivo.com.
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