Marketing scheme successful: I love my TiVo. I love being able to pause TV. I love being able to record TV without the hassles of tapes (making sure you don't tape over things you want to keep, tape speeds, tape quality)-- and being able to transfer a recording to tape at any time. I'm sure I'll love being able to jump back in time by 8 seconds once I figure out how to do that. But the ultimate success of the great giveaway scheme: I absolutely love the on-screen TV grid and show information, which you need to subscribe to their service at $10 a month to use.
A feature I have mixed feelings about: It remembers shows you like (by either recording them or voting for them via red and green buttons on the remote control) and automatically records other shows you might like. The day I plugged the thing in, I played with the instant replay feature during America's Most Wanted, then set it up to record a local comedy show late in the evening. When I woke up the next morning, I discovered that the TiVo thought I might enjoy an episode of Three's Company (which apparently runs on UPN or something at 9am on Sunday). I didn't, but I appreciate the thought.
After only another day, however, I'm already annoyed with the feature. I look over and see the little red light on all the time, meaning another show I don't like being digitized onto my device's hard drives, which I will have to press a bunch of buttons to delete. It's like spam, and if TiVo's partnerships were more strongly established, it would be spam.
But being able to conveniently watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it without the hassle and effort of VCRs is just plain cool. I'm not sure if it's worth $400 ($300 after rebate), but the Great TiVo Giveaway is still underway. It's no longer a sure thing (as it was when I got mine), but still probably worth shooting off an entry. I'm certainly willing to pay $10/mo for the TV grid features, even though I only have crappy reception of 5 channels. (This device is clearly more fun with cable; after a while, the recommendations might actually be reasonable...)
Thanks for the info, Eric! Though I have to say, it's still similar to spam in that it clogs your list of recordings.
That red light was on all night last night, and it was on when I got home from work today. Apparently I accidentally recorded a few seconds of a local news broadcast, and it decided to record every news broadcast from that station throughout the day, and those of other stations when it had time.
It's still nothing to gripe about, I'm just amused that the damned thing has a life of its own-- one that is desperate in purpose to make me happy, but isn't that good at it. It's as if while I was at work, it baked nine apple pies for my dinner. A shame that it cannot learn to connect with me in other ways.
It did, however, record the original Father of the Bride off public television at 2am this morning, which I've been meaning to see for a while. I'm really hoping to train it to know I like PBS, because there's always excellent stuff on when I'm not paying attention, or at 2am. Already set up a "season pass" for Robot Wars and Fawlty Towers...