Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

joining the tivo herd

Rob and I got a TiVo last week.

I’ve had a Comcast DVR for the past three years, and while I’ve certainly made use of it — it’s completely changed the way I watch television — I’ve been rather unhappy with the service for the past year or so. Failed or partial recordings, shows that inexplicably get recorded in multiple segments, video that gets out of sync with the sound — I want to set things up and walk away and be able to trust that it’ll just work. But the DVR’s been so frustratingly unreliable these days, which runs counter to the whole point of having one.

Dari’s defection from the Comcast DVR to TiVo earlier this month prompted our own deliberation on the subject. After a satisfied test-drive of his new TiVo, what sealed the deal for us was a financial consideration: TiVo is running a crazy special right now on its units, and we worked out that we’d actually be saving $10/month over our Comcast plan by switching to TiVo. And we’d have a much more reliable unit (with a better interface, to boot).

So far, it’s been a fantastic little machine. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do — and more. And the user interface refinements are quite nice: Navigating around is rather intuitive, and I don’t feel like I have to work around a clunky system. Like the Comcast DVR, I can set up a “season pass” for my favorite television shows — and if I know the show tends to start early or run late, I can tell the TiVo to adjust the recording accordingly. I can cancel scheduled recordings of individual airings of a show without deleting the whole season pass (a pet peeve of mine from the Comcast DVR), and I can look up future airings (with descriptions) of a show up to two weeks in the future. And I’ve set up keyword-based “wish lists” to automatically record shows featuring foodies Anthony Bourdain or Nigella Lawson (have I mentioned she’s fabulous?). I don’t want to sound like I’m shilling for TiVo, but it’s been great so far — so much better than the old DVR.