I've had my TiVo up and running for about five days now. Overall I'm pretty happy with it. My ReplayTV died about a month ago after four years of faithful service. Unable to resurrect it I was forced to purchase a new DVR. What I chose was the TiVo TCD652160 HD. There weren't really any other choices. ReplayTV has been all but driven out of the market in recent years, completely abandoning their DVR hardware in favor of a solely software-based approach leaving TiVo with a pretty solid control of the DVR market. (Please save all your emails about MythTV, etc.)
Overall I'm pretty impressed with the amount of DVR progress that has occurred between the release of my ReplayTV 5504 and my newly acquired TiVo. I do miss the simplicity of my ReplayTV since TiVo tends to be a bit overcomplicated in spots. I've got a few gripes with my new TiVo (naturally) and I'd like to get them off my chest.
TiVo Suggestions
Suggestions sound like a good idea. In theory your TiVo looks at what you are recording and begins recording things that are similar. The problem is that I never had any shortage of things to watch on my old ReplayTV. After setting the same channels up on my TiVo that seemed adequate.
About a day or two later I noticed that my TiVo was constantly recording two channels simultaneously. It was to the point where I could no longer change the channel because something was always recording. When I found the hidden collection of recordings what I saw was the worst assortment of television possible. Somehow, after I told my TiVo to record The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Heroes, 30 Rock and Scrubs my TiVo figured that it had enough information and then lined up the following for me:
- The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer
- Hannah Montana
- Dr. Phil
- Sabrina, the Teenage Witch
- Full House
- Access Hollywood
- Drake & Josh
- The Martha Stewart Show
- Montel Williams
- Live With Regis and Kelly
- The Fresh Prince of Bel Air
- Frasier
Don't get me wrong, there are a few things on that list that I wouldn't mind watching. However, could you possibly construct a more broad sampling of television? It's like my TiVo watched me select my three or four shows then said, "Hey, are you someone that likes to watch television? Great! We've got a few hundred shows for you!"
I'm sure that over time rating these suggestions they would begin to improve but I was not willing to leave this nuisance of a feature on long enough to find out.
No Commercial Skip
The ReplayTV had a button that fast forwarded exactly 30 seconds. It's no surprise that TiVo got rid of this feature. They have a feature that lets you rewind a few seconds but no ability to skip over advertisements with greater ease. So now you have to manually fast forward which would have been fine if the commercial skip feature had never been invented.
Season Pass
I've got to say that the Season Pass feature sucks. It sounds like a great idea until you consider that there are precious few shows on TV that only play once a week. So what happens is you record every episode of that show that airs. Ever. Try setting up a Season Pass for The Daily Show and you record something like six episodes a day, all identical. You can refine it to pick first run only but what if you want to record it only on a specific channel? Or a specific time? There is really no easy way of doing this that I've found short of setting up a manual recording. That involves finding out the air time and channel of a specific show and manually entering in the information. On my ancient ReplayTV I could simply select a show and press the record button twice to do the same thing. Not being able to do this easily directly from the guide seems like a huge oversight.
I'm still a bit new so maybe I'm missing something here but it seems like quite a bit of work to achieve something simple that everyone is going to try to use.
Ads
Something at the bottom of my main menu screen read "$$ Save Money with Jenny Craig". Apparently TiVo feeds poorly targeted advertisements straight to your TiVo. And you can't even remove them. Imagine that. Call me old fashioned, but after laying out $300 for the TiVo and paying a monthly subscription fee on top of that I think the least I deserve is the ability to remove the ad from my main menu screen. It makes me almost respect them for how bold a move this is.