The Basic TiVo: Great, and a TV Butler For Your Kids and Others

Have you tried out a TiVo yet? The TiVo can become your best TV friend and you can do all sorts of things with it. Do you want your (young) kids to see “good” shows and avoid “bad” ones? With a basic TiVo and a TV set with a timer, you can easily control what they see, when they see it, and you can turn the TV on and off at your preference- automatically.

First, let’s take a look at the basic TiVo (the 40-hour one) and how it works. For this purpose we will look at the TiVo Series2 40-Hours Video Recorder and how one might “normally” use it, and then I will tell you how I turned mine into a TV butler.

A TiVo is a box that sits near your TV, an external digital video recorder. It is not the only way to record television shows. You can record television onto VHS cassettes or even DVDs today, or you can use many cable companies’ DVR services, and all of these will record shows for you. But a TiVo has certain advantages.

The TiVo stores its programs on a non-removable hard disk. If you are happy with it, you can leave it as-is. If you are a hacker, you can give it a larger hard disk, but that is up to you. This one will record 40 hours of programming under normal conditions.

The TiVo can be set to record only what you want it to record, or, if you wish, it will record other shows it thinks you might like, based on the history of the types of shows you have been recording. For example, if you have been recording a lot of TV crime dramas, it might throw in another crime drama you haven’t seen yet. It also has the ability to pause live television.

An essential part of the working of the TiVo is the program guide information supplied to TiVo Inc. by Tribune Media Services. The TiVo downloads this information, through a telephone line or off the net every day. You simply go to an area on the menu called “Find Programs” and there you can easily and quickly select, with one click, programs for up to two weeks ahead based on the name and descriptions of programs, actors, genres, and a host of other factors. If you want, you can request a “Season Pass” to a certain show that repeats. For example, if I select “Modern Marvels” for a Season Pass, the TiVo will record all of those shows, and it won’t record the same show twice within 28 days.

You can tell the TiVo to do a number of things with these shows. Let’s say you don’t get home until 6 PM and you want to record the 5:30 PM evening news each day. You can tell it to record tonight’s show, so you can watch it, but afterward delete it and record the next night’s 5:30 PM evening news show tomorrow night, so that the news show you watch is always fresh. You can tell it to record an episode of 24 and to save it for a week or so, and then delete it. Or you can tell it not to delete that episode of 24 at all, such as if you are going on a 2-week trip and you want to see it when you get back.

The TiVo also lets you create a “Wish List”. This will flag any show coming up which contains a certain actor, title, director, key word, or category. For example, you can make a Wish List with the name “Bogart” and any movie that Humphrey Bogart is a part of on any of your channels for as long as you wish will normally be recorded for you to go back and look at.

What if you want two different shows playing at the same time, though? A thing called the Season Pass Manager allows you to prioritize your programs to resolve conflicts. If the machine can record a showing of the lesser priority show later, it will pick it up later. Obviously, it can’t record two shows at once. Unless it has a two-channel recording capability (two tuners), which this unit has, so conflicts are reduced to a minimum.

What if you want to watch a show while another one you want is being recorded in realtime? There is a button for that, and that is another thing you can do.

You get 40 hours worth of recording time with this basic unit, and that means that you can fill it up with programs. Then the unit will dispose of older programs, unless you tell it not to delete any of them, at which time it won’t record any more until you have freed up some space. Most users never have this problem, though, because they learn to leave some space free.

You can watch a previously recorded program while you are recording another on too. That is nice.

When I first heard about TiVos, I thought you could eliminate commercials with it. You can’t. But you can fast-forward through them. With the remote, you can choose your fast-forward speed and you soon get into a habit that is comfortable for you. Many programs today have a signature marker for when a segment of a show is going off and when a new one is coming on, and you learn to watch for those as you fast-forward and restart the program at normal speed. If you are going to watch a live TV show, a fun thing you can do is delay watching it until 15 or 20 minutes have passed, then start watching it- that way you can then fast-forward through commercials on the “live” show.

These are some of the more important features of the basic 40-hour unit. The next thing you might want to know is, how much does it cost? Most retailers sell them for about $140.00 (in 2007) but you can sometimes find them on sale for $99.00. The monthly service charge is $12.95. At one time you could buy a lifetime (of the machine) subscription for about $300, but they discontinued that practice in March of 2006. I know of one machine that has lasted its owner for six years now, so if he had bought the lifetime subscription he would be getting his service “free”. But no such luck for new buyers. Even so, the monthly fee is worth it- at least to me.

Setup is a bit of a pain. But probably not much more of a pain than that of setting up and learning to use a new computer. The instructions are good and the support is good. But your new TiVo may take some tweaking with certain kinds of TV services. You just have to be patient and you may have to have a friend who already has one to help. But once the setup is done, navigating and using the menu is a snap. And it is many times easier than using a VHS or DVD recorder with your TV.

So these are the basic facts about the unit. How do I, as a consumer, like it? Well, I would never go back to watching TV without a TiVo if I have the choice. Let’s face it- even with so many channels on TV today, most of the shows out there are not to our taste. But let’s say that you do like at least 10% of what’s out there. If you get 150 channels, that means that 15 of those channels are going to have stuff you might really want to watch. You can select shows off your favorite channels, save them into a 25-program “Now Playing” list, and you never have to mess with all the others. The TiVo records the shows you want and when you sit down to watch the shows, the TiVo has them all waiting for you. This is like going through a menu in a restaurant and ordering what you want, instead of having the chef push 20 different foods in your face. It’s nice to have a real choice in the matter.

I also like the fact that the TiVo will record a show at 4 AM in the morning for me while I’m asleep and I don’t have to get up to watch it. I can watch it whenever I want, and then simply delete it with one click. Neat.

What don’t I like about the TiVo? Not much. It seems that about 5% of the time it has a mind of its own. Instead of recording, say, a favorite movie I had been looking forward to it will record something like a re-run of an old “Jerry Springer Show” or something. But not all that often; usually it behaves itself. I’m not sure why this happens, but it may be an anomaly with my cable company or something about the TiVo. But it’s not a really big concern; often you can pick up a show you missed later.

Now that I have covered the nuts and bolts of this TiVo and what I like and don’t like about it, let me tell you about a novel application I have discovered for the unit: with a timered television, it can serve as a wonderful “TV butler.” I don’t know if TiVo even knows about this application of its product, but it is way-cool.

It works like this. A timered TV will, say, turn the TV set “on” at, say, 5:30 PM in the evening and turn itself off at, say, 9 PM if you program the TV that way. During that 3 1/2 hours, you can program the TiVo to only display, as it records, certain designated programs. Here is the implication of this: the TV can restrict itself during its viewing hours to only “safe” shows you choose.

For example, let’s say you have an elderly person who lives in your home. That elderly person can’t stand the displays of sex and violence in many evening TV shows that are getting increasingly stronger all the time. But they do like shows like the 5:30 PM news and shows like reruns of “The Andy Griffith Show”, “Little House on the Prairie,” and “The Cosby Show,” etc. Let’s say those shows appear on four different channels during the 5:30-9:00 PM time frame. You program in the shows for those times and those channels, and Voila! Now they have the G-rated TV they want in the evening. The TiVo will automatically switch from show to show. No bloody bodies falling all over each other in a gun battle, no naughty displays of epidermis. Just good clean TV.

Okay, so you are recording those shows at the same time. No problem; just set the TiVo to delete them after each showing. Or you can save them to watch them over.

The same “TV butler” effect can be used for TV shows for small children (those young enough not to know how to override the TiVo’s controls) too. You can be relatively sure that your children will be watching their favorite parent-approved shows every night, and you can fix dinner or read the paper and you don’t have to be getting up every so often to go switch channels for them. Neat. This is one thing I like that has been a real plus in my situation.

All in all, the 40 hour Series Two TiVo is a real winner, in my eyes. Once you get it up and running, it will change the way you watch TV forever. It does many things very well.

Five Stars/*****