Serious TiVo Head: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

January 19, 2003

Serious TiVo Head

The New York Times's David Pogue has become a serious TiVo head. He sounds as though this technology has truly changed his life...

Tomorrow's TiVos

January 16, 2003

Tomorrow's TiVos
By DAVID POGUE

ttending the Consumer Electronics Show, as I did last week, is an exhausting proposition. Sane people fill the days with meetings and dinners; extremists like me actually walk to all 2,200 booths. My feet may never recover.

As I wrote in today's paper, there was plenty to see, touch and look forward to. But for me, a highlight was visiting the TiVo exhibit for a preview of the company's plans. (If you don't own a TiVo and never will, the rest of this e-column may not hold much interest for you; sorry about that. But hey-whaddya want for free?)

A TiVo, of course, is a digital video recorder (DVR), something like a VCR with a hard drive instead of tapes. It not only records any show you ask for, it can also pause or rewind live television, skip the ads, and so on. It's a life-changer.

In April, TiVo will beam a 4.0 software upgrade to all TiVo Series 2 owners. The new features fall into two categories: free enhancements, and paid enhancements. (Whether or not owners of the older Series 1 machines will get any of these features is still under discussion.)

Freebies: You'll gain the ability to sort the list of recorded shows by either date or alphabetically. You'll also be able to clump shows into folders-all episodes of "Friends," for example-to keep your list manageable. Your existing remote will gain the ability to jump to the top or bottom of the list.

You have a home network, you'll be able to eliminate the box's phone-jack requirement. The TiVo can make its calls to the mother ship (to download the TV guide) via cable modem or D.S.L.

But if you pay a one-time $100 fee, you get some of the juiciest features of all. For starters, you'll be able to program your TiVo from a Web site-a great perk for anyone who occasionally leaves the house. Owners of TiVo's rival, ReplayTV, already enjoy this feature, but they must remember to program the Web site a day in advance of the broadcast. If you have a broadband Internet connection, the TiVo will be able to check for your Web instructions as often as every 15 minutes.

The $100 Home Media option will also let you watch shows on one TiVo that were recorded by a different TiVo in the house. (The other TiVos in your house show up in the Now Playing list with their own icons.)

Once your TiVo is networked (by Ethernet cable or Wi-Fi wireless), the Home Media option will also let you play music or photos from your Mac or PC right on the TV. That's a big improvement over the ReplayTV system, which doesn't play music at all, and for showing pictures requires you to copy the picture files to the Replay itself before you can show them. With TiVo's system, they remain on the computer. You don't sacrifice any hard drive space to these files, as you do on the Replay. (Of course, the Replay has its own perks, like the feature that skips over 80% of the recorded ads during playback.)

I learned three other tidbits of interest to TiVo freaks. First, Toshiba's upcoming SD-H500 is a beautiful TiVo unit with a DVD player built in-a handy space saver. Second, TiVo's HDTV model will be available in about a year; it's up and running in prototype form. Finally, TiVo expects to break even next quarter, and to become profitable for 2003-welcome news if you've ever worried that if the company went under, you'd be saddled with a dead box.

P.S. The big-ticket Christmas gift at the Pogue household this year was a 145-hour TiVo upgrade, basically a formatted hard drive I bought at www.weaknees.com. (You can buy these drives in various capacities there; my 145-hour replacement drive cost $230, including tax and shipping. Guess it tells you something about the Pogue household if the big-ticket gift was a hard drive. But I digress.)

The kit comes with two special wrenches and instructions, which are posted at the Weaknees Web site so you can gauge the installation difficulty before you order. Installing this new, bigger hard drive isn't as simple as putting a Pop-Tart into a toaster, but it's not as hard as taking apart a car engine, either. You open the TiVo case (the hardest part), unplug two cables, unscrew the drive from its mount, and then reverse the procedure with the new drive. The whole operation took 30 minutes.

And now—oh, mama, what a difference. 145 hours of recording time changes everything. Now we record everything at high quality, let a collection of movies sit there until we have time to watch them, and so on. Nerd heaven!

Posted by DeLong at January 19, 2003 04:37 PM | Trackback

TiVo is just great. I attest. Go for it.

One of its features not listed in the story is that it will scan all channels for shows of interest (by name, subject, actor, whatever) and find things you didn't know existed on channels you don't know exist.

E.g. my kids have discovered this is good for schoolwork. They plug in maybe a subject from history class and it records shows at 3am on the CUNY stations, or out-of-town educational stations that fill the high channel slotts at that hour, or on TLC or whatever. Which they would never have known about. Of course this can be used for more adult fare as well. ;-)

Replay TV is an interesting business story. They were first in the market but there were very few buyers, so they withdrew from the retail side. Then the market hit some sort of tipping point and when *vooom*, and now they are trying to get back in.

How the commercial-dependant broadcasters are responding to this commercial-zapping technology is an interesting business story too.

Posted by: Jim Glass on January 19, 2003 05:28 PM

Yes, fine, Tivo sounds technologically marvelous, but I just don't see where the wonder is in having something like Tivo when all you get to choose from is a hundred channels of Hollywood dreck, whether the movie kind or the TV kind.

I suppose it's a good thing more people aren't like me, otherwise the economy would be in more trouble that it is.

Posted by: on January 19, 2003 11:25 PM

Does TiVo add to competition or diversity in electronic media? I am increasingly worried about communications/media concentrations and do not understand how an innovative technology such as TiVo might affect this.

Posted by: on January 20, 2003 07:13 AM

"What'll happen to innovation when Prof. DeLong gets his wish and the federal govt controls, directly, 30% of GDP?"

I have no idea why anyone would make such an absurd remark.

Posted by: on January 20, 2003 08:58 AM

Note first that this is bogus, I did not write it:

>> Because I am unscrupulous. I accuse everyone to the left of me of being a Stalinist.

>> Posted by Patrick R. Sullivan at January 20, 2003 01:57 PM <<

Second, while I have never, ever accused anyone of being a Stalinist who actually wasn't one, I have been often accused of being a "right-wing nazi". Usually by people as intellectually bankrupt as the person who forged the above post.

Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan on January 20, 2003 04:41 PM

Question for the gear-heads: TiVo seems great, but overpriced at the moment to me.

Why can't the same protocols be executed more cheaply with a PC and as-yet-undeveloped software? Lots of consumers already have small home networks (either wired or wireless), and it's easy to make a PC into a TV with a tuner card right now . . . . . . I'd think all you'd need would be a specialized tuner card for your PC, maybe a dedicated hard drive and software to run the system.

Posted by: Anarchus on January 21, 2003 08:34 AM

You can do all these things on a PC. I can do most
of this with my ATI All-in-Wonder. I get a TV guide on screen, I do two or three clicks to schedule a recording, I can see upcoming shows sorted by various topics, etc.

The two drawbacks:
ATI's drivers suck, always have, and probably always will. So at some point the record or play process will crash and a reboot is necessary. Maybe not when the first program is recording, but at some time, and once it crashes nothing more is
going to record until I do a reboot.

Second applies to all such TV software, not just to second-rate ATI software. It is not a lot of fun to watch a TV program on a 19 inch computer monitor. It is the
first choice of almost no one. Lots of people have DVD/CD players in their computer but has anyone invited you over to watch a DVD... on the computer instead of on a TV?

Posted by: American Made on January 21, 2003 10:35 AM

About 4 years ago I had an early ATI vid card. NOT the All-in-Wonder, but another model. The drivers did stink, and about 2 months after going off warranty, the card failed. Which is a particularly bad failure, 'cause it's hard to know what to troubleshoot when you can't get ANYTHING on your screen . . . . .

So the question then is, ASSUMING that somebody comes out with a new, improved and stable product that take the place of the ATI All-in-Wonder card & software, how hard is it to output an analog or digital signal to the TV in your family room?

Would it be possible to use something such as a Hollywood DV-Bridge in between the PC and the TV to convert the digital signal to a TV-readable analog signal? Or is there some other, more elegant solution?

Posted by: Anarchus on January 21, 2003 11:34 AM