What is TiVo?

"What is this TiVo thing you're always talking about?", I often get asked. Aside from being one of the coolest things I've bought in about 15 years, it's also something that has occupied many discussions we've had because of people's curiosity about it. Here I'll give my definitive pitch, on why it's going to change TV, why everyone will eventually have one (or something like it), and why all of you without TiVos are missing out so severely.

Shameless self-promotion

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The one common sentiment of anyone I've ever talked to that owns a TiVo is "oh my god, how could I possibly watch TV without it?". It so radically changes your TV experience that when Laurie and I are on vacation somewhere and for some reason turn on the TV in the hotel room, it's like "Ugh! Oh man, why do people even watch TV without a TiVo? How did we watch TV without a TiVo??"

And I can't even imagine having to channel surf, which I used to do extremely well.

Ok, before you tune out like you would to someone pushing Amway or to a Jehovah's Witness, let me justify those two paragraphs.

You connect your TiVo up to your TV almost like a VCR, and it's always on. All the TV you watch is through the TiVo (it talks to your cable box or satelite receiver to change channels, etc). You tell it what shows you want it to always record, and it does. You also tell it what shows/movies you like or dislike (you rate shows/movies anywhere between three thumbs down and three thumbs up), and it learns what shows you like. Then any time your TiVo isn't full of shows for you, and something comes on at 3:00am that it thinks you'll like, it records that too.

When you turn on your TV, you hit this "TiVo" button on the remote control. That brings up the main menu, and you choose "Now Playing". On this screen you see all of the shows/movies that TiVo has recorded for you, that are waiting to be watched. We have a 120 hour TiVo, so there's usually lots of movies and lots of TV shows that we know we'll like, waiting to be watched. Any time we want to watch them.. Compare that with waking up Sunday morning and surfing around to find that the only thing on is Golf, Bible Talk, and infomercials.

But before I go off describing the details all over the place, let me impose a little structure. Here are a bunch of key features of TiVo, broken up into separate chunks:

There's always "something on", that you like, when you have a TiVo
TiVo has 2 weeks of tv-listings guide data
You can record a show while watching another recorded show
You can watch any part of what's already been recorded
Only watch the commercials you want to
Oh yeah, you can pause and rewind live TV
Never worry about "special episodes" again
No more buying tons of videotapes
Find / Record things by keyword, actor, etc
TiVo will record things it thinks you'll like
Delayed Gratification - Poor Man's Video-On-Demand
HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Encore, etc all much more valuable now

There's always "something on", that you like, when you have a TiVo

As I said above, your TiVo is always filled with things you want to watch. When I finally do get some amount of time in my life that I want to spend watching TV, I don't want it to be garbage that I'm watching. I can safely say I'll never have to watch another infomercial, game show I don't like, or old rerun that I hate. Instead I'll rest assured that we'll catch every new episode of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Practice, as well as having a whole bunch of Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Quantum Leap reruns to pick from.

TiVo has 2 weeks of tv-listings guide data

Throw away that TV guide. First of all, if you're watching Live TV (which we never do anymore), and want to know what something is, a description of that episode comes up with one click of the remote.

Second, when you want to tell TiVo to record a show, all you have to know is the name of the show. You don't need to know when it's on, or what channel; you just enter the name of the show, and tell it whether to record specific episodes or all of them. There are plenty of shows that Laurie and I watch now for which we have absolutely no idea when they air.

You can record a show while watching another recorded show

This feature confused people when it's first mentioned to them. Most people's gut reaction is to say "hey doesn't my VCR already let me do that? I can already watch something while taping something else..".. Read carefully here - the TiVo lets you record a show while watching another recorded show. No, you weren't doing that on your VCR, unless you had a dual-deck VCR or something.
Example: Laurie wants to tape Buffy The Vampire Slayer, or something else that I don't want to watch, let's say on Tuesday night. For whatever reason I end up home and she isn't, and her show starts getting recorded. With a VCR I'd be stuck either watching that or ever-so-carefully switching the TV around somehow to watch something else live (but certainly not anything on tape). Here however I can watch any of the things the TiVo has recorded for me, while it records Buffy for Laurie. And since the TiVo is always full of stuff that we want to watch, it's never a problem. (We almost never watch live TV anymore, except on rare occasions like watching CNN news etc, and even that we buffer).
That then gets someone asking if you can record two different shows at once, and the answer to that is "with software version 2.5 or better, if you have a DirecTiVo" (the DirecTV version of the TiVo). New versions of the TiVo's software download automatically overnight, adding new features. As of the time of this writing, 2.5 is about to be released. "Standalone" TiVos (the rest of them, the most common being Phillips TiVos) are not able to record two different shows at once, but it only really matters when you're talking about taping shows like Friends vs Survivor, since those are only shown once per week. Movie conflicts etc are almost never a concern, because the TiVo will find another time that a show is showing and suggest that one instead.
You can watch any part of what's already been recorded

Here's the example I give for this feature: It's Wednesday, and you were rushing home to watch tape Star Trek: Voyager at 9:00pm (yes, it's off the air already as I write this, but this is the example I've been using for a year). You drive like a maniac to make it home, but get inside around 9:15pm. You had your old VCR recording the show for you.
Which would you do:
1. Start watching now from 9:15 until the end, then rewind the tape to see the now-anti-climactic-beginning, or
2. Wait around twiddling your thumbs for 45 minutes, so you can see it all as it's supposed to be seen (and go to bed 45 minutes later).
With a VCR, you're stuck with those lousy two options. With a TiVo, you can start watching when you get home at 9:15pm, from the beginning of the show. You can fast-forward and rewind through any of the part of the show that has already been recorded.
In fact, when Laurie and I were home at 9:00pm on Wednesdays, we wouldn't even start watching it at 9:00pm. We'd either watch something else that had been recorded for a while, or find something else to do, until about 9:15pm anyway. Why? So we could fast forward through commercials. We're watching it semi-live, yet we still have enough buffered that we can skip the commercials, and still end up being done watching it at 10:00pm just like everyone else. That seems worth mentioning again...
Only watch the commercials you want to

As long as you have some more live tv buffered "in front of you" (i.e. as long as you started watching after the show started, or have paused/rewound while watching for long enough), then you can fast forward past commercials even when watching semi-live TV. I fast forward through them, then if/when I see one that looks interesting or funny, I can rewind and watch it from the beginning, always.
No, it doesn't automatically skip commercials. ReplayTV (a competitor) will do that with their next product, but their previous products haven't been quite as polished as TiVo. We'll see.
Oh yeah, you can pause and rewind live TV

This is the feature that most people know about from commercials. (TiVo's commercials haven't been terribly good, with maybe one or two exceptions). Anyway, as alluded to above, at any time you can pause what you're watching, even if it's live TV (if it's live, you can pause for up to 30 minutes). The TiVo visually stands still on that frame, but starts buffering what's coming in "ahead of you". Later you can hit the pause button again and continue right where you left off, now obviously watching it a bit behind the actual broadcast (but who cares, because when a commercial comes you can skip back ahead). You can also rewind and fast forward anywhere in the buffer, as well as hitting the "instant replay" button to go back a discrete 8 seconds for every time you hit it.
One great example of where this was invaluable was during the presidential debates. It's a 90 minute debate, that everyone pretty much wants to watch live rather than the next day. Then at one point I was like "whoa, what did he say?", and we were able to just rewind and hear it. With a VCR, you'd have to remember what time the thing had been said, then when the entire debate was over, rewind to that one sentence (which at that point is probably completely out of context). Other obvious examples are when the phone rings (pause), and when I want to show Laurie something I just saw on the news or a commercial. This feature to me is kind of like the song Tom Sawyer by Rush; that's an incredible song I love, but since it's all that most people know I react differently when hearing people mention it, wishing they knew more of Rush's incredible work over the years. It doesn't mean I don't love the song - I just don't want people thinking that's all they've done. Same with this feature. (Ok, maybe that was just an excuse to throw in a Rush reference. Sue me).
Never worry about "special episodes" again

Going back to the Star Trek: Voyager example from above, let's say that this week there's a Boston Bruins game playing, so they rescheduled the show to be broadcast on Friday. Plus, let's say it's a two-hour special this week, starting at 8:00pm and going until 10:00pm. You don't have to know anything about any of this, because the TiVo gets updated guide data every night via the phone, and knows about the schedule changes. Plus, in this example you have a "Season Pass" for the show, so it will tape it whenever it's on. It's not like you're saying "every week on Wednesday from 9:00pm to 10:00pm on channel 14" - instead you're saying "Star Trek: Voyager" - all of them, whenever they come on. (And you can even say whether to record just new episodes, or if instead you want reruns recorded too).
No more buying tons of videotapes

One day long ago I realized videotapes were cheap, and I started buying them like they were paper. I decided I didn't have the time to figure out what on a tape I wanted to record over, so I kept it all. (One unfortunate result was my old apartment's livingroom). Anyway, with a TiVo, no more tapes. The TiVo records video to an internal hard drive, and erases stuff when you tell it to. If you really want, you can save video from the TiVo to videotape via a VCR and the "Save to VCR..." command, but I myself find I rarely do that (since you can't schedule batch runs of 8 or so shows in a row).
(Incidentally, the apartment problem became so bad that I actually had strata of videotapes.. Tapes on the surface would be from 1999, but if you dug deep you'd get to 1995 shows. I hadn't really wanted to keep all those shows, but I didn't want to go through the videotapes to find what I didn't want either).
Find / Record things by keyword, actor, etc

You can create things called Wishlists that record shows for you based on keywords, actors, categories, directors, or titles. The best way to describe that feature is via an example:
Laurie and I were planning our honeymoon to Hawaii and wanted to figure out which islands to go to and what to do. So, I created a Keyword Wishlist, for the word "Hawaii". When you create a wishlist, you can set it to automatically record all shows that match the wishlist, or instead just have it around and from time to time view all upcoming shows for that wishlist, without automatically recording them. I chose auto-record, and we had large amounts of travel shows about Hawaii recorded for us by our TiVo - even on channels we didn't know we had. (They were shows we'd never heard of either - something we wouldn't have been able to do otherwise).
Interestingly, this first wishlist I created was a bit crude in that it also wanted to record an episode of The Brady Bunch (because it was the one where they went to Hawaii), along with a bunch of other similarly humerous but not-related shows. I later created a Category wishlist, the Category being "Arts and Living / Travel", wish a keyword of Hawaii. That did the trick, giving us only travel shows about Hawaii. Too cool.
We also created a wishlist for Latvia, in case there was ever anything about Latvia mentioned.. (That's where my (Jeff's) mother was born, and where she lived until the age of 3). Sure enough, about a month or so after I'd forgotten that I even created it, the wishlist taped a Lonely Planet episode about Latvia. My parents, my brother, and I, had taken a trip to Latvia in 1999, and I recognized much of what was on the special. Again, too cool.
TiVo will record things it thinks you'll like

I find that strangely this feature is one of the toughest to describe to people, despite its simplicity. Ok.. First of all, the remote has two buttons on it near the top - a big green Thumbs Up button, and a big red Thumbs Down button. When you're watching any show, movie, etc, you should "rate" it with these buttons. That's how you tell the TiVo what you like. You can give up to three thumbs ups to something, or up to three thumbs downs. (and when you record a show, it gets one thumbs up by default).
The TiVo does two things with this "thumbs" data. First of all, there's a menu choice called "TiVo Suggestions" - when you choose this, it gives you a list of shows/movies that it thinks you'll like that are coming up sometime in the next two weeks. This gives you the opportunity to select some of those items to be recorded, and/or to verify its guesses by giving explicit thumbs-ups or thumbs-downs to the shows it thought you might like. (After the first two days, my TiVo never suggested religious programming again ).
The second (and much more useful) way that it uses this data is to record shows from that TiVo Suggestions list for you, any time there's free space in your TiVo. So if it's 2:30am on a Tuesday, and the TiVo isn't scheduled to record anything for you until Thursday but Star Wars comes on, there's a good chance it will record it for you anyway. It will have a TiVo ( ) icon next to it, indicating that TiVo recorded it on its own without your telling it to. These suggestions have the lowest priority, and will never cause any of your existing shows to go away. but at least let your TiVo fill itself up with shows it thinks you will like.
(I (Jeff) have tried very hard to keep my thumbs-up ratings consistent. One thing I didn't want to do was give everything 3-thumbs-up on a day when I was happy, then rate other stuff horribly when I was in a bad mood. So for me, the rule is this: 3-thumbs-up is reserved for Star Wars, and shows that I believed belonged on that level of greatness (The Shawshank Redemption is up there, along with a few others). 1-thumbs-up is given by default for recording something, so I use that to indicate that something was ok, or at least not bad enough that I went back in to thumbs-down it afterwards. Lastly, 2-thumbs-up is for things better than 1 but not quite at the Star Wars level).
Delayed Gratification - Poor Man's Video-On-Demand

With cable channels or without, the TiVo has acts sort of like a poor-man's video-on-demand (more like video-within-a-week-or-two) for us. There's a very strange (and yet cool) delayed gratification thing going on here for movies.
Ok, let me explain.
About once every two weeks (if I get a chance), I try to look through what movies are coming up in the next 2 weeks. (Remember, the TiVo has guide data that goes out about that far.. actually I think it's more like 10 days). I'll see some movie that I wanted to see (or that Laurie hadn't seen yet that I wanted to show her), and I'll tell the TiVo to record it (even though it's on in a week and a half, at 3:45am).
I'll schedule a bunch of these, then go about my buisness watching something else. I'll completely forget that I even scheduled these. Then one day I'll turn on the TiVo, go to Now Playing to see what's on the TiVo, and go "ohhhh yeaaaaaaaah!! Cool, I forgot I asked for this!". It almost feels like a mini investment - make the future us happy by scheduling things for them now.
Plus, unless you're looking for something obscure, there's a good chance that what you're looking for will be on some channel within the next two weeks.. (and if not, you can create a wishlist for it). That's how it feels like a poor-man's video-on-demand - we still get to watch it, but not necessarily tonight. Which isn't that bad, since we have a TiVo full of things we want to watch anyway that's haunting us until we watch it. (We call it being in "TiVo debt" - when there's so much you have recorded that you want to watch, but don't have the time. I still argue that's better than having an empty TiVo).
And to be honest, I think that form of poor-man's-video-on-demand is way better than if you even had "real" video-on-demand available today. Sure, "real" video on demand would be cool if you had a particular movie in mind right then and needed to watch it that night because friends were over or something, but you'd have to know what you want to watch already. I'd rather browse, find 5 or 6 movies or shows I'm interested in, and have them delivered to me spread out over the next two weeks (usually the case - simple probability theory).
HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Encore, etc all much more valuable now

When AT&T Broadband called us up and asked if we wanted to switch to digital cable, they pointed out that instead of just getting three HBO channels, we'd get like six of them (and similarly more channels of Cinemax, Encore, etc). Now before TiVo, we'd have been like "So what? We barely watch HBO as it is, only watching for a few series shows, some comedy specials, etc. Who has time to look at more of them?". But, they asked after we had a TiVo, so we reacted quite differently. With tons of pay channels like that, the video-on-demand aspect of the TiVo becomes much more useful. Now, when I say something like "You mean you never saw Tucker? We should record that on the TiVo" to Laurie, the chance that it'll actually be on in the next two weeks is way higher.

Well, that's about it. As of the time of this writing (9/14/2001) you can get an old 14 hour TiVo for about $100, with the $250 lifetime service ($10 per month is for schmucks, in my ever-so-humble opinion). If you've got any technical skills (or a friend who does) and want to hack your TiVo, you can then add an 80 gig drive to make it into a 108 hour TiVo for an extra $165 or so. So a cheap TiVo can be had for $350 (with lifetime-for-the-device service plan paid for), and a decent one can be had for about $550 (again, with lifetime-for-the-device service paid for).

(The TiVo "service" - the $250 one-time fee - is the price for the daily guide data that gets downloaded by the TiVo each night, as well as new versions of the software that happen once or twice a year. Consider it part of the cost of the unit. The devices are actually manufactured by Phillips and Sony; TiVo writes the software and sells the service. Still, people call them TiVos instead of PVRs (Personal Video Recorders)).

Check out some other fun things you can do with your TiVo (which ultimately is a box running Linux). I control our TiVo wirelessly from my Palm VIIx when I'm on the road.

Some other articles/pages (from external sites) about what TiVo is, etc:

Welcome to the TiVolution!

TiVo