TiVo

This morning our TiVo went belly-up. It wouldn’t move past the grey startup screen no matter how much profanity was directed in its direction, not to mention crying, cajoling, sweet talking and multiple reboots.

We have gotten more than our money’s worth out of the two TiVo units we have owned since almost the very beginning. We paid quite a bit for the first one as is the curse of the early adopter. Its Series 2 replacement was more reasonably priced. We were also able to transfer the lifetime subscription purchased at the original $199 point to the newer unit. That makes me a smart and lucky person, as the lifetime subscription increased in price a few times and then was discontinued entirely.

But enough about my one-time financial and technologic coup.

I’ve forgotten how to watch TV minus TiVo. It’s been nearly 10 years since we got the first one, and I’ve gotten so accustomed to pausing for phone calls or snack breaks, rewinding to listen to missed dialogue, and fast forwarding through commercials that I’m a bit lost. That’s not even mentioning the shows whose regular airtimes do not fit into our schedules that are recorded for later viewing.

I think we’ll be having this unit repaired, as we weren’t planning to get a new one until we switch over to a new HD TV. At that time we’d have to give up the lifetime subscription anyway, but until our current TV malfunctions, we don’t plan to replace it solely to switch to HD. I hope it is still repairable, and before I go into a TiVo withdrawal meltdown. I rarely use the word “withdrawal” for anything, so you know I mean it this time!

(NaBloPoMo | November ’09: 17 of 30 | 75% Challenge: 262 of 274)

It might come as a surprise to know that we haven’t made the move to HD TV here yet. Our television sets generally die at that inopportune moment when new technology is either too expensive or too rare to consider purchasing. Our current television is still working fine, and was purchased when HD TV was still way overpriced. We may not make the move to HD TV until this set breaks.

So I haven’t had a need to upgrade our TiVo to the HD version. In fact, I really haven’t thought about our TiVo much at all, except to program in our season passes. We have had a TiVo since the Philips Series 1 versions. The lifetime subscription cost only $199 back then, and when we bought a Series 2, they were still offering a one-time subscription transfer at no cost. Since lifetime means the lifetime of the equipment, not the owner, yes, we did pretty much luck out.

But I am not here to brag that I haven’t paid for TiVo service in almost ten years. I’m here to say how silly I feel that I hadn’t looked into, and am not making use of, many of the capabilities of my older TiVo system.

After the hell that was attempting to connect a PS/2 game console to our wireless network, I have never attempted to connect anything else that wasn’t a plain old laptop or desktop computer. That includes the TiVo, and apparently a whole bunch of capabilities such as movie downloads, photo and web video viewing, mobile access, and scheduling from the web will be available to me upon connecting the TiVo to the home network.

So I’ll be shopping around for a network adapter, and getting TiVo on our network this weekend, just out of curiosity if nothing else. Scheduling recordings from the web will be worth it, at least!