Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia To TiVo or Not to TiVo

Circuit Cellar has an international audience, so some of you will have to bear with me if you live in a country that hasn’t gone crazy over commercial TV digital video recording (a.k.a. TiVo, or in some places its competitor ReplayTV).

Remember about five years ago when you wanted to record a TV program? Provided you were one of the people who actually read directions, you had to go through the arduous task of setting the VCR. If you were like me, you just said, "Dear, did you remember to set the VCR before we leave?," giving the task to the fairer sex. You could record more than one program, too, as long as the total time didn’t exceed 6 h and you didn’t have a power glitch any time before the last second of recording, otherwise the whole process was trashed. Needless to say, recording wasn’t easy.

A few years ago, digital recorders came on the scene. I appreciated the technology, of course, but I had a privacy issue with them that kept me on the outside for many years. For those of you still in the dark, TiVo is a digital video recorder. The box is connected to your cable line or satellite dish. And, depending upon the size of the internal hard drive, it records between 35 and 280 h of programming. TiVo connects to your telephone line or the Internet and downloads a special TiVo program guide that allows you to simply click on the programs you want to view or record (even two at a time).

The bad news about TiVo is that it is like your worst nightmare about Internet cookies. The TiVo box downloads the program guide, and then uploads everything it has done since the last time it was polled. So, every program you surfed, every commercial you watched or skipped—basically your complete viewing habits—are now available to some marketing guy on a mission. But, then again, our digital world is full of personal-info paranoia, so what’s new? I finally succumbed when my wife said, "So, what would you watch that you couldn’t tell people?" My realization was nothing, and I went out the same day and bought an 80-h Sony TiVo that connected to my DirectTV satellite dish.

Because I already had a substantial monthly subscription plan with DirectTV, the usual $10-per-month TiVo subscription was added for free. I also added an equipment replacement policy for $60 per year. This was extremely fortuitous because the Sony TiVo crapped out four weeks after I bought it. Rather than wait three months to get it replaced by Sony, I sent it to DirectTV and received a "new" Hughes TiVo via UPS the next day. The bad news was that it turned out to be a 35-h unit instead of the 80-h unit I had purchased. This one worked for two months before it joined the other one in the DirectTV trashcan. Then, DirectTV sent me a Philips unit as a replacement. This one has run OK for the past three months (knock on wood).

Of course, DirectTV has sent new remotes, documentation, and hook-up cables each time the unit has been replaced, but spares are good. What you have to watch out for are hidden settings in replacement units. All TiVos have a progressive setup procedure designed specifically for direction-challenged people like me. This is how you tell the machine to automatically fill your entire hard drive with Simpson reruns or just leave the driving to you. Complacency should be avoided, however, even if you have already gone through the entire setup procedure with three other machines in the past five months. When I neglected to examine the telephone number to which the TiVo unit periodically calls for programming (a 1 to 3 h initial setup download), I found a $28 long-distance charge on my phone bill! Apparently the latest TiVo preferred to call Indiana rather than the local Hartford number for programming. That got changed immediately.

So, after almost a year of use, like most people with TiVo, I love it. For the Microsoft bashers out there, you’ll be glad to know that TiVo runs on Linux, which seems to be an unending source of amusement for people who want to add enhancements (i.e., hack the box). Because it uses an open-source operating system, there is less interference from commercial interests (like a Microsoft). Therefore, modifications like increasing the size of the hard drive and adding a DVD recorder abound. In fact, I found one unofficial site (www.tivocommunity.com) that has 164,000 threads with 1,800,000 posts talking about TiVo. Yes, opening the box will void the warranty, but it looks like it isn’t discouraged. Apparently promoting the cult following has more benefits for TiVo in the long run.

So, TiVo has succeeded in becoming the better mousetrap. More importantly, it is a real computer. And just like video games, there is a lot of horsepower under the hood. I’m sure even some of the more esoteric potential enhancements would be of interest to Circuit Cellar readers. The on-line forum prominently posts, "NOTE...No talk of any type of service theft or video extraction is allowed. This also includes hacks that remove ads from TiVo software." Provided you understand that we also have this same rule, Circuit Cellar would love to see (and potentially publish) the great things you’ve done with your TiVo.