I haven't written about TiVo here for a long time…amazing because of how important my TiVo has been to me. I was the first person I knew to own one and I can't tell you how much it improved my life. At last, I could watch TV the way I wanted to watch it which was when I wanted to. I knew how to set a VCR to record things when I was out and I did it but it was nowhere near as convenient as TiVo. The big difference is that now I record everything I might want to watch and then I can pick and choose what to watch and in what order and I can pause a show in mid-viewing and…well, you know how liberating that can be.
I'm still using very old Series 2 TiVos here because I get my video signal via DirecTV and TiVo has not made a really good model that interfaces with DirecTV. They've been saying for years they were about to but no such machine has materialized.
That may be about to change. The TiVo Overlords have been saying they'd have a good high-def TiVo for DirecTV out by the end of 2011 and no one believed them. We'd heard that before and we all knew that around August or so, they'd move the date and say, "Next year for sure." But here it is, the day before Thanksgiving…and TiVo is still saying it'll be out by the end of '11. That gives one hope.
On the other hand, massive flooding in Thailand has crippled the production of computer harddisks. That's where most of them are made and there's a brief (one hopes) shortage of them. That may be what kicks the new TiVo over to 2012.
I'd been considering ditching DirecTV, going to cable and buying the new TiVo Premiere Elite which has four tuners. You can record four shows at once or watch one and record three. You can also program it via an iPhone app and easily transfer recorded shows to your iPhone or iPad and there are many features. It works only with digital cable — no satellite dishes, no roof antennas — and it also won't work with AT&T U-Verse, a service that I don't have but spend my life declining. (There are more people in this world trying to get me to switch to AT&T U-Verse than there are fighting crime, healing the sick and defending our nation.) But I held off on the Premiere Elite because I recklessly believed that like Godot, the DirecTV TiVo was coming and I didn't want to switch, then realize I should have waited.
Will it show before the next time they drop the ball in Times Square? If it does, will it be what I crave? Stay tuned…and you may want to take a Season Pass for this topic because it may go on for a while.