If you've been toying with buying a TiVo, I'll suggest a deal you might consider…and I don't make a nickel on this. The best company I've found that handles TiVos, especially for repair and upgrades, is a firm called (for some reason) WeaKnees. They've come up with a stash of refurbished Humax TiVos with built-in DVD burners. This is the only TiVo system out there for which one can still purchase TiVo Lifetime Service, which at $299 is a bargain if you're going to keep the machine more than two years.
WeaKnees is offering the Humax TiVo for $199 with free shipping. There's a $150 rebate available so the machine costs you $49. Actually, if you go for this deal, spend a hundred bucks more and get the version in which WeaKnees installs a larger harddisk, thereby boosting your recording capacity from 40 hours to 350.
It won't handle hi-def but if that doesn't matter to you, you can get a TiVo with lifetime service and a DVD burner for a grand total of $348-$448. And yes, it's refurbished but you'd be buying it from a pretty reliable company. Here are the details.
A couple times a month, I get an e-mail asking me if I think TiVo will be around long enough to make it safe to invest in one. Yeah, I do. A few years ago, there was a period when that seemed iffy…but even there, if you'd bought a machine then and it all blew up today, you'd have gotten your bucks' worth out of it. At the moment, TiVo looks somewhat stable. The big threat is probably not that the company would go under but just that someone else will come out with a machine you'd rather have. (The odds are it would be the TiVo company and given their past behavior, there's a good chance — though no guarantee — that they'd allow you to transfer that lifetime service contract to the upgraded machine.)
A newer, better model is pretty much the risk when you buy any piece of technology today. A week or so ago, I purchased the new Blackberry Curve cellphone and on my way out of the store (italics, mine) I heard another salesguy talking about a new phone that'll be out in a few weeks that sounds even better. And if I waited for that and bought it instead, on my way out of the store, I'd hear of yet another coming out in a few weeks. Still, I've been a TiVo customer since the first few months they were on the market. That was mid-1999 and I haven't seen another brand of digital video recorder I thought was preferable. It'll happen but it hasn't happened yet.