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Pogue Loves TiVo

David Pogue's amusing video love letter to the new Tivo. Here's his full review in today's New York Times.

by Matt Haughey September 21, 2006 in News

Comments

The Series 3 is a very nice box, but it won't grow TiVo market share by a single customer. Convincing existing TiVo owners to pay the $800 and upgrade is possible. Convincing non-TiVo owners to pay the extra money is not.

A couple errors in his TiVo "unique" features list:

PROGRAMMED SKIPPING You can program one of your TiVo remote’s buttons to skip 30 seconds — a much quicker, more precise way to skip ads. (Search Google for “tivo 30-second skip” for instructions.)

My Comcast Motorola 6412 DVRs can be easily programmed to 30 second skip as well.

SORTING OUT OVERLAP With two tuners, recording overlapping shows is rarely a problem. But even if you have only one tuner, the TiVo doesn’t consider it a conflict when one requested show starts at 8 p.m. and another ends at 8:03 (a sneaky network audience-retention tactic); it just records as much of the overlapping show as it can.

The Moto 6412 has 2 tuners as well, however I wouldn't doubt that it's conflict resolution software is inferior to TiVo's.

No question, the Series 3 is a much nicer PVR than these Moto's, but another feature I'd lose if I went the TiVo/Cablecard route is OnDemand shows for my kids. They are the most effective means of modern child crowd control and I could not live without them.

Posted by: Bill G at Sep 21, 2006 11:13:27 AM

Actually there are already people posting in TiVoCommunity.com that say the Series3 is their first TiVo and that they held off on getting one until HD support came out. So it has sold to new users.

Posted by: MegaZone at Sep 21, 2006 11:27:50 PM

It's just too bad they've abandoned their Canadian customers -- we won't get CableCards here and they don't even provide OTA HD data. That's one really expensive dual tuner TiVo.

Not that we were probably even a blip, but apprently we were worthy enough to get in on the Series 2 action (even if they won't ship us hardware.)

Conspiracy theory: It's all a ploy by TiVo to get its U.S. customers to sell their Series 2 TiVos on eBay to us poor Canadians in favour of a Series 3.

Posted by: Peter at Sep 22, 2006 5:57:46 AM

"Convincing existing TiVo owners to pay the $800 and upgrade is possible."

- Not this Tivo owner. I can't believe the cost of this thing. I'll be waiting till it's sub $300

Posted by: Bill at Sep 22, 2006 7:33:14 AM

I was never a TiVo user, and just got a Series3. I've been waiting for this to be released and even with the large price tag I couldn't resist. Being an early adopter isn't cheap, but it is very fun!

Posted by: Grant at Sep 22, 2006 2:16:28 PM

As a long time TiVo enthusiast and user, Ive always wondered what the competing generics were like to use; my family has always used TiVo.

My mother just got the Comcast generic DVR to accompany a new 58inch HD plasma. Totally miserable and practically unusable. Nuff said.

The price of an amazing user interface / experience is very difficult to quantify. However, its clear to me that its worth the $800 - fortunately, or unfortunately, TV is my biggest hobby. $800 on a relative consumption basis is nothing. Its easy to spend that on one night out at the clubs.

Posted by: New York at Sep 24, 2006 11:54:37 AM

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