All PVR

Ok, it is Confession time for me…

Until now, I only saw Tivo’s at friends place and such. Our own household had the DishNetwork DVR, which we have been enjoying for many years.
However, my recent dispute with DishNetwork’s unfair pricing practices for existing customers versus new customers ended our relationship.
So, we switched to local Cable, and our household seemed to enter dark depressing times. Not so much because of any troubles with the Cable, but because of lack of DVR!!! While I do have a computer based DVR, I wasn’t happy with the recording quality (of all things).
And so we got a Tivo, which I was busy installing and configuring throughout last week.
More on Tivo later, but what was really interesting for me is how much entire household was impacted by the loss of DVR.
I really thought we could get away without it for a few months, while I figure out our new entertainment strategy, but everyone seemed to become depressed. My daughter gently kept asking things like - ‘How do I pause this?’, or ‘Where is the rewind button?’, and I kept trying to explain that we don’t have DVR any more…
But now we are a Tivo home, and I must say, transition has been hard. I guess I had high expectations, seeing how Tivo is supposedly easy to use. But since we were all so used to DishNetwork’s PVR, it wasn’t easy at all.
It seems to me that Tivo doesn’t try to be your home PVR at all, but instead wants to take over TV viewing habits altogether. I haven’t decided if it’s good or bad, it’s just different, for now.

Meanwhile, in order not to bore you to death, here are some exciting news from BBC archives. It looks like BBC is planning to have their entire archives online, for viewing, and searchable, I presume. I say this is another excellent step in the right direction for personalized TV.

dishnetwork, tivo, bbc archives