Funny piece this week by Joe Lavin. He and his father bought his mom a TiVo for Christmas, so she can tape all of her favorite shows, including all those Law and Order spinoffs and all the CSI shows. Not only did he discover that all these devices don't like to communicate with each other (the TiVo instructions tell you not to hook it up through a DVD player and the DVD player instructions advise you not to hook it up through a cable box or satellite), he also discovered that his mom almost made a big mistake when buying something for him.
And so I spent most of Christmas trying to hook up all the different boxes in the simplest way possible for my mother, and I think I succeeded. For the most part, she is faring pretty well with all the new technology, although she did have a little trouble pausing a movie until she learned that she could just hit the "eleven" key. She is doing much better with technology than last year, when she informed me that she was thinking of buying me an iHop for Christmas -- you know, one of those portable music devices from Apple. All I wanted was to listen to some MP3s on my way to work, and I almost ended up a pancake house franchisee.
He also makes a very true and very funny observation about how high speed internet access was supposed to free up all this time for us, and just the opposite has happened.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-24-2007 @ 11:41AM
seth brundle said...
I have owned and gifted about 5 TiVos, and here's what boggles my mind - why dont they just put a DVD player in it?
One of the TiVos I own is a Pioneer Series 2 with built-in DVD recorder. To be honest, I never use the recorder, but I love playing DVDs on it.
A DVD drive is what - like a $10 part? And it removes an extra component from your system, reduces wiring and input switching, and integrates perfectly into the TiVo interface.
Why they dont even offer it as an option on TiVos is a mystery.
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1-24-2007 @ 2:40PM
David said...
They *do* offera DVD player as an option on TiVos...just not the ones sold under the TiVo brand. For whatever reason, they've decided to let third party manufacturers release the DVD-enabled boxes (like your Pioneer, or the Humax I gave to my mom), maybe because they don't want to get in the hardware business any more than they have to. Personally, I predict that within 5 years TiVo isn't making boxes at all, and is simply a software vendor to Comcast/Motorola, Pioneer/Humax/Toshiba,(the new) DirecTV, etc. ESPECIALLY if they win some more patent disputes.
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1-24-2007 @ 3:24PM
rjlawrencejr said...
Seth,
Why did you buy a Pioneer Series 2 if you're not going to use the DVD recorder? Unless you bought it for the free lifetime TiVo Basic?
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1-24-2007 @ 4:19PM
Man said...
I got a TiVo hooked up to a DVD player plus other things and have no problems, granted the wiring looks like a robot exploded.
Remember instructions are only a suggestion guide on what you should do.
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1-24-2007 @ 4:47PM
Steve said...
Two words... Harmony Remote.
Tivo has got to be the easiest things in my HT. The Harmony brings it all together to a single point of control. Wiring the HT is not fun, but not brain surgery either.
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1-25-2007 @ 6:22AM
confused said...
wtf does this have to do with iHop?
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