On the Stage

The Greatest Invention in 50 Years

I have one word for you: TiVo



Aaaaahhh…..

Let’s let that word soak in for a while…
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Alright, you ready to move on? It is such a cool tool.



It’s basically a hard drive that can store your TV shows for you, so you can watch them at your convenience, and fast forward through those pesky election commercials!

You can get a 40-hour TiVo for $99! Or an 80-hour for $199.99 or a 140-hour for $299.99.

You then pay $12.95/month for the TiVo service, or $299.99 for lifetime TiVo service.

Ever have one of those days where you just couldn’t get back to the house to pop a tape in, grab the controller, program the VCR or even find the tape first? Well, with TiVo that’s no problem. It records it for you, it’s your TV brain and your TV memory. You tell it once to record Survivor for you, all new episodes, and it will do it every day that a new Survivor is on, you don’t even have to know that it is on Thursday’s at 7 pm. It’s called getting a Season’s Pass to the show.

Before I get too far, lets talk about the pausing of live TV. It’s as simple as it sounds folks. You’re watching your football game and you have to use the restroom, or you have to grab some more pop and chips, or your kid falls and hurts themselves, or you wife makes you clean the toilet, or the doorbell rings, or a bird flies through your sliding glass door, you can simply hit the pause button your TiVo remote and go handle that situation and when you come back, sweet little TiVo will be waiting for you with your show paused. Then, when a commercial comes on, you’ll be behind schedule on your TV show, so you can just fast forward through that junk and get back to your show faster! Amazing, and it works!

Are you a big fan on old episodes of Cheers as I am? Well, with TiVo you can tell it to record Cheers whenever it is on and it will record every episode of Cheers on any channel it may be on, any channel that you have with your cable that is. Remember, it’s called a Season Pass. Don’t want it to record the same episode more than once? Well, don’t worry, it knows. It wont record the same episode of anything if it has taped it for you already and it comes on again within a 28 day window, unless you tell it to.

Man, I just hate it when two shows I love are on at the same time, I can’t record one on the VCR and then watch another, what am I to do? Get a TiVo. With TiVo you can record two shows at once. Or, you can record one show and watch another. Or, with all the TV sitting in your TiVo Now Playing list you can watch a show you didn’t get to earlier and record the shows that were on that night.

TiVo will even be more of a brain and start to learn you and your families TV habits. With the thumbs up/thumbs down technique, you decide what you like. Start thumbs up-ing shows because it has Tom Hanks in it and it will remember that and anytime you’re not recording something and there’s a show with Tom Hanks on, it will just record it for you and leave it there for you to decide if you want to watch it or not. You can either thumb up and down from the show as your watching it, because the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons are on your controller, or you can do it from within TiVo as your searching for the show, or as the show is on your Now Playing list.

The Now Playing list, that has all the shows you’ve TiVo’ed, also lets you know when a certain show is on the verge of being deleted. If there is no circle next to your show, it’s telling you that you have 2 days or more before the shows starts to be put in danger of getting recorded over. With a yellow circle it means it has a day or so. With a yellow circle with an exclamation point in it, you better be watching that show or telling TiVo to keep that pesky show for longer, or it will be recorded over. Now don’t worry too much, I have kept shows with an exclamation point for many, many days. It’s just a system to let you know that it could happen. TiVo has a built in system of recording a show for 2 days for you then you have to decide what to do with the show if you haven’t watched it yet.

Another patented feature of TiVo is view all upcoming episodes. If you go to a show in TiVo, lets say “Will & Grace," to see when it’s on and to record it, it has the “view all upcoming episodes" option where you can see every “Will & Grace" episode in a two week span listed on every station you receive. You may then pick and choose what you want to record, or then choose your Season Pass option. With the then further more options associated with Season Pass.

Season Pass: Lets you tell TiVo whether for a particular show you would like to record only first run episodes(only the new ones), reruns & first runs or all episodes. Beautiful…

Let me tell you something else, say your watching live TV, which rarely happens when you have a TiVo because you’ll learn to record whatever it was you wanted to watch live and go into your TiVo and watch something already recorded on your TiVo. But, let’s say your watching live TV and all of a sudden a commercial for the next episode of ER comes up, in the top right corner you will see a bleeping green thumb that says something like “push to record" and you push your green thumbs up button, it will take you to the screen to record that ER episode, because you saw the commercial and wanted to record that.

Another handy feature of TiVo is the recording quality of your TV shows. If you want to fit even more TV on to your TiVo, you can simply record all of your shows on basic quality and you will have more space for more shows. The higher up in quality you go, the less room TiVo has. Believe me folks, I record on Basic Quality, and it’s just fine! But if I’m recording something to put onto tape later, I will then bump it up to Best Quality.

Which reminds me…you see a movie on later and you have wanted that movie forever…simply TiVo it and you can then go to it in your Now Playing list and choose the send to tape feature and pop a tape in your VCR start it on your TiVo and hit record on your VCR and it’s going right on to your tape, ladies and gentlemen!

There is also a live guide that is basically a built in TV guide. You’re watching live TV and you hit the live guide button and it will let you surf through every channel you have and any time you want with the TV showing in the background so you don’t miss anything and can still find out what’s coming up.

Also with your TiVo is a built in feature that tells you the name of the episode or movie, the basic plot, the actors, the date and the length. You pull up the show in your Now Playing list and hit your “enter" button on the TiVo remote and up pops all that information plus episode number, when it originally aired, producers, directors and guest stars. Beautiful…if you’re trying to manually record a show because the Season Pass conflicted with too many other shows, you can hit your enter button on the description of the show in any part of TiVo and find out when it originally aired and if it’s then an episode you already saw, believe me, it comes in handy!

I didn’t even get into searching for ANY show or movie or documentary or anything on TV by name or actor, etc and finding it or the wishlist which you can go to and TiVo let’s you know what shows an actor will be in for the two week period or when the Jets are playing on TV or anything. Buy the TiVo ladies and gentlemen and let the TiVo do the talking for you.

Any questions? :-)