Friday, November 19, 2004

TiVo Public Service

In response to a question about an earlier post, here's a quickie description of no-frills Comcast GhettoTiVo:

If Comcast is your cable provider, chances are you can get their DVR service, hereby referred to as GhettoTiVo. It's operating system is not as elegant as TiVo's; it doesn't predict shows for you the way TiVo does; it doesn't let you fast-forward 30 seconds at a time, the way TiVo does; you cannot program it through a remote location, the way TiVo can. But it does have this advantage: You don't buy the DVR (Comcast gives it to you) and the monthly fee is cheap (depends on location, but universally cheaper than TiVo, I believe.

This is good because DVR units, like all hard-disk drives, have a natural life span of around two to three years. So if you want TiVo, you have to spend a few hundred dollars to buy the DVR unit and then you have to spend that money all over again whenever if breaks. With GhettoTiVo, Comcast lends you the unit, and when it wears out, will provide you with another, free of charge.

And the good news is, it works.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you have DirecTV, TiVo is a great service, much better than TiVo with cable (or any DVR). The monthly fee is only $5, and because the DirecTV signals are already encoded in MPEG-2, the TiVo doesn't have to do any on-the-fly compression, which degrades the picture on non-satellite DVRs.

Oh, and you can record two shows at the same time. And the boxes are cheaper than their non-satellite brethren.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the information on Comcast "Tivo". Being someone who works very weird schedules, recording is my only option to see things when I have time to watch. (and I love Comcast's giving me east coast feeds on the west coast.)