Tivo
So I bought a Tivo today…
I’d been looking at getting one for a while. A lot of my coworkers have them and they are pretty damned cool. I was going to get an old used one on ebay and then add another large hard drive to it originally. I didn’t want to pay more than $100 for it…
So, I looked at a bunch of ebay auctions and it was doable. I then happened to look in Microsoft’s internal classifieds today and someone had, today, listed a tivo for sale. It was a Sony one, which is the slightly nicer brand, and the owner had already added an 80 GB drive to it (for a total of 110 GB). It listed for $120, which I figured was a deal with it already being upgraded. I hopped right on it and, by the end of the day, I had a shiny silver tivo to call my own.
At the highest video quality (which is quite nice), it can hold 34 hours of shows. R thinks tivos are in the “kinda cool” realm but has philosophical issues with paying Tivo $12 a month for their service. The service is how tivo knows what shows are on and the metadata for those shows. You can teach the tivo to record all of certain shows or shows with certain actors and it can, over time, learn your preferences. All of this needs the service so I’m paying it myself.
I feel like a consumer but I’m happy with my bargain purchase. Of course, I’m going to stick a wireless card in it so I can pull the data off of it, encode it as divX and burn it to CD-R’s anyway… ;-)
