wildyams

I bought a Tivo last night off my good friend Jon who is moving to Mammoth for the winter. Jon isn't sure what he's gonna do after snowboarding season ends up there (probably in April or May, I'd guess), and he may or may not move back here, and if so he may or may not do it right away. It's all up in the air for him, so he basically got rid of everything he owned, either by selling it (like he did to me with his Tivo) or by giving it to people to watch till he gets back (like he's doing with his HDTV). I'll get the HDTV from him in a week or so, but last night he brought a bunch of stuff over for me to store for him, and he brought the Tivo which I was purchasing, and having played with it a bit I wanted to comment on it.

I can tell already that I'm really going to love the Tivo, and I can also tell I am almost surely not the person that the Tivo was made for. I almost never watch any kind of TV show, mainly because I don't like commercials, I don't like having to schedule myself around a show, and I don't like the content and ideas that most shows seem to advance. Put it this way, I get a real disgusted feeling watching virtually any TV show that's on regular TV even when it's not during the commercials. I may not be able to explain adequately why that is, but that's the way it is, so I don't ever tune in. Virtually the only thing I watch with commercials is sporting events these days, everything else I watch on TV comes from premium pay channels like HBO. Now, on those channels I will watch TV shows on occasion, although I still hate to schedule myself around them, so it's more like if they're on I'll watch them, but now with a Tivo I won't have to do that, so I'm sure I'll end up watching a lot more of the great shows they have on HBO that I get peeks at here and there.

Since I'm not going to be scheduling many TV shows for my Tivo to record, utilizing the "season pass" feature, I'll mainly just have it record a bunch of movies. I did go in last night and tell it to grab all of the occurrences of The Daily Show, as well as all the Laker games; and I also had it look for any programs on snakes or sharks (I'm fascinated by both of those animals), but that will probably be most of whatever I put in there. Other than that, I went through all my movie channels and was able to view everything that would be shown in the next day or two very easily, so I just had it grab every movie which looked even remotely interesting, and I'll just select from there which movies I'd like to watch whenever I'm home and in the TV watching mood.

As Steven mentioned in his last comment, and which I had read about on my own, Tivo is going to soon introduce pop-up ads that will appear while you are fast forwarding through commercials. While I think this is unfortunate, and I hate this type of thing, hopefully it will not bother me too much as I will still probably not be watching much programming that has commercials (except for The Daily Show and sporting events). My quest to avoid advertising marches on, I guess :lol