The Death Of TiVo In My Home

I realized the other day that I could pretty much get away with selling my TiVo if I wanted to. I'm a huge fan of time-shifting, playing back live television and all that good stuff, don't get me wrong. But, the fact of the matter is, I've left my TiVo behind, and TiVo seems to have no desire to keep up with me.

First, I switched to HDTV. I have cable, which means that TiVo won't be of *any* use to me for my Hi-Def programming until they support the CableCard standard, and even then I'll have to buy a new unit, and a new subscription to TiVo, etc., etc. Meanwhile, though, my DVR built into my cable box -- while certainly not as pretty and full-featured as a TiVo is -- has one unique feature that TiVo doesn't have: it works, here, now, today.

Second, I haven't had a Windows machine in years. Something about chasing after the virus/worm/trojan/exploit of the week that made me give it up. However, as cool as TiVoToGo might be for me (to sling TV shows over to my laptop to watch at work, on the road, etc.), it won't happen because TiVo has basically said TiVoToGo ain't comin' to the Mac. Likewise, the TiVo Desktop software, which would theoretically let you play iTunes playlists through your TiVo (and presumably through your kickin' home theater) has always been buggy as shit on the Mac (it's playlist generation logic, well, it sucks, let's just say that... if it finds a track with the same Artist/Album/TrackName in two different places in a playlist it positively freaks out, which can be problematic if you have classical music in your playlist where you have something like "Promenade" a couple times throughout a long piece or two copies of the same song remixed differently, etc., etc.)

Basically, TiVo was really really cool, and if you've only got SDTV, it's still pretty much the shit. But for me, it's simply not keeping pace with the way I'm living, and that's a real shame.

Right now, my TiVo basically fills the role of "Third Tuner Bitch". My Cable DVR will record two shows at any time. If there's a third show at the same time I want to record, the TiVo becomes "the bitch" and records the least important of the three in SD. It's got a bunch of season passes for shows I barely watch any more, all of which are SD-only (everything that I could move to an HD subscription on the cable DVR I did).

I feel sorry for the little guy. Reduced to a mere boat-anchor in usefulness far before his time.