Living in the future: Part 2:Tivo & Netflix

Follow-up to Part 1: Twitter & Flickr - today it'll be Tivo & Netflix

Tivo
I bought Matt our Tivo for his birthday about 2 years ago. Friends told us "Tivo will revolutionize your life!" and "It will make your tv-viewing so much more efficient." Turns out, this is one technology that lived up to the hype. We our Tivo. I've even found myself listening to the radio while driving and wishing my car radio had a rewind button. We can now keep life on our own schedule, and not feel pressured to rearrange activities to watch shows we like. Almost every night we use the "pause" button, to allow us to keep talking to each other - and re-start the live program later.

Overview of Tivo: The Tivo sits between your cable source (i.e. cable box) and TV. The Tivo is hooked up to either by a phone line or network interface and downloads a schedule (customized to your cable company & local area). You can set it to record programs (like a VCR, but so much better). It stores the programs on an internal hard drive, and (if you have the optional network interface) you can also wirelessly transmit those programs to your PC. With Tivo, you can also pause programs while you're watching them, and rewind & fast forward. This means that you can skip commercials (when watching recorded programs) and do things like rewind to catch things you missed (great when watching sports).

What I like about Tivo:

• Just about everything. :)
• Season passes are fantastic. With them, the Tivo will record every time a particular show is on, within the bounds you set (such as recording new episodes only). I noticed recently that I can force the tivo to even record extra time, which I've done for Battlestar Galactica (since for some reason, we were typically losing the last 30 seconds or so.
  
• The way the Tivo stores the programs really works for me. Our programs are stored in folders (one folder for Good Eats, one for Scrubs, etc.). We have ours set to sort those programs by what was most recently recorded.
• The Tivo program list marks programs with easy-to-understand colored dots. Green means "this will be saved until you delete." Yellow means "this could be deleted soon."
• You can specify when you record something how long you want to keep it, and there are plenty of options. We keep at most 5 episodes of Sweat Equity (and when the Tivo gets full, it may pull us down to 3 or 4 episodes for space reasons), but we keep every episode of The Office until we manually delete it (to make sure we don't lose anything).
• Skipping commercials.
• Tivo's fast forward and play buttons are intelligent. If you're watching commercials go by and then realize the program is starting and press play, it's smart enough to not just play right then (which would skip the first few seconds of the program). It rewinds a bit first, so you wind up playing the very start of the program. So smart!
• Our tivo also takes two inputs (one for regular cable and one for digital cable). It keeps both active all the time, which means we can record one show while watching another. Or, we can flip back & forth between two live shows (and use the rewind/fast forward buttons to skip commercials).
  

How Tivo could be better:

• Our Tivo's storage got full as I recorded something like 12 hours of The War, a documentary on PBS about 15 months ago. I just finally finished watching them. But, over the past few months, we'd reached the point where the Tivo's storage was full, so we couldn't keep as many programs as we wanted. I understand there's a way to hack and make the Tivo's hard drive bigger, which we just might do.
• I had a crazy idea to improve the Tivo this week. It already has built-in features to mark something thumbs-up or thumbs-down. If you record a program, it gives a thumbs-up, or you can manually mark things. I think it uses this info to offer suggestions of other programs you might like. I'd love to see this be applied when watching live TV. For instance, if you accidentially stumble across "Horribly nasty medical procedures show" the Tivo would be smart enough to not display images of surgery, but would instead say "Um, you really don't want to see this, do you?" :)
  

Netflix
Matt bought us netflix as a Valentine's gift a few years ago. We don't normally exchange valentines gifts, so I do kinda wonder if it was just an excuse to get something we both wanted. :) Netflix is essentially a mail-delivery video store. Rather than going to Blockbuster, you get DVDs mailed to you, which you watch and return in pre-paid envelopes.

What I like about Netflix:

• No late fees. Seriously a good thing considering how long we've kept a few movies.
  
• You keep a queue online of all the movies you're interested in. You can rearrange the queue at any time. When you return one movie, Netflix sends you the next movie from your queue. This has helped us keep track of things we wanted to watch, but would otherwise forget about.
• You can rent all sorts of things you probably wouldn't bother with if you had to pay for them rental-by-rental. (I.e. documentaries, exercise videos, television shows, etc.)
  

What I don't like about Netflix:

• DVDs come in flat envelopes (the mailing envelope is also your return envelope). This means they can't come with any of the art from the DVD. True, this also happens if you rent at Blockbuster, but at least there you could read the back of the DVD case before you rent it. (Though I suppose I could get all the info I wanted merely by going to my computer.)
• We might rearrange our queue, but by the time the movie arrives (which is sometimes as little as one day) we're in the mood for something else. That's what's led to a few movies staying at our house for months.
• I wish we had more capability to download straight to our television. Someday that may work better for us, I guess.

I think that Tivo will be here to stay. I think Netflix is too, but I think it will evolve into being mostly a download-to-your-TV type service. Mailing DVDs is remarkably quick, but not nearly as quick as it will be when I can download programming right when I want it.