Weighing TiVo's fortunes

Ed Felten in Freedom to Tinker: Why hasn't TiVo improved? Because it's cozying up too much to Hollywood.

David Pogue in the New York Times: For TiVo, It’s Not Over Yet.

They're both right. Here's Pogue's list of "some of the brilliant features that make a TiVo a TiVo, the features that make it stand head and shoulders over the copycat digital video recorders (DVR’s) provided by, for example, cable companies":

* Retroactive recording. You come home, flip on the TV, and discover that you’re 35 minutes into what looks like a great show. If you have TiVo, you can either rewind into the past (to view what you missed while the TV was off) or even record it, thanks to the TiVo buffer that always stores the most recent 45 minutes of the current channel.

* Wish list. On a TiVo, you can type something—an actor, movie title, anything—that you’re interested in, even if it’s not anywhere in the TV guide. If and when it’s ever broadcast, on any channel at any time, the TiVo will record it for you. ...

* Built-in reaction time. When you’re fast-forwarding through a show [and] you hit Play, it doesn’t begin playing from that point; it begins playing a few seconds before that, with uncanny “it knew what I wanted” accuracy.

* 30-second skip. It’s not a documented trick, but it’s nonetheless a juicy and delicious one. Press the following buttons on the remote while a show is playing back: Select, Play, Select, 3, 0, Select. Now your Advance button is a 30-second skip button. Press the same sequence again to turn off this feature. (You have to re-do this after a power failure.) It’s a much quicker, more precise way to skip ads.

* Season pass. On many DVR’s, you can ask to have a certain show recorded every week automatically—“Desperate Housewives” or whatever. But on a TiVo, you get some important options with that. For example, you can tell the TiVo to record only first-run episodes and not repeats. ...

The point should be clear: when every tiniest aspect of a machine is this deeply, thoroughly considered and intelligently designed, the result is a product that inspires fierce loyalty and makes you only too happy to join the cult.

Absolutely.