I got my first TiVo in February, 2002. It was an AT&T branded series 2 recorder. I already had a friend that had an earlier model so I had some idea of what they did but it turns out that I was completely wrong. I knew that it was something like a VCR on steroids in that it would allow you to pause, fast-forward and rewind live television and record shows without having to mess with VHS tapes. I figured it was the live TV functionality that would be the most useful. I felt that $300 for a device that would allow me to pause a show while I was getting a drink was a bit excessive but I've always been an early adopter of new technology and merely having one had a certain geek status factor that couldn't be measured. When it arrived, I was very anxious to open it up, plug it in and take it for a spin. At first I was somewhat confused. The first thing I wanted to try was to pause live TV. Being the geek that I am, I only read the manual when I am completely stumped (not very often when it comes to electronics). I pressed the obvious Live TV button on the remote and sure enough I was watching live TV. I then pressed the record button (I figured that if I wanted to pause live TV, I must be recording it first). Once I pressed it, I got a prompt from TiVo asking me if I wanted to continue recording at 'Best Quality' and keep what I've already recorded or record at a lower quality and scrap what I already had. After reading the message again, I was a little confused. I didn't tell it to record anything. How does it have anything recorded? I told it to go ahead and record at best quality at which point a little red light came on indicating that it was recording something. I wanted to go back to the main menu to see what it was doing. I looked around for a stop button but I couldn't find one. I tried the display button and all I got was information about the show it was recording. I tried a couple of other things before I finally pressed the cute little TiVo button on the top of the remote. I knew it was just a marketing button but I figured it might do something useful. Sure enough, there was the main menu. I selected the first entry titled “Now Playing”. The TiVo brought up a new screen showing the name of the program I had chose to record with a little recording symbol next to it. I pressed select and it pulled up details about the program with a couple of options. I chose 'Play' and sure enough the program started playing. The thing that struck me was that the program started playing from a point before I started recording. It all started to come together. The TiVo was always recording live TV! Pressing the record button only caused it to save the entry in the “Now Playing” list. I had it figured out now...

After a few minutes of playing around with the live TV recording feature, I decided to venture on into the other areas. Pressing the little TiVo button that I had to come to enjoy, I brought up the main menu. I decided to choose “Pick Programs to Record.” The TiVo brought up several options such as search by time and channel, search using wish lists, search by title, etc. Still in the VCR mindset, I chose to search by time and channel. I picked a random time and channel and told it to record. It asked me how long it wanted me to record. I told it half an hour. It then told me that it was going to record at high quality and but gave me a recording options menu. I took a look at it and changed it to medium quality and confirmed. TiVo then informed me that the recording would be added to the To-Do list. Cool. I went back through the menus and found the To-Do List and sure enough, my scheduled recording was there. I also saw a menu item that showed the recording history. It listed the programs that I had already recorded and what I did with them (deleted them, canceled the recording, stopped the recording, etc). I realized that functionality would limit my recording of late night Cinemax (at least if my wife found it).

I then looked into the other areas of “Pick Programs to Record.” I played around with the wish lists which allowed me to search for a show based on certain criteria such as keywords, category, etc. I could configure it to record them automatically or just allow me to pull up a list of programs that matched my wish list and choose the ones I wanted to record manually. I quickly realized that this wish list stuff had power and proceeded to set some up. I then played around with the Season Pass thing. I realized that if I wanted to see every episode of a series (or only certain episodes such as new ones), I could easily just create a season pass. It would ask me how many of them I wanted to keep, what quality I wanted them recorded at and how many days it should save them for. I searched for several shows by title and set up season passes for them. After creating each season pass, the TiVo told me that they would show up in the Season Pass Manager. I went and looked at them and I realized that I could change their priority (if 2 or more shows with season passes occur at the same time, the higher priority one will be recorded)., view the shows that will and will not be recorded and select additional episodes of a season pass to record (overriding the priority). After messing around in the season pass manager, I went back to the To-Do list and saw that there were many entries going two weeks in the future for the shows I had selected. I wanted to see what would happen if there was a conflict so I looked at the time of one of the shows and told the TiVo to record another show at the same time. The TiVo informed me that such-and-such was scheduled to record at that time. It asked me if I would like to search for other showing of the show or I would like to cancel the recording a record the new show in its place. I played around with both options and I was very impressed with how easy it was to handle conflicts. They really spent some time making the software as usable as possible.

After a few days, my wife and I had our TiVo booked up recording things at all hours of the day and night and I slowly realized that I wasn't using the one function that justified the TiVo's purchase, pausing live TV. The Now Playing list constantly had hours and hours of good television already recorded and I never had the occasion to flip through the channels and watch live television. Watching television had been transformed. It was now like going to Blockbuster and finding the show you wanted to see from their large inventory. I never watched another commercial (you actually start to miss them after a while, some one asks you what movie you want to see and you never know what's showing) and I never had to listen to some band on Saturday Night Live I didn't want to.

Since getting my first TiVo, I've sold my parents on one as well as my sister and her husband. I've replaced my AT&T model with a DirectTV-TiVo combo that allows me to record two shows at once (it has two recievers) and I sold my old one to my parents (they are probably among only a handful of people with more than one of them). I am still trying to sell my in-laws on TiVo but they are so scared of technology and they don't spend enough time over at our house to see what it's good for (not that that's enough, you really have to use one for a week to see how it will transform your viewing habits).

Many people hear how TiVo users are fanatical about trying to convince the world to get one. You would think it was pyramid scheme. I promise, we are not getting any referrer bonuses from TiVo, we just get so frustrated seeing someone watching television the 20^th century way – when and how NBC wants you to watch it. I try to think on an analogy with another technology but nothing comes to mind. Many of the non-TiVo people out there tell me how they can't even program their VCR. That's not a valid argument. TiVo would be a complete failure if it wasn't for the simple, easy-to-understand interface. TiVo must have spent years with monkeys to get it so easy to use.

Here are some features TiVo should add (I'm sure they are working on some of them):

1. For homes with several TiVos, the ability to network them so that one TiVo can play recordings from another and a show won't be recorded on two TiVos at the same time.

2. Multiple users, when I thumbs-up a program, it should keep that information separate from when my wife thumbs-up one. Otherwise the TiVo may conclude that I might like Sci-Fi cooking shows (TiVo automatically records things it thinks you will like based on ratings you give it)

3. Quota management: People with children may only want the TiVo to record a certain amount of shows for each child.

4. Have an option so that TiVo will always record something. If there's nothing good on, record something anyway, who knows, the owner might like it. If the red record light isn't on, it's wasting time.

5. Integrated pop-corn maker :)

Well, enough already. Go get a TiVo and stop planning your life around NBC's Must-See-TV.