Rating: 
Summary: Easy Set-up, Great 800 Customer Service, Works perfectly
Review: I am not terribly good with electronics, but I had no trouble setting this up...just like plugging in a VCR. The initialization of the unit took some time and I called the FREE 1-800 number for customer service (I heard that Replay's number is often long distance) I was up in running soon after.I love the idea of not having to look through the tv guide to find when a movie is on...I can search using TiVo. I can also have it tape all the reruns of my favorite tv shows, Law and Order and I Love Lucy. I don't need to worry about missing anything. The 14 hour unit is just big enough for me, although I may upgrade my unit through Philips or get another unit, the 30 hour, soon. TiVo is revolutionary and is simply the best product. Also, since it is sold in regular electronic stores, it makes you feel confident that you can get help locally instead of only over the net or the phone. I give TiVo 2 thumbs up. Incidentally, I tried the Replay unit and liked it, but I was getting charged long distance fees for the nightly call, about $50-$60 per month, a lot more than $10 I pay for the TiVo 1-800 subscription. Go TIVO!
Rating: 
Summary: best thing since sliced bread
Review: Tivo has revolutionized my tv watching in the two months we have had this device. The machine setup itself was simple to follow. However, it took my engineer tv watching daughter and me a day to think through the options of hookup with a single tv monitor, a cable box and a vcr. we can simultaneously record different channels on tivo and the vcr, we can select to watch tivo live or playback or vcr. The very strong features not in order of preference are the (1) ease of surfing for current live program with program summaries displayed, (2) searching for program names in future for recording. (3) the season pass feature for recording all episodes of a given series, with automatic change when certain episodes change time for local programming needs, i.e. CBS Sunday morning on the west coast changes from week to week in football season (4) ability to watch a program from the beginning while it is continuing to record the completion of the program, i.e. the evening news, I get home about 5:45 and can watch from the beginning and skip stories not interesting to me. Also good is TiVo "suggestions", which I wouldn't have recorded in the first place, but having recorded available, I can choose to view or not. ease of deletion, a mere click. My tv watching is broadened because of this feature. controlled viewing of playback is an excellent feature. we can pause a playback, do other things and come back to the place we left off. to review something near the end is excellent, skip to end and then back scan. Sports recording is a mild disappointment because of the limited recording time at the high level of resolution necessary for comfortable watching. IF i don't have other cultural programs on storage waiting to be seen, it is good. higher disk capacity would be better. all in all an excellent device for tv watching computer nerds.
Rating: 
Summary: Service Difficulties lead me to recommend Replay over Tivo.
Review: DVR's are great. I have 3 -- 2 Replays and a Tivo. I highly recommend them over VCR's for all the reasons you read in all the reviews. They also work quite well with few glitches, so I hadn't had much chance to test their tech support, until recently. My Tivo unit is not properly contacting the server to download the program directory. This has been going on for over 2 weeks, so now my unit won't record at all. Tivo support lines have 30 min+ waits to get through. Online support is very limited. Upon getting thru to the first Tivo number, finally, they sent me to a second Philips number, and they were closed, with limited business hours. It would be one thing if this were just bad out-of-warranty hardware support, we're all used to that. However, Tivo is charging $12/month for the directory service and to not be willing to even take my call on it is frustrating. I've had no problems with 2 Replay TV units, which I've owned longer, and would recommend them over Tivo. Functionally, the units are essentially the same -- Tivo's slightly easier to use but Replay is slightly more flexible. My next unit will be another Replay.
Rating:
Summary: I love my Tivo!
Review: NOTICE: This review relates to TiVo, not this specific hardware device. I have a Sony SAT-T60 DirecTV/TiVo combination receiver.
My wife and I became addicted to TiVo within 1 month after installing it. We have gone from watching 90% live TV/10% recorded (VCR) to 90% Tivo/10% live TV! We hardly watch anything anymore at its regular time. We simply pull up the "Now Playing" menu, which lists all the shows I have previously recorded, and watch whatever we're in the mood for - drama (Law and Order or Once and Again), comedy (Friends, South Park), reality TV (Survivor, Fear Factor), or sports (Illinois basketball, cliff diving). There are so many cool things about TiVo, but these are my THREE FAVORITE things:
1) Season Pass, which once you set it up, allows you to record a particular show EVERY time it's on or all shows with a particular actor or subject,
2) Easy to record (simply choose the show, not the time and channel) and easy to find and play (scroll through "Now Playing" list of prerecorded shows and choose "Select" to play),
3) Record two shows at once (like Survivor and Friends, which both start at 8:00 on Thursday) with a DirecTV/TiVo combination receiver, which we have. We started with the monthly subscription and moved to the lifetime after just a month (it's good for the life of the box, not you). We have a Sony model, and I've found Sony to always be reliable (two TVs, one VCR). I bought a 4-year warranty as a safety precaution (new technology and insurance against the lifetime subscription). DirecTV customer service is decent, but not great (they handle the TiVo side as well). The BEST resource for TiVo is the TiVo AVS forum, which you can link to from the Buzz section of the TiVo Web site. It's a "must read" prior to buying this unit. But I am not exaggerating when I say that this is the coolest, most liberating invention to come out since the World Wide Web. No joke! You will fall in love with your TiVo too.
Rating:
Summary: Tivo - Superb Product with a few outstanding issues
Review: TiVo is well built, extremely quiet, and very easy to use. After one day, it became an absolute necessity in our household (even my wife loves it) TiVo allows you to rate programs and then it predictively records shows on your behalf. Every time you watch a show, rate it! This is how TiVo learns. After a week or so, you will get about a 50% success rate with its prerecordings. This is not bad because the TiVo automatic recording have a low priority and they will automatically be deleted if the disk runs low on space, even if you havent seen it. Therefore there is no downside to allowing TiVo to guess at what you like :) However here is a list of TiVo shortcomings... 1) No commerical ELIMINATION 2) Pricepoint way too high compared to Replay TV 3) No UHF remote control support 4) Season pass is not granular enough in control 5) Lack of storage! (8 hours at med quality bites) 6) Menus slow. I think CPU may be underpowered 7) No surround sound, HDTV, or firewire support 8) No multi-profile support(TiVO is unaware of multiple users) All in all, TiVo is an indespensable part of our video gear now
Rating:
Summary: You were right!
Review: I thought these reviews were from Tivo employees until I bought my own tivo. It is as fantastic as these reviews state! Works like a charm, cures Tv surfing for good, and may make you a couch potato. Has s-video connections, hooks to the data port on rca directv units to control the satellite, never misses a show. This is the future of tv viewing, here now. I have had a great experience with this Tivo 14hr unit. Even in the lowest recording quality, tv looks great. I record 99% in low quality with no problems. And 14 hours is really fine for time, otheriwse I would NEVER have the time to watch all I recorded in a days span. The advanced tv listings is worth the $10 a month in it self, or you can switch to a lifetime plan anytime for $200. And now the 14 hour Tivo units are everywhere for $399 with a $100 rebate for current, or new directv users. With the rebates, a Tivo unit for $299 is a better choice than a vcr. Tivo comes with hords of hookup cables and solves the "no local channels" issue for small satellite users by allowing the satellite channels and local channels from an antenna or cable tv service to be intergrated into one, in the Tivo tv listings and taping. If your reading these reviews and thinking of buying, BUY! You WILL NOT regret it! And with the rebates, and a 30-day money back from tivo, your the winner. But you wont want to return this. Drawbacks are few. One is a looong setup proceedure when you first hookup tivo, as it downloads tv first time tv listings and sorts them all. Also, it can become slow and pokey in responce to the remote, but snaps out of it shortly. Ive seen this mostly when going through listings while the unit is recording a program at the same time. And the remotes pause button and play button should of been switched, and the thumbs up/down button should be much smaller and located at the bottom of the remote where the enter and clear are located. Thats it! Just picky drawbacks that are a pleasure to put up with for the convience of using the Tivo. You'll LOVE it! I didnt think I would, and I do. Iam just glad I went and got one, and as other reviews state here, " I wouldnt give it up for anything"...
Rating:
Summary: This is the future -- some day we'll all have a TiVo
Review: VCRs are great, except for the fact that they are complicated and obsolete. Even computer programmers have trouble programming their VCRs, the programming becomes messed up every time the TV schedule changes or a show is preempted, and it takes forever to fast forward through VHS tapes looking for a particular show. TiVo changes all that. It makes it easy to record and replay shows. Instead of telling a VCR to record Channel 4 each Thursday at 9:00pm, you tell TiVo to record ER. That's it! If you've seen the episode before, you can delete it instantly. And the feature that let's you go back and watch live shows from the beginning while they are still being broadcast(if, for example, you get home 15 minutes after your favorite show starts) is awesome. Likewise, if you have kids, the ability to pause live TV is terrific. Some day, we will all use products like TiVo. The only question is whether to buy now (in which case you will pay twice as much and get a product with less functionality and more bugs) or hold off for a year or two while they improve the product and drop the price. Personally, I'm glad I bought now. I have loved having the TiVo system. It's not perfect, but it does what my VCR should have done (if it weren't so complicated and slow). The VCR is an antique, TiVo is the future.
Rating:
Summary: Changes your life - but you need more capacity
Review: There is no way you'll watch TV the same way you did before you get this - you watch what you want, when you want. No more waiting until 10 PM to see something - you just watch it the next night at 8:30, even while another show you like is on. Its pretty amazing. You need to expand the hours, though - go ...find the upgrade kit you'll need to really use this thing.
Rating: 
Summary: TiVo is self destructing.
Review: I have enjoyed my Tivo for 2 years now. Bascially, we can no longer live without it. However, as a company, Tivo is absolutely horrible. Where to start? My Tivo started to experience problems with video/audio synch lately. I called customer support and received suggestions for a fix, all of which I had tried. They were nice enough. Then I find out, to exchange my unit for a new one, it will cost $149.00 for parts and labor. Shipping is additional. OK. How about letting me save everyone the trouble and purchase a Tivo II (for much more money) and keep my current lifetime subscription? Seeing as how I was an early adopter/evangelist, etc? Uhh, no. Oh, and by the way, after you pay for repairs, they're only warrantied for 30 DAYS! Then, if you have further trouble, you're SOL again. I ask if there's a supervisor, or anyone available who's interested in keeping a good customer? Uhh, no. Well, I guess I can just buy Replay or Ultimate TV then? Uhh, yeah. I don't take the time to write online opinions or letters very often, but the policies and behavior of Tivo are so frustatingly bad, I just had to. Next on my list is the CEO. If they keep this up, he'll be next in the bread line. To sum up, the company I previously raved about will never see another dime from me. (or any of my valuable programming data)
Rating:
Summary: Tivo will dramatically change how you use TV
Review: Any Tivo is a huge improvement over regular television. This unit can easily be upgraded for more capacity. I added an additional 80 gig drive without a hitch. Pausing live television is great. I haven't used my VCR in over a year. Tapes are a joke in comparison. Easy onscreen menus guide the set up of recording preferences. The Season Pass feature will record every episode for you!
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