TiVo – Yak & Natter

Tivo Crash

richard — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 18:59:00 +0000

Tivo Crash
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway.

How about this for reliability. Our TiVo has been running more-or-less non-stop for 9 years. I was setting up a recording last night and we received our first ever proper error…. with hex and everything.

TiVo still rules.

As quick search of

jane — Mon, 17 Feb 2003 10:31:00 +0000

As a quick search of our previous blogs will tell you, we love our Tivo. But, you can’t get them in the UK anymore – bah! Need To Know helpfully provided some information in Friday‘s newsletter of a couple of build your own alternatives Freevo and MythTV. They look kind of interesting, and I guess we’ll investigate further if anything should happen to our Tivo.

Radios should be more

richard — Mon, 20 May 2002 20:04:00 +0000

Radios should be more like TVs. Dials? A limited number of stored stations labelled “1” or “2”? Why not have a bit of a screen, a few logos so I can select a channel and go there, rather than scanning for channels? Anyway…

I have a thing about needing a radio version of TiVo, and today Jane tempted me with a couple of URLs.

TiVo for radio’ set for UK launch is a story in the Guardian… but from 14 Feb 2001. Alas the company in the article, sounds like it’s sort of lost the way. Shame.

The second, Bitbop Tuner is TiVo For Radio is from Jul 27, 2001 sounded better, in that it’s a download for your PC. I go for the download button but the site has an important notice telling me that they’ve “discontinued distribution”.
(Amusing moment: The system requirements list “Minimum Ram: 64MB”, fine, “Processor: Absolutely Necessary”

So it seems people have tried to make better radios, but there’s no money in it.

know we go on

richard — Wed, 15 May 2002 12:00:00 +0000

I know we go on a lot about TiVo, but this impressed me…

We’d notice a problem where TiVo had confused a bunch of channels: what it thought
was BBC4 (say) was actually something like the Parliament channel. This is bad, because when TiVo spots
something good to record, it changes to the wrong channel and records something else. Bah.

On Monday I put a call into TiVO to see what was happening, and they said they’d look into and probably
update our TiVo.
Today, they call back.
The problem, they’d figured out, was actually with our set-top box. TiVo was right, the set-top
box had the channels confused. Now, I’d have expected most companies to say “we’re right, it’s
somebody else’s problem, give them (your now out-of-business set-top box manufacturer) a call”, but the TiVo folk knew what set-top box we have, and gave me the
detailed instructions on what to do to fix it.

TiVo: expensive, but in the end, good value.

Poor old Tivo it

jane — Sun, 05 May 2002 18:43:00 +0000

Poor old Tivo, it’s still suffering with our lack of channels – we caught it recording 2 hours of QVC the other day

spotted TiVo Data Collection

jane — Tue, 27 Mar 2001 09:48:00 +0000

I spotted TiVo’s Data Collection and Privacy Practices linked from another blog (BoingBoing.net) and it makes kind of interesting reading. I’m not sure whether I’m surprised by this or not, I guess I knew Tivo was capable of this as the capturing of viewing data is what makes Tivo work. The paragraph “TiVo permits its subscribers to disable the collection of viewing information and diagnostic logs by calling TiVo toll-free at 1-877-367-8486 (1-877-FOR-TIVO).” is kind of interesting though.

On further investigation, CNN ran a story on the subject yesterday Privacy group criticizes TiVo for collecting info