We are big fans of Tivo. Back when the things first came on the market a friend of ours bought one. Then he won another one in a Tivo essay contest and gave his extra one to us. So we've had a Tivo for a long time. Back then we bought the lifetime membership which is no longer available. So we have this old old Tivo that is free to use until it dies. It only has one receiver so you can either watch or record something, but you can't watch one thing and record something else at the same time.
But we love our Tivo. So much so that I have vowed that if I ever win the lottery I will buy one for everyone I know. (I know, not a real noble life goal given all the REAL problems in the world, but I know that people would LOVE them.)
And when Tivo dropped some of its prices recently as it prepared to release its HD version (which is something like $800 -- way out of our price range) we decided to get a new one with two receivers. We moved the old one up to our bedroom. Then David got one for his mother for Christmas. And then, because I had a slight windfall with the severance funds from my previous job, I got one for my mom and her husband for Christmas. (We also got them the 3 year service contracts.)
One of the many uses of Tivo, we have found, has been to record the many episodes of Sesame Street that run on various channels at various times throughout the day. With the new Tivo you can transfer the shows from your Tivo box to your laptop. This turned out to be technology that prevented my suicide from jumping out of a plane because we could play episodes of Elmo for Jack on the laptop in hour 397 of our flight from the West Coast to the East Coast.
This also lets us save episodes of Elmo that Jack really really likes. His favorite is the one where Elmo (and Dorothy of course) are thinking about bells. During one sequence of this episode, one of Elmo's friends is in a video about her experience with a bell choir -- you know, a bunch of people who ring different notes on hand bells in sequence to play a particular song. Jack is mesmerized by this one. He giggles when the girl rings her bell to early and everyone laughs. And then when she rings her bell at the right time and everyone claps, Jack claps too. He loves it.
So that was one of the episodes that was recorded on my mother's new Tivo while we were visiting her last week. And I think we all watched it 7,093,891 times.
It has occurred to me that we will someday be telling Jack that we used to have to watch TV at a certain time to see a particular show, and we couldn't pause the TV to answer the phone. We would miss our show if that happened. He will think we are making it up. Like how my father had to shovel through 12 feet of snow with a teaspoon for 10 miles to get to school each day.
I am so with you! Especially about the last paragraph.
We don't have Tivo service up here in Canada, although we do have DVRs, rentable by the month or we could buy one.
Currently, I can't download anything from it to my computer, but boy would I love to! I am jealous of that.
Posted by: Aurelia | January 05, 2007 at 07:52 AM