This and That

DVR

I love it. It is a friend and member of our family.  If you have a TV you should have one. It’s that simple. No longer should you be a slave to the traffic light TV guide.  Watch the shows when you want, when you want. As the idea of spawning is discussed I can see how this would come in handy for those who might have to watch kid programs when their favorite shows are on or whose schedules are all out of whack and at the mercy of the little one(s).

I remember many moons ago if you had a night class or were going out and wanted to watch something you’d have to set your VCR and hope that you were skilled enough to be able to program the VCR properly and you could only record ONE show at a time. The times they are a changin…

TiVo

Tivo is the originator of this great service and the first to offer it commercially, but while they are still in business it seems their idea has been borrowed by cable companies all over the world. We have the basic DV-R package with Cablevision where we can record two shows simulataneously and I belive we can store upwards of 100 hours on the lovely device. There are limitations where you can’t watch a third show while you are recording two of them at the same time, so this can be annoying when a new program comes into the mix that you want to deem DV-R worthy or see if you like a series premier, etc but that isn’t the end of the world IMO.

In coming weeks / months we will be switching over to the AT&T U-verse plan which takes DV-R to a whole new level. We will be able to record more shows concurrently as well as share all DV-R’d programs on any of the cable boxes in our abode. This is great for the Gossip Girls, America’s Next Top Model, Medium, etc. that the wife likes to add to the DV-R mix.

att&t

There are two other great features that have me excited about the switch to AT&T. The first is the ability to program the DV-R from the web, this will come in handy when you’re staying late for a meeting or just forgot to put something down to record.  The second which is seasonal is the integration with Yahoo! Sports for Fantasy Football and giving you up to the minute stats on the members of your team right on the screen. This is sweet, but will make the misses a little crazy as she already feels like a football widow on Sundays during the season.

Now from a total nerd perspective the concept and the design is fairly simple. By that I mean I know how it works I just don’t know how to create one. Basically it seems to me that you are just recording using a hard drive with a UI that allows you to decide the amount of space (shown to you as time) that you want to allocate for a specific project. The device then writes that data to the hard drive and organizes it in the dataset to make it accessible from the DV-R menu. This is the front-end that sits over top of the data to make it easier to find for you.

From a TV watching standpoint you get to watch TV more efficiently. For a one-hour program, you have roughly 15-20 minutes of commercials that aren’t necessary anymore. This isn’t good in terms of advertising dollars and getting you to watch their commercials, but I’m willing to bet that this issue is already in the works by the big wigs. So do the math you get 2 ‘one-hour’ programs and can watch them in only 90 minutes time. More time to get your work done or watch another show (or two). It’s your choice and that’s the best part.

I’m off to catch up on some TV…

Tags: Abode, America S Next Top Model, Cable Boxes, Cable Companies, Cablevision, Caption, Dv, DV-R, Favorite Shows, Gossip Girls, Greatest Inventions, Interweb, Kid Programs, Many Moons, Next Top Model, Out Of Whack, Slave To The Traffic Light, Times They Are A Changin, Tivo, Tv Guide, Tv Shows, U Verse, Vcr

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 6:28 AM and is filed under 2.0, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.