My uncle, who we are staying with, bought a TiVo-like device recently (allegedly so that we can record good stuff for the kids, though that sounds like a ruse to me). Naturally I’m very relieved to have such a device back in my life (though I bought an Elgato DTT stick recently, with a review to follow). This particular unit, from Sagem, has 2 tuners so you can record one program while recording another, and enough storage for about 80 hours of TV (recording the mpeg-2 stream natively, which gives literally broadcast-quality storage). Early days, but if you can’t have a TiVo this looks tolerable.
All good, you might think. Unfortunately it also flagged my increasing age, in a way you may not expect. Responding to my uncle’s initial enthusiasm at pausing live TV I mentioned that Claire is not much of a tech fan, but it takes an event as serious as a trans-Atlantic move to pry her TiVo from her resisting fingers. And then I realized that this is the story I always tell about TiVo. Which is fine, I guess, but I’m aware that telling the same set of stories over and over is something I recognize in people who are older than I consider myself to be.
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Although TiVos are generally not available here in the UK, if you’re desperate enough you can normally get hold of one, on eBay or on some specialist TiVo web sites. Unfortuntely, the TiVos here are the 1st generation ones, and lack some of the advanced functionality of the US models.
Most of the UK users seem to be fairly fanatical about them, and regularly modify them to increase disk capacity (from the basic 40GB = 20 hours) and to add extra memory and network cards. See the UK forum of the TiVo Community for more…