Last Sunday night after church we were surprised to learn that my boss was going to give us a TiVO DVR device. My boss had gone to Dallas for some work with our church new movie Facing the Giants. While in Dallas, he attended a meeting where TiVo was introducing their new service KidsZone. Tivo was giving away a free DVR box and 6 months trial for attending the presentation.

My boss does not have cable or satellite coming into his home, so he could not use the gift and thus the TiVo items were given to us. My brother and his family have a TiVo DVR and service but we have never watched it or looked at it. I have never checked out TiVo. None of my friends have TiVo that I know of. I knew very little.

Setup was pretty simple, though it took me an extra day to figure out that I needed to put TV on channel 3 to watch the VCR. This would be a good reason to question why I lead “technology” at Sherwood.
Features

LiveTV is the first feature we discovered. My wife came in to watch some TV in the last 10 minutes of a show. Instead of trying to tell her what happened, I went back 30 minutes into the show and we caught her up and watched it to the conclusion. I really like the feature. Unfortunetaly this is going to cut down on me watching 2 or 3 shows at once since TiVo will only record the show that is playing. My wife will be happy.

Season pass is a feature that will allow you to record the entire season of a show that you watch. We signed-up a couple of shows for the kids. They were working the next day.

I like the online TV guides, espeically the one that has what is on now for each station on the left side of the screen while showing the next few hours of programming of the station that is hightlighted.

The KidZone feature is a good concept and will be usefull as soon a we allow our children to use the remote.

TiVo also likes to record shows it thinks we might like. I was surprised to find we had recorded lots of shows in the first couple of day when we only asked for two. They have a feature called Suggestions (I think). Suggestions are shows that TiVo thinks we will like based on what we record and how we rate shows. I setup TiVo to recored the first Tennessee football game and got some Major League baseball, boxing and Sports Center.

A nice bonus was the ability of the remote to control the volume on my stereo. A small but nice touch.

I think I am going to like TiVo.