Once You Go TiVo You’ll Never Go Back!

My evil plan to spread TiVo is working beautifully. As some of you know I’ve been berating my brother, Tony, for wanting to build a PVR instead of just buying a TiVo. A couple of months ago he joined me on the dark side and picked up not one, but two DirecTiVos (combination DirecTV receivers and TiVos). As you can see by his recent post he is now a wholehearted believer and convert to the TiVolution. I think he’s my fifth victim convert. Welcome aboard bruh!

I have some comments on his post. I noticed that he picked up on one of the more controversial TiVo features that some people have issues with. That is TiVo’s ability to automatically record shows that it thinks you will like based on shows that you tell it to record and/or rate by giving them 1 to 3 thumbs up. The first comment is that suggested recordings can be turned off. So for those that just hate the idea of this box learning about you and guessing what you like, just flip the switch and turn the feature off. My brother’s not in that camp though. He simply doesn’t like how it can sometimes go overboard with a certain genre. In his case he may have watched a cooking show, probably the excellent Thirsty Traveler, and then TiVo decided to record a bunch of cooking shows. I’ve had this happen to me on my first TiVo, when it decided to record a bunch of westerns for me. This can be easily fixed by simply rating the offending show with a thumbs down. TiVo will never record that show again and that genre will have a lesser rating in your profile.

There are some benefits from leaving the suggestions turned on. TiVo has been known to pick up some great programming that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. I like to think of my TiVo as my personal TV watching servant. He’s always working for me — out there scouring TV land in search of some ish I’ll like. And once it’s been properly trained, it’s usually very good at that task.

The key thing to remember about suggested recordings is that they are the first things to be deleted as you run of of disk space. So they can easily be ignored, if you so choose. (They’re listed at the bottom of the page too for this reason.) Just think of them as bonus programming that you don’t have to watch, and they don’t really take up any of your disk space since they are the first to be deleted to make space for the shows you’ve told TiVo to record. Most of us old school TiVo owners use the suggested recordings as a free space indicator. TiVo doesn’t provide a method for telling you how much free space you have, so you can look at the number of suggested recording you have and gauge your free space based on the number of suggestions you have. So don’t sweat the suggestions, they are your friend.

My brother also talked about the uses of the Season Pass™ (SP) and WishList™ (WL) features. I’ll add that WLs are one of the greatest features of TiVo. They can be used to search for programming by keyword, actor, director, or show title. You can also set those searches to be recorded automatically. A nice thing about WL™ is that they work across different channels, unlike a SP which only works on one channel. You can decide whether or not to have your WLs record automatically. I use WLs to do things like record any Lakers game, or get all the Law & Orders (Original, SVU, and C.I.) whether they’re on NBC or the 2 week later run on USA (or whatever channel it comes on… that kind of info is now trivia for me b/c I don’t care nor do I need to know… that’s what the TiVo is for!).

Here’s a real powerful feature of a WL, I have a keyword search set up for ‘Survivor’. That not only records all the episodes, but will also catch any talk show on which the booted contestants appear (providing they’re listed in the guide data). Even is you wanted to just record the show and not all the extra stuff, in the case of Survivor a WL works better than a SP. That’s because CBS, in their ultimate wisdom, changes the title of the final show of the series, on which the winner is revealed, to ‘Survivor ___ , the Reunion’. Since a SP looks for an exact match on the title it wouldn’t record the finale show. I also have all the HBO shows set up as WishLists™. Because I have multiple HBO feeds those shows can have a lower priority and still get recorded because TiVo will find it on any of my HBO channels. So for all of those reasons I’ll often opt for a WL over an SP.

Bottom line is once you go TiVo you’ll never go back.

P.S. Any TiVo newbies should check out the great help over at the TiVo Community Forum, starting with this thread: Advice from a veteran to a newbie