Always one to pursue useless knowledge wherever he can find it in a seemingly never-ending quest to achieve the improbable and downright unlikely status of modern-day Renaissance man, Mark Bittmann has indulged his desire to never be lost in any conversation, by developing an arcane understanding of things of little consequence or import while maintaining his alleged status as a small fish in a small pond.
As long as his self-indulgent whim is catered to, he manages to sustain the facade of someone under the misperception that others care about what he thinks. With a ubiquity normally reserved for greenhouse gasses, he chases his random and inconsequential thoughts with all the tenacity of a banana peel. This is his life, his curse, and his twisted and maniacal way of impressing the ladies.
Imagine being able to see all of those old movies you’ve been meaning to get to, but can’t because they’re always broadcast at an hour not fit for man or beast? Sounds like it’s time to peruse the TV guide, set the old VCR and remember to put a freshly rewound tape in. In addition, there’s remembering to leave the cable box not only on, but on the correct channel as well. As if many people don’t experience enough of a hassle just setting the clock on the VCR (to the chagrin of just about anyone subjected to a cheesy night club comic’s observations of such in the last 20 years), trying to see what you want when you want - even with the benefit of video taping - can be a pain in the butt. Well, not any more…at least not for myself anyway. .I just scored one of the Series II TiVo machines and it is gold, baby! Frankly, after only owning it for a month, I don’t know how I ever lived without it. This machine of wonder has me so captivated with my television, it’s as though I were a kid again, staring into the hypnotic light of cathode ray technology like willing road kill.
With this new gizmo I can pause live broadcasts for up to a half hour. What’s that? The potentially game-winning shot is headed for the hoop and the phone is ringing? Not a problem with TiVo. Just hit the pause button and freeze the ball in mid-air with digital picture quality and you can find out who won at your leisure within the next half hour. Or maybe phone didn’t ring, but you were otherwise distracted and wish to see what you missed? All one need do is hit the instant replay button to back up eight seconds. Need to go back more than that? Hit it again for another eight second rewind. It also has several speeds of slow motion playback. TiVo always keeps a half hour behind the current time stored for as long as you stay on a particular station. Change the channel and TiVo dumps the half hour of the channel you were just on and begins to store the current channel, always working towards keeping a half hour in reserve. So, if you come home up to half an hour late and your roommate has already started watching South Park without your tardy ass, you can just rewind to the beginning, assuming they didn’t change the channel during the commercial. And even if they did, had you the foresight to get a Season Pass to South Park, it changed the channel to the correct station at the correct time to record it for you anyway, informing your roommate that should they turn the channel, it will mess up the recording. Season passes are cool because all one need do, for example is tell TiVo that you want it to record South Park every time Comedy Central broadcasts it. You can even specify whether or not it should record repeats as well as first run episodes. In addition, This most wondrous of widgets can record in four different levels of picture quality, so you needn’t take up too much space on its hard drive for something that needn’t necessarily be recorded in pristine quality, such as the simple animation of South Park.
Yep, you read correctly: it has a hard drive. In this case an 80 gigabyte hard drive, capable of recording up to 80 hours of fun at lowest the quality picture setting. Although the picture of this setting is nothing special, the medium, high and “best” quality settings are more than adequate and even if you record everything at best quality, it will still hold up to 27 hours of it. Pretty cool, huh?
In addition to the Season Pass feature, it has a Wish List feature as well. For instance, one can “tell” the machine that you like John Ford movies and it will list which movies directed by him are playing in the next two weeks and the time and channel they are broadcast. If it overlaps with something it has been instructed to record on another station, it informs the programmer and lets them choose which recording to go ahead with. The same filtering process can also be tuned to find programs featuring preferred movie stars of one’s choosing or even by subject matter of by the use of key words. Like programs about the Maya empire? Put in the words Maya and Mayan and it will search the entire listings for show descriptions containing these words. It requires a phone line to operate, as once a week it makes a phone call to a schedule database of the programming for the user’s local television provider and sorts through it, finding selections that match their Wish List parameters and adding them to an easy to use interface that allows one to easily select which features to record. As a result of this feature, I am now seeing all kinds of mainstream, independent and old films I’ve always wanted and never had time to see, at my convenience and without messing with the pitfalls of tapes and VCR settings. Miles of Hitchcock and Cukor-shot celluloid with sound is now at my disposal and convenience. A satisfied film junkie I most certainly am.
What’s more, if one is watching a broadcast that the machine has recorded and another show that it has been instructed to record should happen to begin, it will change the channel on the cable box (or what have you) and begin to record the selection without missing a beat or interrupting in any way the recording you are watching. I have my Season Passes set to record all of the programs I watch weekly as well, so that if I am unable to make it home in time for their original broadcast, I will not miss a second.. Another outstanding byproduct of this line of thinking allows me fast forward through the commercials. All one need do is begin watching up to a half hour past the original broadcast time, rewind to the beginning and voila, skipping through the commercials they can go. The whole device is just cool, handy, easy to use and smart. I will never again be remiss in seeing a film broadcast by a director I like as long as I remember to check it’s listings every week and tell it which ones to go ahead and get for me. I just cannot say enough about the convenience and benefits it offers to someone who wants their money out of the price they pay for quality television service. I actually feel as though I am getting my dollars worth out of my high priced cable company (we here in the States have Daddy Bush to thank for that one, considering he was the dimwit who deregulated the cable companies once upon a time, sending subscription fees typically and predictably through the proverbial roof) for a welcome change. TiVo has brought out the true potential of cable television for me.
As if all of that weren’t cool enough, there are further plans for its upgradeable and already significant capabilities. They’re talking about actually being able to send programs the box has recorded over its telephone connection to another users’ TiVo machine as well. Hopefully the manufacturer has some sort of deal in the works to issue royalties of some sort to the movie and television studios and broadcasters of this sort of content, as it will surely inspire complaints of digital copyright infringement along the lines of the whining that accompanied Napster, only this time the Genie is a piece of hardware and not just a program anyone can download and use on their PC, so it may be that the file exchanging of television broadcasts will be limited to TiVo users…in theory anyway. The problem with thinking the Genie won’t escape the bottle in the manner song file-sharing has is the fact that there are already programs that can allow one to turn their PC into a TiVo-like device that can record in the same fashion, albeit without all the interface and recording options features. Not to mention that ripped TV shows are already widely available through KaZaa as it is. So, we may be seeing another large-scale copyright protection case involving TiVo and similar technologies sometime soon. Oh well, that’s their problem. I’m going to watch Notorious again.
