Tivo or ReplayTV, but getting the unit for basically the cost of a Tivo subscription seemed decent to me.

But always remember, with the TiVo, as with the empeg, it's not the hardware that makes it extraordinary, it's the software.

To me, the TiVo software seems near perfect in the way it makes certain that I don't ever miss seeing anything I want to see, and at the same time provides me with lots of programming I didn't ask for but that turns out to be interesting. It knows what I like. As Tony would say, it's FM. (The "M" stands for Magic...)

The only feature I can even think of that I wish I had would be the ability to start a program late, and end a program early in the season passes. (I can start them early and end them late, but not the other way around.)

Why would I do that? [rant] Has anybody else noticed the idiotic thing that NBC has started doing with their top rated programs? Instead of scheduling them to start on the hour, they schedule them a minute before. So rather than 9:00pm to 10:00pm, they air 8:59pm to 9:59pm. Oh, this is so clever of them -- they think I'm so stupid that if I start a minute sooner I'll get hooked on their show and not see what else might be starting on the other channels.

What this really means (since I only watch TiVo and not live television) is that their 9 pm program now has to beat out not only the other channels' 9pm programs, but the other channels' 8pm programs as well before I'll watch NBC, because the other channels' 8pm programs don't end until after NBC's 9pm program has started. It pisses me off so much that I now automatically move any NBC hh:59 program to the end of my Season Pass priority list. In the two months since this ludicrous practice began, I have seen perhaps two NBC hh:59 programs. There is more programming that I like on TV than I can possibly find time to watch, so it's NBC's loss, not mine.

The true irony is... NBC is the parent company of TiVo and this new scheduling practice of theirs can only hurt their viewership among TiVo owners. [/rant]

tanstaafl.