An article  by Yanman

Avid readers of this site have been reading about TiVo’s Digital Video Recorder for some time now, and their subscriber base has now reached over 1 million. As others try to imitate, and the leader works on extending their head start we thought now might be a good time to attempt to explain this space. 

A Digital Video Recorder or DVR for short is a computer based piece of home electronics that uses a computer hard drive to store your favorite programs instead of using tape.  By incorporating an electronic “TV guide”, these systems make it an all to easy task to time shift up to 80 hour or more of your favorite shows, whenever and wherever they are on.  Gone forever are the days of forgetting to re-set the flashing 12:00 on the VCR (DVRs set the time automatically), running out of tapes (There are none), or missing a marathon of your favorite shows (If you so chose, the DVR will record every showing of that program regardless of day, date, time or channel). While features vary widely these are the basics. 

With DVDs all the rage and the burden of time shifting eliminated, the last bastion of hope for VHS was longer term storage of your favorite shows, specials, and TV movies. If you wanted to keep something that was stored on your ever-filling DVR recorder the only option was to “record it off” to a VCR. This is no longer the case. With an integrated DVD recorder, DVRs can now archive those favorite shows, on that all to familiar DVD format. Now you can watch, American Idol, Friends or CSI, in all its glory, on your TV, on your PC, or even in your car.  Isn’t technology grand? 

So are theses things just an overgrown VCR? 

The answer to that question is a resounding no! There are much more features that a DVR can offer. Just look at our article about TiVo’s latest announcements, and you will see that DVRs can be more, much more. Things like  viewing of photos, listening to music, and even tuning in satellite radio, all benefit from TiVo’s ease-of-use and forward thinking. What will they think of next? Stay tuned!

Ready to to TiVo?