A MARRIAGE MADE IN HEAVEN?

I’m a huge proponent of DiVo. I could never justify to myself spending the amount necessary on a TiVo recorder as well as the subscription fee even if their programming interface is the best out there and the storage capacity is better. But when Time Warner finally started providing DVRs, a/k/a DiVos, to its customers, I was one of the first to jump on board. Literally, in fact. I had called Time Warner Cable in New York as soon as I had heard these things were in the planning stages. I visited the web site constantly until I saw something about the DVRs on the page, and when the web site asked if I wanted to be notified as soon as they were available, I said yes. And I was. Before their big ad campaign and rollout started, I had one of the machines. Technically, Time Warner says they were still in Beta for the program, but I didn’t care. No longer did I need my ghetto-switching button between two VCRs — I could record two things at once. No longer did I need to wait until a program was over to start watching it; I could start from the beginning as soon as I got home. This was huge when it came time to watching just about anything, especially baseball and football games.

So I’ve been perfectly content paying my $7-8 per month for my DiVo rather than the much larger investment for a TiVo with all these positives but still only one tuner. Sure, when my friend moved back to San Francisco and started bragging about wirelessly connecting his upstairs and downstairs TiVos so he could watch in the bedroom something recorded on the machine in the living room, I was a little jealous, but still content.

What the hell do I do with this news: “Online DVD renter Netflix Inc. and television recorder maker TiVo Inc. are close to a deal to allow Netflix subscribers to download movies over the Internet to their TiVo devices, according to the latest issue of Newsweek magazine.” Are you kidding me? Could there be more awesome than a netflix subscription without having to wait for the DVD? Yeah, it’s not all that different from pay-per-view movies, except for a zillion better choices, depending how this whole thing is run.

Another line from the story: “TiVo has said it was working on delivering unique content, such as independent films, over the Internet to subscriber set-top boxes,” otherwise known as TiVo pay-per-view, I suppose. Obviously TiVo has noticed it’s declining marketshare thanks to cable and satellite companies and they’re fighting back. Well, they’re on the right track. Maybe one of these days, I’ll even be able to afford one. For now, I’m still happy with my DiVo, but the itch for that 140 Hour big boy got a bit more noticeable with this news.