I had lunch yesterday with a friend of mine who now works at TiVo and it occured to me (as I was explaining Digital Dad to him) that I have yet to really talk about this topic.
I've owned a ReplayTV box for years now, purchased under the Panasonic ShowStopper brand. I think I bought it 1999 or 2000. My main criteria at that time was that the Replay box had no monthly fees.
Since then Replay has gone through some tough times and I was worried that if they went under that my program guide services, which is accessed by my Showstopper box dialing into Replay servers, would be shut down. Suddenly the monthly fee wasn't looking like such a bad idea after all. But so far they are still breathing.
The gist of this device, like TiVo based devices, is that it can record live TV onto a hard disk. In fact, it is always recording the incoming TV signal to the hard disk, which enables you to pause live TV at any time (and go to the bathroom, tend to a screaming child, eat dinner, etc.). It's also very very easy to record your favorite shows and watch them whenever (some call this time shifting - fancy name).
These Personal Video Recorders or Digital Video Recorders are actually a massively valuable thing for families As you all know, you will never get 30 minutes uninteruppted to do anything in your life until your kids are in grade school, so if you have the slightest interest in watching The Sopranos, The Simpsons, American Idol, or whatever you are into, you need this.
You can also set it up to record all of your kids' favorite shows and then they can watch them "on demand".
Of course there is also the incredible value of skipping over commercials. 'Nuff said.
However, I wish these things were even more family friendly. The first thing I noticed was "Barney" was saved on the same list of programs as "The Sopranos". It would be quite unfortunate to choose the wrong one - the Sopranos are no where near kid material and frankly I am very much not into Barney.
What I'd like to see are individual account screens, one for me, one for my wife, one for the kids or each kid, and shows are saved to those accounts (which are password protected of course). This way my kids can go to their account and choose form one of their favorites.
Makes perfect sense to me - not sure why it hasn't happened yet.
Comments