# Terrabyte Tivo!!



## Billy Bob Boy (Jul 25, 2004)

Un Freekin believable. An actual Terabyte of storage On a directivo. 130 hours hd and 870 hours of sd At weeknees. Actually its not that exspensive considering the first time the Hd tivo came out it was 1000 this is only 1300. But for the average joe thats pricy. Yes you can have every tv show ever recorded sent right to your house for just 1299.99!!


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## cmtar (Jan 26, 2005)

sounds like a waste of money to me


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## Lee L (Oct 1, 2003)

I have 500 mb and every once in a while I get worried about stuff if we are on vacation during a heavy week of TV. I have gotten it down to 1 page of sugestions but that is teh lowest.


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## MickeS (Dec 26, 2002)

I was considering getting two 500GB hitachi drives and slap in my SA TiVo... but I realized that was a little much money just to be able to say I have a Terabyte TiVo. 

With just one tuner (or even with two), it seems a little excessive with that much storage.

Cool, though.


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## buckeye1010 (Dec 11, 2002)

Both my Tivos (an SD and a HD) are networked and I have a computer with 1.2TB of movies and shows. I think I did it just cause I could. Right now, including the space on the Tivos and the computer together, I'm only at 50% full. It was up to about 80% at one time. Yes, it's overkill, but it's nice not to worry about space.


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## the_scotsman (Jul 28, 2005)

Not sure this is the best of deals....

For me this would be better......

2 x H10-250 @ $579each $1158
2 x TwinBreaze brackets $78
2 x 250GB HDD $200
MIR -$200
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Total cost $1236

That gives you the same capacity, 4 tuners, some redundancy, and 32 months of Mirror fees for the same price. Of course the 250GB HDD could cost a little more or you might even get 300Gb for $99 - prices vary. You also need to add in the new drives - not possible for everyone.

Just a thought.

Paul M.


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## tbeckner (Oct 26, 2001)

Billy Bob Boy said:


> Un Freekin believable. An actual Terabyte of storage On a directivo. 130 hours hd and 870 hours of sd At weeknees. Actually its not that exspensive considering the first time the Hd tivo came out it was 1000 this is only 1300. But for the average joe thats pricy. Yes you can have every tv show ever recorded sent right to your house for just 1299.99!!


If you had money to spend, which most of us do not, this would be great, but I see it as a waste, since almost 95+% of TV is still being broadcasted in SD and NOT HD, or is being being broadcast in upconverted SD. HD could actually take almost another half a decade or more to become reality.


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## ebonovic (Jul 24, 2001)

On the flip side....

One bad sector amongs that 1tb... boom, all TB go bye bye...


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## jmoak (Jun 20, 2000)

_A waste?!!??_ ()
Heck, the biggest tivo was a prize here at one time! "TivoKing" they called it.

I myself had one of the biggest ones for an hour or two back in july of '00. 52 hours and 56minutes, it was. .... but that was before anyone had come up with the "TivoKing" crown.

Seems rather quaint and a little bit puny these days though.


_ahhh, memories...._


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## ebonovic (Jul 24, 2001)

jmoak said:


> _ahhh, memories...._


I remember the biggest mistake in my life....
Getting a BestBuy credit card to purchase a 250mb (megabyte) harddrive for $250...


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## tbeckner (Oct 26, 2001)

ebonovic said:


> On the flip side....
> 
> One bad sector amongs that 1tb... boom, all TB go bye bye...


And if you are in IT, why would you say that, especially since most drives today can self diagnose and automatically change their redirection tables without any additional software. But then again are you in IT?

And if you are in IT, you know that you can become pigeon holed in IT and the old saying that people in IT "KNOWN MORE AND MORE ABOUT LESS AND LESS", is very true.

I am NOT trying to pick on you, ebonovic, but why would you make such a statement?


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## ebonovic (Jul 24, 2001)

Okay... Bad Sector, bad choice of words. What I ment was one un-recoverable error with the drive (be it a sector that can't be moved, or was in a spot where OS files where damaged and could not be recovered, or the drive suffered a physicall failure).

I have had my my personal TiVo upgrade drives develop bad segments that nothing could repair (one time a two week old drive "threw a head"). In one instance I lost 10 recordings of Smallville and I have never caught up. (I have all the DVDs just haven't watched them).

I just wanted to point out that spending that kind of money to use two 500gb drives, opens a wider single point of failure, based on how the "marraige" of the two TiVo hard drives work.

I am not against having a Terrabyte of storage, in fact I would love to hook a SAN up to my TiVo if I could...

I try as best as I can stay on the cutting edge of stuff, and make sure that I don't always see one side of the puzzle.... Because if I *do* get too focused, then the next guy coming up with bigger eyes will push me off the ledge and I will never see them comming.


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## Hodaka (Mar 12, 2005)

and everyone asked me why i needed to put a 300gig in each of my R10s..


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## Dkerr24 (Oct 29, 2004)

I guess I keep my Season Passes to a manageable level... My smallest DTivo has a 120gb drive, and I've never lost a program due to it filling up.

That being said... I'm sure I'll spring for a 200 to 300gb drive when one of these drives fail.


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## SeattleCarl (Nov 11, 2005)

ebonovic said:


> I remember the biggest mistake in my life....
> Getting a BestBuy credit card to purchase a 250mb (megabyte) harddrive for $250...


I can remember lusting over a 5 meg hard drive that cost $2000. My then Z80 PC with 256K of ram and 4-5.25 inch floppies was pretty cutting edge (and cost well over $2K).

Carl


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## SpacemanSpiff (Jan 31, 2004)

Too bad you can't configure a TiVo to use a RAID.


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## tbeckner (Oct 26, 2001)

SpacemanSpiff said:


> Too bad you can't configure a TiVo to use a RAID.


I assume you are talking about RAID 1, but why would you want to. What would really be great, would be that the next generation of DVRs start using SATA drives and have an eSATA port (external SATA), for external SATA drives. Now that could be useful, but I highly doubt it unless it is on a home media server box, which should be the long-term direction of all of these companies.


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## SpacemanSpiff (Jan 31, 2004)

I was thinking RAID 5, maybe with a hot swap spare. I realize you can't get more than 2 drives in a box but what the heck. A guy can dream can't he?


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## DocNo (Oct 10, 2001)

I've got 5 500 GB drives on order that I am going to RAID together (RAID 5) on my server computer. 

With Galleon, I can automatically schedule it to download shows via Tivo2Go so I really don't care that T2Go is slow on transfers, the most I will be behind is one or two hours.

And once I have the program off my Tivo and onto my computer, I can do many more things with it - and I can even pull it back up to my Tivo if I so desire.

I'm no longer interested in building the biggest tivo - in fact, with my now third hard drive failure (  WD pieces 'o crap - seagate only from now on!) I have learned oh too well what ebonovic is talking about. Just wish I would have gotten more recordings off after spinrite revived the drive the last couple of times - oh well, nothing that can't be recorded again! Thank goodness for repeats....


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## ebonovic (Jul 24, 2001)

I did investigate droping a 500gb into my HD-DTivo... (I have some other threads on it)... And in my SD's... Ultimately it became much more $$$ efficient to have multiple units with 160ish GB drives (and just leaving the HD to record HD stuff), then it was to make them massive.

Sure, HMO would have been nice... but ultimately... Things that we record on one are best suited for the room that it is recorded in (News in teh bedroom, and fitness shows in the basement)


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## Redux (Oct 19, 2004)

SpacemanSpiff said:


> Too bad you can't configure a TiVo to use a RAID.


Well, obviously you can, and the sky's the limit. Any kind of RAID you want. Multi-terrabytes.

No reason it shouldn't be discussable here, since the content of a "Tivoserver" could be home movies, legitimate backup copies of DVDs, etc. Not necessarily original tivo content, which might not be be discussable here.

I like the idea of having my tivo content stored externally via more mainstream methodology (Linux, Mac OS, even Windows), with all the standard backup/RAID tools available and then having your Tivo see that content as a series of external Tivos accessed via patched MRV. Better (more dependable/flexible), IMO, that simply brute-force enlarging the Tivo storage.


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## xnevergiveinx (Apr 5, 2004)

good thing it has 2 seagate drives...so you know that you will get 5 years of service out of them, even if they fail, because of the awesome warranty through seagate


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## tbeckner (Oct 26, 2001)

Redux said:


> Well, obviously you can, and the sky's the limit. Any kind of RAID you want. Multi-terrabytes.
> 
> No reason it shouldn't be discussable here, since the content of a "Tivoserver" could be home movies, legitimate backup copies of DVDs, etc. Not necessarily original tivo content, which might not be be discussable here.
> 
> I like the idea of having my tivo content stored externally via more mainstream methodology (Linux, Mac OS, even Windows), with all the standard backup/RAID tools available and then having your Tivo see that content as a series of external Tivos accessed via patched MRV. Better (more dependable/flexible), IMO, that simply brute-force enlarging the Tivo storage.


Actually, what all you guys are talking about is OnDemand video and large video libraries. This is coming to the wired world and a lot sooner than you think. Verizon in an article yesterday was talking about increasing their current online video OnDemand storage from 1,500 hours to over 7,000 hours within a month. And this is just the start of the Huge OnDemand revoluition that should take place this next year. We all have heard about Warner Brothers, NBC, CBS, ABC, and Disney offering OnDemand videos for the iPOD and even DirecTV (although the DirecTV will not actually be true VOD). Well that is just the start, and very soon almost all of the current and past videos will be available as video OnDemand via multiple sources (Internet, specific devices like iPOD, DirecTV (although again not true VOD), and cable/IPTV, and some of that video will be available as a PPV and some like my current HBO OnDemand service via cable will be available as a subscription. I thought that DirecTV in 1994 was a real jump in video edlivery, because of quality, selection, and immediate PPV selections (when cable had no PPV capability), and I was right then. And then for a super long time I thought of how neat it would be to pause and rewind live TV, and in 2000 I bought a TiVo and connected it to my DirecTV feed. Today, I am looking forward to the next huge jump in video delivery and that is OnDemand. How incredible would it be to be able to watch what ever you wanted from almost endless selections of movies, docs, series, special, and almost every video program ever recorded, well it is coming and will be available via OnDemand. Limited bandwidth one-way services like DirecTV will never be able to provide this capability, but huge FTTP/FTTH pipes with GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Networks) feeds to supply that type service. The Japanese just tested terabit fiber, so day is coming where all video ever recorded will be available to watch when you want to watch it. Sure makes DirecTV and the DVR look old fashion.


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## Redux (Oct 19, 2004)

tbeckner said:


> Actually, what all you guys are talking about is OnDemand video and large video libraries. This is coming to the wired world and a lot sooner than you think.


Except that "sooner than you think" still means a lot of us will be dead by then and there's no reason not to be doing it right now, on our own. The tools have existed for quite some time. Tivoserver, more recently added to the mix, is the missing (consumer-friendly) link.


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## tbeckner (Oct 26, 2001)

Redux said:


> Except that "sooner than you think" still means a lot of us will be dead by then and there's no reason not to be doing it right now, on our own. The tools have existed for quite some time. Tivoserver, more recently added to the mix, is the missing (consumer-friendly) link.


I assume that you didn't hear that Verizon has increased their Online OnDemand Library to over 7,000 hours (about 3,500 2 hour movies), this week. I bet it will be sooner than you think and unless you are over 70, it will be available long before you die. I currently have access to 150 hours of HBO OnDemand for free every month from my FTTC/RF based cable company. If I signed up for Showtime I would have another 150 hours of monthly OnDemand access, which I won't. And that does not include PPV movie OnDemand access, and all of this has just happened in the last few months. Understand the big buzz this year will be VOD. Even DirecTV knows that , and they named the "NOW SHOWING" on their new DirecTV DVR "My VOD", but of course we all know that DirecTv cannot supply true video OnDemand. The new DirecTV DVR will only prerecord video like showcases for later selection and show. (POOR MANS VOD).


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## Redux (Oct 19, 2004)

tbeckner said:


> unless you are over 70


Or over 16 and drive fast. Or ... well, life is short, and sometimes brutally short at the whim of the gods.



tbeckner said:


> 7,000 hours (about 3,500 2 hour movies), this week.


... and many more thousands of hours from a variety of sources, 95% of it unwatchable drek.

What _is_ useful, and what I am talking about, culled from the remaining 5%, is having immediately available thousands of hours of programming selected as meaningful and enjoyable by the specific consumer. We don't need pie in the sky or half-baked commercial fumbling to provide this for us. It is already here, now, today.


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## tbeckner (Oct 26, 2001)

Redux said:


> Or over 16 and drive fast. Or ... well, life is short, and sometimes brutally short at the whim of the gods.
> 
> ... and many more thousands of hours from a variety of sources, 95% of it unwatchable drek.
> 
> What _is_ useful, and what I am talking about, culled from the remaining 5%, is having immediately available thousands of hours of programming selected as meaningful and enjoyable by the specific consumer. We don't need pie in the sky or half-baked commercial fumbling to provide this for us. It is already here, now, today.


Of course I view 7,000 hours plus as just a bb in a 55 gallon drum, so the rest of the OnDemand explosion will happen in the next few years. I would assume that the 7,000 hours will grow to more that 50,000 hours by the end of 2006, and 150,000+ hours by the end of 2007 and that is a lot of video, but again it will not be from a single source. It will be offered by many sources, including the networks, premium services (like HBO and Showtime), and some even directly from the likes of Warner Bros and Disney (who both are offering some of their video OnDemand now). You have to realize that they see the same thing you do, access to video libraries is the future of video delivery, which is also why Steve Jobs put video OnDemand access on the iPOD. It is coming, and if you are only 16, then don't worry, you will easily see what that commercial two years ago talked about. A traveler was checking into a small motel in a small town and the clerk said that he would access to every video ever recorded from his room OnDemand. I wish I could remember what company that commercial was promoting. Anyway it is coming and really a lot sooner that you could ever imagine.


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## Redux (Oct 19, 2004)

tbeckner said:


> that commercial two years ago talked about. A traveler was checking into a small motel in a small town and the clerk said that he would access to every video ever recorded from his room OnDemand. I wish I could remember what company that commercial was promoting.


Quest


tbeckner said:


> Anyway it is coming and really a lot sooner that you could ever imagine.


There's no point in prolonging the discussion. Your position is that providers are in the process of making that available to us and I have no quarrel with that but say the capability, for consumers of the minimal technical sophistication of (say) readers of this forum, has been with us for some time and there's no reason to wait for the corporate Luddites to catch up.


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## tbeckner (Oct 26, 2001)

Redux said:


> Quest
> There's no point in prolonging the discussion. Your position is that providers are in the process of making that available to us and I have no quarrel with that but say the capability, for consumers of the minimal technical sophistication of (say) readers of this forum, has been with us for some time and there's no reason to wait for the corporate Luddites to catch up.


Except that they will be able to offer us far more video than we could ever store for our own use, 100's of 1,000's of times more video, and access to video we could never have access to. And that is worth the price of admission, and we will NOT have to expend large sums of money to have access to all of those selections, 24 hours a day, anyday.


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## Billy Bob Boy (Jul 25, 2004)

cmtar said:


> sounds like a waste of money to me


 I doubt the ones that plunked down 1000 for a hd tivo would agree. They may be kicking themselves for not waiting but they would not agree.


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## Billy Bob Boy (Jul 25, 2004)

I only posted this cause I was happy to see tivo storage getting up to the Level that a middle age couch potato really needs. My problem is that I have in the neighbor hood of 60 different shows i love with an average of 200 episodes each. Some 30 min and some 60 min long around 50 50 there. All trek series are 7 years long each. Biggest prob with tivo storage going up is that D* eventually will drop tivo mabye in just a handful of years. Utv will go first when i see D* drop utv I will start to worry about tivo.

The second prob with bigger drives is this medium is guaranteed to fail. (sooner or later all HD's will fail) If you are quick you may recover your shows. If not Bye Bye. I know I am filling up my 447 hour tivo but eventually it will all be gone some day. (i have it all backed up on dvd but the tivo is ten times easier to acess all the shows.


What I really would like to see would be a Tv delivery medium that has ALL tv shows in a Humongous database all on demand. and you pay per view at a super cheap price. IE: I am in the mood for Night court i would go to the Database type in Night court. the episode guide would come up All 180 eps are there and i select the ones to watch. Can you imagine All the seinfelds ,Star treks all in the families threes companies ect in one place. easy to find and no worries of Hd failure. AHHHH!!! What a nice dream. Especially for all the middle age couch potatoes out there. Perhaps my grand kids(When I have them) will enjoy something like this.!!


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## Lee L (Oct 1, 2003)

Well, the real key for the satellite people, IMO, is the client-server system. They need to have one whopping server (and it has to be a Tb or more, not some little 250 gig drive)that can store all kinds of stuff on the drive, plus the customer's own recordings. That way they can push down content so it can be ready as they will never have the bandwidth to do VOD like the Cable and Phone Companies will.

I am still not totally convinced that VOD will be exploding anytime soon. Yes, Verizon is doing a trial in one area, but not everywhere. The cable and phone companies have been beating the VOD drum since I was in high school (I am 35) and it is still coming from around the corner 'real soon now'. 

The problem so far is that veiwers have not wanted the same things that cable wants to deliver. I think TiVo is colser to what consumers want as they can decide what is available from all the current shows on TV, whereas cable puts stuff they want up, but it is old stuff and not current shows. Maybe a mix of it all is the answer?


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## Steve1212 (Dec 1, 2004)

Billy Bob - you are acting like a HD failing is a new thing. I have gone through 4 diff tivos since i started back in 2003. Not because of HD failing, but because i felt like buying new ones. I just what im trying to say, is if you are scared then don't buy it.


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## Jebberwocky! (Apr 16, 2005)

I want every movie made, every TV show broadcast - and I want it on demand. 


how many year till I get what I want???


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## Heckler (Jul 30, 2002)

DocNo said:


> I've got 5 500 GB drives on order that I am going to RAID together (RAID 5) on my server computer.
> 
> With Galleon, I can automatically schedule it to download shows via Tivo2Go so I really don't care that T2Go is slow on transfers, the most I will be behind is one or two hours.
> 
> ...


Yeah, but you're not doing that with a DTiVo, right...? Unless I've missed something, Galleon doesn't work even with a hacked DTiVo, you have to keep using JavaHMO...

Heckler


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## Heckler (Jul 30, 2002)

At the 1MB for every 2GB rule of thumb, this thing has a ~500MB swap file... Does TPIP even know how to do that or do the folks at WeaKnees have to do even further tweaking...? 

Heckler


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## Redux (Oct 19, 2004)

Heckler said:


> Galleon doesn't work even with a hacked DTiVo


You can get much or all of the functionality elsewhere. The essential portion, just having your time-shifted material stored externally, can be accomplished on the DTivo via tivoserver.


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## Billy Bob Boy (Jul 25, 2004)

Steve1212 said:


> Billy Bob - you are acting like a HD failing is a new thing. I have gone through 4 diff tivos since i started back in 2003. Not because of HD failing, but because i felt like buying new ones. I just what im trying to say, is if you are scared then don't buy it.


Where in my post did i say i was scared. I was just commenting on the inevitability of failure of storing something for permanent archiving on Hd medium. If I was scared I would not have upgraded one of my machines to 447 hours. I wont buy one of these because I dont have the bucks to plunk down 1300 dollars on a tivo. especially when it is first out. Sometimes I buy when the tech first comes out to enjoy it right away, but only if it is something i dont already have. Since i already have a TB of storage among 5 machines i am set for now. I guess you never heard of a commentary before!


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## rvfrueh (Nov 12, 2003)

SeattleCarl said:


> I can remember lusting over a 5 meg hard drive that cost $2000. My then Z80 PC with 256K of ram and 4-5.25 inch floppies was pretty cutting edge (and cost well over $2K).
> 
> Carl


I can remember adding up all of my floppies and my brother and I deciding we'd never need that much space. ;-)


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## C Sammet (Jan 15, 2006)

There is one small little problem with the hoopla over Video on Demand and those thousands of hours of available programming that my little home network, TIVOs, and Servers with stored content never have to worry about: connection outages.

As pie-in-the-sky and wonderful all of what was said sounds I never have to worry about loosing my connection in order to watch something I have already saved. Our electric is through underground utilities, but our cable and phone is above ground and as I sit here typing I am looking outside at the cable line sitting on the ground due to the ice that accumulated overnight.

Somehow I think all of that wonderful content that will be on demand through GPON will require some form of cable and unless they are going to start burying all cables it will be as susceptible to this kind of outage as cable is today.

Of course DirecTV, which we have is still on the air and I am watching whatever I want as well as recording it too. Seems like foolishness to me to base any hopes on a marketing proposal like VOD and those 1000s of hours of programming when there are such simple means for it to be down.

It also sounds an awful lot like what we heard when the dotcoms were going to rule the world. We all saw how well that worked. At this point I bet all of the companies will move toward VOD since it offers them a means by which to begin charging by program and by viewing instance. They can sure make a lot more off people willing to pay per show per time watched then simply by people paying a set monthly fee. The price I am sure will be pennies, but those pennies will sure add up to more than you currently pay eventually. Of course then it will be said that you are paying only for those shows you wanted, so you shouldn't complain about the price. Oh well, hopefully they will just leave those of us who prefer this "old fashioned" method alone.

Just my 2 cents on the whole VOD thing and why a TIVO, Network, and Servers with content seems like a better approach to providing consumers with what they really want at the lowest price.


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## chamelea (Feb 19, 2004)

Just one opinion - VoD will most likely be a fixed monthly fee for some aggregate dnload hours per month - basically the Netflix business model. Once that becomes available over broadband, the next step will be offers of local news and network serials too. Cable and satellite carriers might begin to find it tough to sign-up new subs at $50/month.

As for terabyte-TiVo storage, it becomes a little silly - kinda like holding on to 15 years of magazines. I'm guilty-as-charged too, with way more TiVo backlog than I can possibly watch. But I think there are at least two valid alternatives (beyond VoD).

My new DVDR burner (Pioneer 633, highly recommended) has a 160G drive. Any surplus stuff on TiVo is now transferred (analog) to that drive at bedtime. Then it is subject to stripping out commercials and burning to DVD. The transport controls on the DVD burner are vastly better than TiVo's transport - slow-mo forward and back, speed-view (1.5x) with dialog, too many others to list. It makes it nicer, in some cases, to watch stuff from that drive than TiVo's.

The second alternative, already mentioned above by others, is networked (SNA or NAS) storage truly into the terabytes. Enhancing this potential are the new Panasonic DVDRs due out this summer with RJ45 network ports! Just one opinion, again, but I'm feeling that installing massive storage into the D-TiVo box became vastly less attractive when Rupert fired TiVo. Also feel that DTV, for me at least, lost a ton of customer loyalty.


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