Philips HDR612 TiVo 60 Hour Digital Video Recorder
Best thing to happen to TV!
Tivo is the greatest thing to happen to television!<br />Tivo customer service is extremly courtious and friendly (even called me back directly with more information once they researched what I asked about!)  Tivo appears to very customer driven and employees of Tivo often engage in dialog in different Internet forums.<br />The service is extremly easy to activate although you do want to set up your Tivo for the first time right before you go to bed - if you have satalite or lots of cable stations it can take 4-5 hours to do the initial setup.  That is the only hitch, and it's a one-time pain.  From then on, all updates to the guide data happen in the background without interrupting Tivo or it's ability to record shows.<br />After that, life with Tivo is great!<br />You can get season passes to your favorite shows and they are then waiting for you to watch them when you want to, instead of when some network thinks it would be a good time for you to watch TV.<br />You can also optionally manually record shows or special events.<br />As you watch TV on your Tivo, you can give programs you like Thumbs Up (or down) and Tivo will take that information and generate lists of suggestions.  You can optionally have Tivo record these suggestions, but only if you have the space (Tivo never overwrites what you tell it to record with suggestions).  I have found some very interesting shows based on what Tivo suggested and auto-recorded for me as well as rediscovered a few old favorites that I didn't realize were still on!<br />And of course, if you still watch live TV you can pause and do instant replays - or even &quot;rewind&quot; back in Tivo's buffer.  While these features are cool at first, once you start using a Tivo, you find you watch less and less live TV.  It's still very handy for sporting events where idiot producers don't replay that one play you want to see again - with Tivo you can replay it as many times as you want, in slow motion or even frame by frame if you want.  The power is yours....<br />This is the way TV was meant to be - no more worrying about time or channels - simply pick programs out by name and then watching them when you want to watch them.  Total control over live TV. Also no fussing with VCR tapes ever again - it just works...<br />Even if you are like me and don't watch that much TV, what little TV you do watch (or in my case get to watch :) can now be exactly what you want when you want.