I first bought a Tivo when we moved to Tucson 16 years ago. Prior to that, I used a Dish network DVR that was OK, but nothing spectacular. I knew the Tivo was a better user experience, as I had a friend who did UI/UX work for the company way back when they were in their infancy.
That original Tivo graduated to a Series 3 HD when we brought home a plasma TV, and a few years ago, when Comcast (correction: Xfinity) stopped supporting the MPEG2 format for broadcast, it was time to upgrade. Fortunately, Tivo had an offer for an all in subscription to a refurbished Tivo Romio for a reasonable price.
That had been working well for a number of years, but had become flakey recently. Sporadic, spontaneous reboots were driving me nuts. Finally, last Saturday, it died. Caught in a reboot cycle, it seemed dead.
Fortunately, some internet sleuthing identified that the problem was most likely caused by a bad disk, so off to Weaknees, and to order up a replacement HD.
But…
The reality is that I do not watch much live TV anymore. Sure, I enjoy recording Full Frontal, new episodes of Rick and Morty, and the occasional The Daily Show featuring Trevor Noah, but since Comcast stopped carrying BEin Sports, I can’t tune in to MotoGP races anymore.
Almost all my viewing is streaming. Netflix (decreasing), Amazon Prime (cautiously, as it sucks bandwidth), and Hulu are my go to’s with my Plex server for my home library of movies, I am pretty much good.
If it were up to me, I would cut the cord, buy an Apple TV to stream, and be done with it.
However, my wife is a sports nut. She needs her college football fix. She craves women’s collegiate volleyball. And when the olympics are on, well, I don’t get to watch TV for 2 weeks solid.
Summary
The Tivo lives on, probably for a few more years, but the reality is that we are not too far from being able to cut the cord. Sling and Hulu both have live sports, and if I can convince the boss of that, then perhaps we can go from an Xfinity triple play for a stupid amount of money each month to just their fattest internet connection will be sufficient, and save money to boot!
