Still Reliable, Sources Now Also More Convenient

While listening to CNN's podcast of this past Sunday's "Reliable Sources" program for 37 minutes and 50 seconds of my drive home today, I began to wonder whether I still needed to keep my Season Pass scheduled for the same program on my Tivo at home. It's the exact same show content-wise, minus the commercials, thus it is much shorter than the 60 minutes of broadcast time that the Tivo chews up for it. Of course Tivo makes it pretty darn easy to skip through the 22 minutes and 10 seconds of ad pitches, none-too-revelatory "updates" from talking head du-jour, plus the lead-ins/hand-offs to/from preceding/following shows, but you can't get any easier than not having to do anything at all.

So what's in Tivo's favor? First, it's always plugged into generally one of the largest pieces of screen real estate in the house (our tvs still dwarf the size of even the most gargantuan computer monitors, though theoretically they share much of the same hardware). Second, if you have more than one Tivo and a home network, you could theoretically share programs between them.

I say "theoretically" because it has been our experience that we have to have a dedicated hard-wired cable into the tivo boxes from the two wireless access points we have in our fairly small house. One access point could service the whole house, but not with any sort of media sharing going on, and we already wirelessly stream our music to our stereo. We sometiimes get interference from our microwave on that, but it doesn't generally degrade the other basic online stuff we do, like web browsing. Whereas if we have the tivos networked solely wirelessly over the exact same infrastructure, it not only brings all other online activity to a crawl, but it also doesn't go fast enough to watch generally in anything close to real-time, while it's downloading. So you both can't watch what you're downloading, nor get to any other content while you're downloading, at least not until almost 10-15 minutes has been downloaded, then you have a reasonable chance of staying ahead of the download cache.

At least hard-wiring the Tivos to the access points minimizes their impact on our web browsing, so we can watch youtube, but that still isn't necessarily fast enough over the slower version of WiFi that many houses still have for real-time viewing while downloading (we have one old client that only operates on 802.11b, so we have to use the slower one until we retire/upgrade it). However even in the worst case of the above scenarios, our iTunes will still work since it's presenting already downloaded shows and video podcasts, like Reliable Sources.

So that's 3 strikes against Tivo: 1) for the 22 minutes of hard drive space, 2) for making me do what I can otherwise avoid at no loss to me of anything of value, and 3) slowing down my incessant news trolling. Season Pass priority Number 7 gets canceled. CNN Reliable Sources podcast

Selections from the rest of my current Season Pass list:
#1) Austin City Limits: WMPT because the other PBS station available on our Comcast subscription for some reason has listings a week off from who is actually appearing, so I'd fire it up on a Sunday night excited to catch Lyle Lovett and instead get Robert Randolph & the Family Band, which maybe is fine, but nevertheless not what I was looking for at that time. When your available media consumption time is as hotly contested as ours is, I may not get an hour for picking and singing in the 2 weeks or so that any given episode is saved on my box, so it helps if I at least know what I'm getting ready to watch. It gets the high priority also primarily because it has zero competition in its normal broadcast timeslot in the rest of my regular viewing schedule, so the only time I'd want to cancel it myself is if I were watching something else, usually soccer, in which case I'd manually cancel the recording.

#2) Desperate Housewives: I personally don't watch it much, but I know somebody close to me who probably would be more than a little upset to come home expecting to see the episode not be recorded that she missed because she was busy putting our son to sleep, or cleaning up after my piglike self because I still need work on getting my cleanliness acceptance factor closer to that of a civilized being. I program the Tivo, so my show got first slot, but number 2 ain't too shabby (though I wouldn't complain if she took the effort to figure out how to swap them, as I'd applaud the technology learning initiative it would demonstarte).

#3) The Office: our current favorite.

#4) The Simpsons: classic that has seen better days, but I'm still not ready to drop out of the top 5 yet. Plus I'm really looking forward to the movie (please be another Beavis and Butthead and not another

#5) My Name is Earl: a close second behind The Office.

Once these are available as free downloads, Tivo loses them too. I wonder if Tivo or anybody else has tracked the impact of the releases of programs into other formats on PVR/DVR usage.